As a gentleman of the bedchamber, Potemkin now spent much of his time around the imperial palaces performing his duties, which included standing behind her chair at meals to serve her and her guests. This meant that he saw the Empress frequently in public, getting to know the routine of her life. She took an interest in him – and he began to take a reckless interest in her that was not necessarily fitting for such a junior courtier.
Skip Notes
* This was the child with whom she was pregnant at Elisabeth’s death – Alexei Grigorevich Bobrinsky, 1762–1813. Though he was never officially recognized, Catherine saw to his upbringing. He led a debauched life in Paris with the Empress paying his debts, before returning home and later travelling again. Paul I finally recognized him as a half-brother and made him a count.
PART TWO
Closer
1762–1774
4
CYCLOPS
Nature has made Grigory Orlov a Russian peasant and he will remain thus until the end.
Durand de Distroff
When the Empress and the Second Lieutenant of the Horse-Guards encountered each other in the hundreds of corridors of the Winter Palace, Potemkin would fall to his knees, take her hand and declare he was passionately in love with her. There was nothing unusual about them meeting one another in such a way, because Potemkin was a gentleman of the bedchamber. Any courtier might literally have bumped into his Sovereign somewhere in the Palace – they saw her every day. Indeed, even members of the public could enter the Palace, if they were decently dressed and not wearing livery. However, Potemkin’s conduct – kissing Catherine’s hands on bended knee and declaring his love – was rash, not to say careless. It can only have been saved from awkwardness by his exuberant charm – and her flirtatious acquiescence.
There were probably several young officers at Court who believed themselves in love with her – and many others who would have pretended to be for the sake of their careers. A long list of suitors, including Zakhar Chernyshev and Kirill Razumovsky, had fallen in love with Catherine over the years and accepted her gentle rebuttals. But Potemkin refused to accept either the conventions of the courtier or the dominance of the Orlovs. He went further than anyone else. Most courtiers were wary of the brothers who had murdered an emperor. Potemkin flaunted his courage. Long before he was in power, he disdained the hierarchies of court. He teased the secret police chief. Magnates treated Sheshkovsky circumspectly but Potemkin is said to have laughed at the knout-wielder, asking: ‘How many people are you knout-beating today?’1
He could not have behaved like this before the Orlovs without some encouragement from the Empress. She could easily have stopped him if she had wished. But she did not. This was unfair of her for there could be no prospect of Catherine accepting Potemkin as a lover in 1763/4. She owed her throne to the Orlovs. Potemkin was still too young. So Catherine could not have taken him seriously. She was in love with Grigory Orlov and, as she later told Potemkin, she was a creature of habit and loyalty. She regarded the dashing but not particularly talented Orlov as her permanent companion and ‘would have remained for ever, had he not been the first to tire’.2 Nonetheless she seemed to recognize that she enjoyed a special empathy with Potemkin. So did the Gentleman of the Bedchamber who contrived to meet her as much as he could during the routine of her days.
* * *
—
Catherine arose daily at 7 a.m., but, if she woke earlier, she lit her own stove so as not to wake her servants. She then worked until eleven on her own with her ministers or her cabinet secretaries, sometimes giving audiences at 9 a.m. She wrote furiously in her own hand – she herself called it ‘graphomania’ – to a wide variety of correspondents, from Voltaire and Diderot to the Germans Dr Zimmerman, Madame Bielke and later Baron Grimm. Her letters were warm, outspoken and lively, laced with her slightly ponderous sense of humour.3 This was the age of letter-writing: men and women of the world took a pride in the style and the content of their letters. If they were from a great man in an interesting situation – a Prince de Ligne or a Catherine the Great or a Voltaire – they were copied and read out in the salons of Europe like a cross between the despatches of a distinguished journalist and the spin of an advertising agency.4 Catherine liked writing, and not just letters. She loved drafting decrees – ukase – and instructions in her own hand. In the middle 1760s, she was already writing her General Instruction for the Great Commission she was to call in 1767 to codify existing laws. She copied out large portions of the books she had studied since adolescence, especially Beccaria and Montesquieu. She called this her ‘legislomania’.
