Polish affairs were so complex and unstable that Potemkin remained uncommitted to any one policy, preferring to move in mysterious and flexible ways. He conducted at least three policies simultaneously. He continued to run the pro-Russian Polish party, which was hostile to King Stanislas-Augustus, around his nephew Branicki and a camarilla of magnates.43
In late 1786, he began to pursue a second policy – the purchase of huge estates in Poland itself, made possible by his indigenat of 1775. (He had sold some Russian estates in 1783 and was about to sell the Krichev complex.) Now he told Miranda that he had just bought Polish estates that extended over 300,000 acres and cost two million roubles.44 The rumour went round Kiev that these estates contained 300 villages and 60,000 souls.45 In late 1786, the Prince made a complicated deal with Prince Ksawery Lubomirski to buy the massive Smila and Meschiricz estates on the right bank of the Dnieper in the triangle of the Polish Palatinate of Kiev that jutted into Russian territory. Smila alone was so extensive that, at his death, it contained 112,000 male souls, giving it a total population the size of a small eighteenth-century city. It had its own baronial Court, its own judicial system and even a private army.46
He bought the estates with his own money, but it all derived from the Treasury in one way or another and he regarded this purchase as an imperial, as well as a private, enterprise. Lubomirski was already one of the main contractors of timber for Potemkin’s Black Sea Fleet, so he was buying his own suppliers to create a semi-private, semi-imperial conglomerate.47 But there was more to it than that: the deal made Potemkin a Polish magnate in his own right – the foundations of his own private principality outside Russia. It was also a form of privatized annexation of Polish territory – and a Trojan Horse that would give him the right to penetrate Polish institutions. Catherine had tried to give Potemkin the Duchy of Courland and the new Kingdom of Dacia, if not the crown of Poland itself. ‘From his newly bought lands in Poland,’ she commented in Kiev to her secretary, ‘Potemkin will perhaps make a tertium quid independent of both Russia and Poland.’ She understood the danger of Paul’s accession to her dear consort – but it also made her uneasy. Later that year, he explained to her that he had bought these lands ‘to become a landowner and to gain the right to enter both their affairs and their military command’.48 Like everything connected with Poland, the Smila purchase proved to be a quagmire, igniting a series of court cases and family arguments among the Lubomirskis that embroiled Potemkin in four years of negotiations and litigation.49
King Stanislas-Augustus represented the third strand of Potemkin’s Polish policy. While undermining him with Branicki and his land purchases, Potemkin had always had a soft spot for Stanislas-Augustus, that powerless aesthete and overly sincere patron of the Enlightenment: their correspondence was warmer than just diplomatic courtesy, at least on Potemkin’s side. The Prince believed that a treaty with Stanislas-Augustus would buy Polish support against the Turks and keep Poland in the Russian sphere of influence and out of the greedy paws of Prussia. Personally, Potemkin could then command Polish troops as a magnate. All this could be most easily achieved through King Stanislas-Augustus.
The Poles themselves were in Kiev to undermine their own king before the meeting with Catherine, and win Serenissimus’ favour.50 ‘These first-rank Polish are humble and sycophantic before Prince Potemkin,’ observed Miranda at a dinner at the Branickis’. Politics and adultery were the undercurrents, as all the Poles ‘tricked themselves, and were tricked, or tricked others, all very amiable, less so it is true than their wives…’. Indeed their entire display was to raise their prestige in the eyes of Potemkin, ‘but his glance is hard to catch’, joked Ligne, ‘since he has only one eye and is short-sighted’.51
Potemkin demonstrated his power by favouring one Pole and humiliating another. Everyone was jealous of Potemkin’s attention. Ligne, Nassau and Lewis Littlepage intrigued with the Poles on behalf of their masters. Branicki envied Nassau, because the latter was staying with Potemkin – and therefore was ‘master of the field of battle.’52 Branicki and Felix Potocki tried to persuade Potemkin that Stanislas-Augustus opposed his land acquisitions, which had understandably caused some unease in Warsaw.53 Alexandra Branicka was already so close to the Empress that Polish gossip claimed she was her natural daughter.54 The Prince was irritated by Branicki’s bungling intrigues, so there was a ‘terrible scene’, which made Alexandra ill.55 Yet he had Branicki and Felix Potocki received warmly by the Empress, while she ‘did not even cast a glance’ at his critics, Ignacy Potocki and Prince Sapieha.56
Even Miranda managed to become caught up in this Polish game. He greeted the Prince in front of some Polish magnates without standing up. Miranda should have known that royalty, of whom Potemkin was by now almost one, are touchy about etiquette. Strangers could never take Potemkin’s favour for granted. Rumours that Miranda was neither a Spanish count nor a colonel may have also played some part in this cooling. Potemkin gave him the icy treatment.57
In early March, the Prince, accompanied by Nassau, Branicki and Stackelberg, the Russian Ambassador to Warsaw, travelled the twenty-eight miles to Chwastow to meet the King of Poland, who nervously awaited his rendezvous with Catherine after so many years.58 Potemkin wore the uniform of a Polish szlachta of the Palatinate of Bratslav and his Polish orders. He treated the King, accompanied by Littlepage, like his own monarch. The two men agreed on Potemkin’s suggestion of a Russo-Polish treaty against the Ottomans. Serenissimus let Stackelberg sound out Stanislas-Augustus on his plans to set himself up in a feudal principality at Smila. The King responded that he wanted Russian agreement on reforming the Polish constitution. Potemkin denounced Ignacy Potocki as ‘a scelerat’ – a fossil, Felix Potocki was ‘a fool’, but Branicki was really not a bad fellow.59 Potemkin was ‘enchanted’ by the King60 – ‘for at least a moment’.61 The coming meeting with Catherine was confirmed.
