Catherine the Great

ONE NIGHT at the end of June in 1755, when the White Nights were at a peak of milky brightness and the sun still remained on the horizon at 11 p.m., Catherine was hostess at a supper and ball in the gardens of the Oranienbaum estate. Among those stepping down from a long line of arriving carriages was the newly appointed English ambassador, Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams. At supper, the Englishman found himself sitting next to Catherine and, as the evening progressed, each was charmed by the other’s company. “It was not difficult to talk to Sir Charles for he was extremely witty and had a great knowledge of the world, having visited most of the European capitals,” Catherine said. Later, she was told that he had enjoyed the evening as much as she.

Before the supper, Hanbury-Williams had introduced Catherine to a young Polish nobleman, Count Stanislaus Poniatowski, who had come to Russia to act as his secretary. As she and Sir Charles talked at supper, her eyes strayed to this second visitor, whose elegance and grace made him stand out among the dancers. “The English ambassador spoke very favorably of the count,” she remembered in her Memoirs, “and told me that his mother’s family, the Czartoryskis, were a pillar of the pro-Russian party in Poland.” They had sent their son to Russia in the ambassador’s care in order to enrich his understanding of Poland’s large eastern neighbor. Because the subject of foreigners succeeding in Russia applied to Catherine personally, she volunteered an opinion. She said that, in general, Russia was “a stumbling block for foreigners,” a yardstick for measuring ability, and that anyone who succeeded in Russia could count on succeeding anywhere in Europe. She considered this rule infallible, she continued, “for nowhere are people quicker to notice weakness, absurdity, or defects in a foreigner than in Russia. One can be assured that nothing will be overlooked because, fundamentally, no Russian really likes a foreigner.”

While Catherine was watching Poniatowski, the young man was taking careful note of her. On the journey back from Oranienbaum later that night, he had no difficulty drawing the ambassador into a long, enthusiastic discussion about the grand duchess, and the two men, one forty-seven, the other twenty-three, passed flattering impressions back and forth.

That summer night was the beginning of a close personal and political relationship among the three. Poniatowski became Catherine’s lover, and Hanbury-Williams became her friend. For the next two and a half years, the English diplomat helped to assist her financially and then attempted to enlist her influence in the great diplomatic crisis that marked the beginning of the global Seven Years’ War.

Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams was born to a wealthy Monmouthshire family. His youth was set in an eighteenth-century English landscape of splendid mansions, formal gardens, clipped green lawns, and portraits by Gainsborough. After Eton, he married, fathered two daughters, and entered Parliament as a Whig under the leadership of Sir Robert Walpole. He became a fixture in fashionable London drawing rooms as an elegant, witty conversationalist and a minor satirical poet. In his late thirties, Sir Charles left his wife and abandoned politics for diplomacy. In his first two posts, Berlin and Dresden, wit, charm, and elegant English manners were not enough. At the court of Frederick II, he was not to the taste of that intellectual monarch. In Dresden, wit and satire were even less in demand. Political influence at home then saw him appointed to St. Petersburg, where he was warmly welcomed because he was rumored to be bringing a large amount of gold to be used in opening doors and making friends. At Elizabeth’s court, however, the elegant Englishman found himself again in an atmosphere where his talents seemed to have little value. He discovered a single exception: a young woman on whom the arrival of a polished diplomat, coming from a world of culture and brilliant repartee, made a strong impression.

Sir Charles had come to St. Petersburg on an important mission. A treaty, originally made in 1742, which traded English payments in gold for the promise of Russian support in any continental war involving England, was on the point of expiring. Simultaneously, fear of Frederick of Prussia’s belligerent reputation had stirred King George II’s concern for his own small, almost defenseless, north German electorate of Hanover. Hanbury-Williams’s mission was to renew the subsidies treaty, which would guarantee Russian intervention if Prussia invaded Hanover. Specifically, the British government wanted Russia to concentrate fifty-five thousand men at Riga with the threat that they would march west into Frederick’s province of East Prussia if the Prussians moved against Hanover.