At 11 a.m. she did her toilette and admitted those whom she knew best into her bedroom, such as the Orlovs. They might then go for a walk – if it was summer, she loved to stroll in the Summer Palace gardens where members of the public could approach her. When Panin arranged for Casanova to meet her,5 she was accompanied only by Grigory Orlov and two ladies-in-waiting. She dined at 1 p.m. At 2.30 p.m. she returned to her apartments, where she read until six, the ‘lover’s hour’, at which time she entertained Orlov.
If there was a Court evening, she then dressed and went out. Dress at Court was a long coat for men à la Française and for ladies a gown with long sleeves and a short train and whalebone bodice. Partly because it suited Russian wealth and flamboyance and partly because it was a court that needed to advertise its legitimacy, both men and women competed to wear diamonds on anything where they could be attached – buttons, buckles, scabbards, epaulettes and often three rows on the borders of hats. Both sexes wore the ribbons and sashes of the five orders of Russian chivalry: Catherine herself liked to wear the ribbon of St Andrew – red edged with silver studded with diamonds – and St George over one shoulder with the collars of St Alexander Nevsky, St Catherine and St Vladimir and two stars – St Andrew and St George – on her left breast.6 Catherine inherited the lavishness of dress from the Elisabethan Court. She enjoyed splendour, appreciated its political uses and she was certainly not remotely economical, but she never approached Elisabeth’s sartorial extravagance, later toning down the magnificence. She understood that too much glitter undermines the very power it is meant to illustrate.
While the Guards patrolled outside the palaces, the Sovereign’s own apartments were guarded by an elite force, founded by Catherine in 1764 and made up of nobles – the sixty men of the Chevaliers-Gardes – who wore blue coats faced with red covered in silver lace. Everything from bandolier to carbine was furnished in silver, even their boots. On their heads they wore silver helmets with high plumes. The Russian eagle was embroidered on their backs and adorned the silver plates of armour on arms, knees and breast, fastened by silver cords and silver chains.7
On Sunday evenings there was a court; on Mondays a French comedy; on Thursdays, there was usually a French tragedy and then a ballet; on Fridays or Saturdays there was often a fancy-dress masquerade at the Palace. Five thousand guests attended these vast and semi-public fêtes. Catherine and her Court displayed their magnificence to the foreign ambassadors and to each other. What better guide to such an evening than Casanova? ‘The ball went on for sixty hours…Everywhere I see joy, freedom and the great profusion of candles…’. He heard a fellow masked guest say: ‘There’s the Empress…you will see Grigory Orlov in a moment; he has orders to follow her at a distance…’. Guests pretended not to recognize her. ‘Everyone recognized him because of his great stature and the way he always kept his head bent forward.’ Casanova the international freeloader ate as much as he could, watched a contredance quadrille executed perfectly in the French style and then, naturally being who he was, met an ex-mistress (now kept by the Polish Ambassador) whose delights he rediscovered. By this point, he had long since lost sight of the Empress.8
Catherine enjoyed dressing up and being masked. On one occasion, disguised as an officer in her pink domino (loose cloak) and regimentals, she recorded some of her sligh
tly erotic conversations with guests who genuinely did not recognize her. One princess thought her a handsome man and danced with her. Catherine whispered, ‘What a happy man I am,’ and they flirted. Catherine kissed her hand; she blushed. ‘Please say who you are,’ asked the girl. ‘I am yours,’ replied Catherine, but she would not identify herself.9
Catherine seldom ate much in the evening and virtually always retired by 10.30 p.m., accompanied by Grigory Orlov. She liked to be asleep by eleven.10 Her disciplined routine formed the public world of Court, but Potemkin’s wit had won him access to its private world. This brought him closer to the vigilant, violent Orlovs, but it also gave him the chance to let the Empress know how passionately he felt. Potemkin would pay dearly for his recklessness.