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Back in Kiev two days later, Miranda awaited Potemkin’s return nervously. But the Prince, whose sulks never lasted long, greeted him like a long-lost friend: ‘it seems a century since we last saw each other’, he boomed.62 As Catherine’s departure got closer, it was time to leave Miranda behind. The Empress, via Mamonov, offered him Russian service, but he revealed his hopes for a Venezuelan revolt against Spain. Catherine and Potemkin were sympathetic to this anti-Bourbon project. ‘If the Inquisition is so necessary, then they should appoint Miranda as Inquisitor,’ joked Potemkin. Catherine offered him the use of all Russian missions abroad and he cheekily requested 10,000 roubles of credit. Mamonov told Miranda that Serenissimus would have to approve, more evidence of Catherine’s and Potemkin’s near equality. Potemkin agreed. On 22 April, the future (if short-lived) dictator of Venezuela took his leave of Empress and Prince. The Spanish caught up with Francisco de Miranda in the end. Later that year in Petersburg, the two Bourbon ambassadors threatened to withdraw unless the fake Count–Colonel was expelled. In the end, he never got the full 10,000 roubles – but he did keep in contact with Potemkin: the archives reveal that he sent him a telescope from London as a present.63
Just as everyone was getting exceptionally tired of Kiev, which Catherine called ‘abominable’,64 artillery salvoes announced that the ice had melted and the show could begin. At midday on 22 April 1787, the Empress embarked on her galley in the most luxurious fleet ever seen on a great river.
Skip Notes
*1 The Empress’s trip was the cause of another row with her Heir: she wanted to take the little princes, Alexander and Constantine, with her. Grand Duke Paul bitterly objected: he wished to come on the trip as well, but Catherine was not going to allow ‘Die schwere Bagage’ to spoil her glory. Paul even appealed desperately to Potemkin to stop the children going, a humiliating recognition of his power. Potemkin probably helped the children stay with the parents, a sign of kindness overcoming expediency; but Alexander fell ill, which actually solved the pro
blem.
*2 This was Countess Mniszech, née Urszula Zamoyska, the King of Poland’s niece. Stanislas-Augustus claimed that Potemkin had proposed marriage to her back in 1775. For obvious reasons, this was unlikely. Now Potemkin, who evidently bore no ill feelings, had her decorated by Catherine, along with Alexandra Branicka.
*3 Once in this intimate circle, Ségur noticed that Potemkin kept slipping away to a back room. When he tried to follow, the nieces detained him with ‘charming cajolery’. Finally he escaped to discover the Oriental scene of a room filled with jewels and forbidden merchandise, surrounded by merchants and onlookers. At the centre of it was his own valet Evrard, who had been caught red-handed smuggling and whose goods were thus being sold off, with Potemkin doubtless getting the best of the gems. The highly embarrassed Ségur sacked his valet on the spot, but the nieces, who were evidently delighted with the latest fashions from Paris, dissuaded him. ‘You had better be nice to him,’ said Potemkin, ‘since by a strange chance, you find yourself to be his…accomplice.’ His valet may have been caught with contraband, but the Ambassador of the Most Christian Majesty had clearly been set up for one of Potemkin’s jokes.
*4 This resembles Lord Palmerston’s attempt to ravish one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting at Windsor – except that Catherine was probably as amused as the Queen was not.
24
CLEOPATRA
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burn’d on the water, the poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were lovesick with them, the oars were silver
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar’d all description…
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
At midday on 22 April 1787, Catherine, Potemkin and their entourage boarded the dining barge, where a feast for fifty was laid out. At 3 p.m., the fleet moved off. The seven imperial galleys of the Prince’s sublime fleet were elegant, comfortable and majestic, painted in gold and scarlet on the outside, decorated in gold and silk inside, propelled and served by 3,000 oarsmen, crew and guards, and attended by over eighty other boats.1 Each had its own orchestra, always on deck, which played as the guests embarked or disembarked. On Catherine’s barge, the Dnieper, the orchestra was conducted by Potemkin’s maestro, Sarti. Her boudoir had twin beds for her and Mamonov. Each barge had a communal drawing room, library, music-room and canopy on deck. The sumptuous bedroom suites were hung with Chinese silk, with beds in taffeta; the studies had mahogany writing-tables, a comfortable chintz-covered divan and even lavatories with their own water-supply, a novelty on land let alone on the Dnieper. The floating dining-hall could seat seventy.