* * *
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In the early evenings, Catherine invited an inner circle of about eighteen to her apartments and later to the extension of the Winter Palace that she called her Little Hermitage. Her habitués included Countess Bruce, that attractive fixer whom Catherine trusted in the most private matters; the Master of Horse, Lev Naryshkin, whom she called her ‘born clown’,11 the epitome of the rich and frivolous Russian nobleman; the Orlovs of course – and, increasingly, among others, Potemkin.
The Russian Court was much less stiff and formal than many in Western Europe, including that of George III. Even when Catherine received ministers who were not part of her private coterie, they sat and worked together, not like British Prime Ministers, who had to stand in George III’s presence unless he granted them the rare privilege of sitting. In Catherine’s Little Hermitage, this casualness went even further. Catherine played cards – whist or faro usually – until around 10 p.m. Guardsmen like Orlov and Potemkin were instantly at home, since they had spent much of their youth sitting at the green baize tables. They also took part in word and paper games, charades and even singsongs.
Grigory Orlov was the master of the salon: Catherine gave her lover the rooms above her own in the Winter Palace so that he could descend the green staircase without being announced. While Catherine took a prim view of risqué jokes in her inner circle, she was open in her displays of affection with Orlov. A visiting Englishman later recorded, ‘they did not forbear their caresses for his presence’.12 Orlov adored music and his good humour set the tone of these evenings, when the Empress herself almost became one of a circle of friends. ‘After dinner,’ the Court Journal recorded on one evening, ‘Her Imperial Majesty graciously returned to her inner apartments, and the gentlemen in the card room themselves sang songs, to the accompaniment of various wines; then the Court singers and servants…and, on the orders of Count G. G. Orlov, the NCOs and soldiers of the guard at Tsarskoe Selo, sang gay songs in another room.’13
The Orlovs had achieved their ambitions – up to a point. While the marriage was now a dead letter, Orlov was the Empress’s constant companion, which in itself gave him influence. But it was certainly she who ran the government. There was a fault in the design of the Orlovs as a political force: the brains, the brawn and the charm were not united in one man but were distributed with admirable fairness among the five brothers. Alexei Orlov, Le Balafre, had the ruthlessness; Fyodor the culture and political savvy; while Grigory, who needed all of the above, possessed only handsomeness, a wonderful nature and solid good sense.
Diplomats claimed Orlov, ‘having grown up in alehouses and places of ill-repute,…led a life of a reprobate though he was kind and good-hearted’. It was said that ‘all his good qualities’ were ‘overshadowed by a licentiousness’ that ‘turned the Royal Court into a den of debauchery. There was hardly a single maiden at Court…not subjected to his importunings,’14 alleged Prince Shcherbatov, the self-appointed moral conscience of the Russian aristocracy.15 ‘The favourite’, wrote the British envoy, Sir Thomas Gunning, ‘is dissipated…’ and kept low company. As the 1760s went on, Catherine either ignored his infidelities like a worldly wife or did not know of them. Orlov however was not as simple as foreign diplomats claimed, but nor was he an intellectual or a statesman: he corresponded with Voltaire and Rousseau but probably to please Catherine and because it was expected of a cultured grandee of that time.
Catherine never overpromoted Orlov, who was to have only two big jobs: straight after the coup, he was appointed to head the Special Administration for Foreigners and Immigrants in charge of attracting colonists to the empty regions of the approaches to the Black Sea and the marches of the northern Caucasus. There he performed energetically and laid some of the foundations for Potemkin’s later success. In 1765, she appointed him Grand Master of Ordnance, head of the artillery, though it is significant that she felt the need to consult Panin, who advised her to scale down the powers of that position before giving it to him. Orlov never mastered the details of artillery and ‘seemed to know less about them than a schoolboy’, according to the French diplomat Durand, who met him at military exercises. Later he rose heroically to the challenge of fighting the Moscow Plague.16
Orlov swaggered around in Catherine’s wake, but he did not exert himself in exercising power and was never allowed the political independence she later delegated to Potemkin. While physically intimate with the Empress, Orlov was semi-detached from actual government.
* * *
—
Potemkin was in a hurry to display his insolent cleverness before the Empress, whose informality gave him plenty of scope to do so. On one occasion, he carelessly wandered up to the salon where Grigory Orlov was playing cards with the Empress. He leaned on the card table and started looking at Orlov’s cards. Orlov whispered that he should leave, but Catherine intervened. ‘Leave him alone,’ she said. ‘He’s not interrupting us.’17
If the Orlovs decided to get rid of Potemkin, it was Nikita Panin who intervened at this ‘dangerous time’ to save him from whatever the Orlovs were planning.18 Late in the summer of 1762, Potemkin was given his first – and last – foreign assignment: to travel to Stockholm to inform Count Ivan Osterman, the Russian Ambassador to Sweden, of the change of regime.19 The Russian Court traditionally treated Sweden as a cooling area for overheated lovers. (Panin himself and Catherine’s first lover Serge Saltykov had been despatched there for similar reasons.) From the patchy evidence that we have of his early career, it seems that the irrepressible Potemkin had learned nothing from this shot across his bows and kept playing the fool in front of the Orlovs until he had to be taught a lesson.
On his return, Catherine remained as interested as ever in this original young friend. Potemkin, whom she later called her ‘pupil’, benefited from this generosity of spirit. On duty as gentleman of the bedchamber, he was sitting opposite the Empress at table when she asked him a question in French. He replied in Russian. When a courtier told him off for such rudeness, Potemkin exclaimed: ‘On the contrary, I think a subject should answer in the language in which he can best express his thoughts – and I’ve been studying Russian for twenty-two years.’20 This was typical of his flirtatious impertinence but also of his defiance of the Gallomania of many courtiers. There is a legend that Catherine suggested he improve his French and arranged for him to be taught by a defrocked French priest named Chevalier de Vivarais, who had served under Dupleix at Pondicherry in India during the Seven Years War. This seedy mountebank was no chevalier and travelled with a ‘wife’ called Vaumale de Fages who apparently made a pleasurable contribution to Potemkin’s French lessons. The name has a courtesan’s ring to it: doubtless she was a most patient teacher. Vivarais was the first of a long line of sophisticated crooks whose company Potemkin enjoyed. As for French, it became his second language.21
Catherine charted a special government career for her young protégé. She knew his religious interests well enough to appoint Potemkin assistant to the Procurator of the Holy Synod, the council created by Peter the Great to run the Orthodox Church. The Procurator was administrator and judge in all matters religious – the equivalent of the Procurator-Gene
ral in secular matters. The Empress cared enough about him to draft his instructions herself. Entitled ‘Instruction to our Gentleman of the Monarch’s Bedchamber Grigory Potemkin’, and dated 4 September 1763, her first letter to him, which shows the maternal tone she favoured with younger men, reads:
From the ukase given about you to the Holy Synod: though you know well why you have been appointed to this place, we are ordering the following for the best fulfilment of your duty…1. For better understanding of the affairs run from this place…2. it will be useful for you to make it a rule to come to the Synod when they are not sitting…3. To know the agenda in advance…4. You will have to listen with diligent attention…
Point six decreed that, in the event of the Procurator-General’s illness, ‘you will have to report to us all business and write our orders down in the Synod. In a word, you will have to learn all things which will lighten the course of business and help you to understand it better.’22 Potemkin’s first period in the Synod was short, possibly because of his problems with the Orlovs, but we know from Decree 146 of the Synod’s records that he attended the Synod on a day-to-day basis during September.23 He was on the rise.
Catherine the Great & Potemkin Page 12