The dazzling, almost mythical, memory of this cruise remained with all its guests for the rest of their lives. ‘A multitude of sloops and boats hovered unceasingly at the head and sides of the fleet which looked like something out of a fairy-tale,’ remembered Ségur. Onlookers gave ‘thundering acclamations as they saw the sailors of her majestic squadron rhythmically dip their painted oars into the waters of the Dnieper to the roar of the guns’. It was like ‘Cleopatra’s fleet…never was there a more brilliant and agreeable voyage’, thought Ligne. ‘It’s true’, Nassau told his wife, ‘that our gathering on this galley is one of the most unique things ever seen.’
The Prince presented a perpetual spectacle along the riverside: as they set off to cannon salvoes and symphonies, small squadrons of Cossacks manoeuvred over the plains. ‘Towns, villages, country houses and sometimes rustic huts were so wonderfully adorned and disguised with garlands of flowers and splendid architectural decorations that they seemed to be transformed before our eyes into superb cities, palaces suddenly sprang up and magically created gardens.’
Potemkin’s barge, the Bug, housed himself, his nieces, their husbands and Nassau-Siegen. The tedium of Kiev was left behind, but the malice and mischief cruised down the Dnieper with them. ‘I love being with the Prince, who really likes me,’ Nassau told his wife, ‘despite my companions who loathe me.’ Later he made friends with Branicki. The ex-lover of the Queen of Tahiti and almost-King of Ouidah drew a picture for his wife of their living quarters on the ‘big and ornate’ barge: Potemkin occupied the largest suite and no one could reach their rooms without passing through his salon. Catherine’s first rendezvous was with the King of Poland five days downriver, and Potemkin’s barge was a floating confederation of Polish intrigues. Nassau, still on his mission for Stanislas-Augustus against Branicki and trying to make his fortune, always awoke early and roused Potemkin to get him on his own.
The mornings were free. At midday, the Empress’s galley fired a cannon to announce dinner, sometimes for only ten guests, who were rowed over. Afterwards, Nassau was conveyed to the barge of Ligne and Ségur, where the former would read out his diaries. At 6 p.m., it was back to the Empress’s boat for supper. She always retired at 9 p.m. and ‘everyone goes to Prince Potemkin’s’. But, despite this unprecedented pomp, the tour was intimate. One night, Mamonov, bored with his early imperial lights-out, asked Nassau and some others to stay for a game of whist. Scarcely had they begun to play in Catherine’s salon than she entered with her hair down, holding her bed bonnet and wearing an apricot-coloured taffeta dressing gown with blue ribbons. This was a unique glimpse of how the older Catherine looked to her young lovers behind bedroom doors. ‘Having her hair uncovered makes her look younger,’ remarked Nassau. She hoped she was not disturbing them, sat down, excused her ‘déshabillé’ and was ‘very cheerful’. She retired at 10 p.m. The whist ended at 1.30 a.m.
‘The journey is truly a continual party and absolutely superb,’ Nassau reported. ‘A charming society because Ligne and Ségur make it great.’ The pair, who shared the Sejm, were to become the naughty schoolboys of the tour, always up to horseplay. Every morning, Ligne knocked on the thin partition separating their bedrooms to recite impromptu poems to Ségur and then sent over his page with letters of ‘wisdom, folly, politics, pretty speeches, military anecdotes and philosophical epigrams’. Nothing could have been stranger than this sunrise correspondence ‘between an Austrian general and a French ambassador lying side by side on the same barge, not far from the empress of the North, sailing down the Dnieper, through Cossack country, to visit the Tartars’. Ségur thought the visions of the cruise almost poetical: ‘The beautiful wealth, the magnificence of our fleet, the majesty of the river, the movement, the joy of countless spectators along the riverside, the military and Asiatic mixture of costumes of thirty different nations, finally the certainty of seeing new things each day, stirred and sharpened our imagination.’ The sheer success of these spectacles reflected on the magnificent showman: ‘The elements, seasons, nature and art all seemed to conspire to assure the triumph of this powerful favourite. ‘2
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After three days of Cleopatran cruising, the King of Poland, Stanislas-Augustus, touched with romantic memories and political panaceas, waited at Kaniev on the Polish bank to meet the Empress. There was pathos in this meeting: when they had last met, he was a young Polish dreamer and she the oppressed wife of an imbecilic bully. Now he was a king and she an empress. He had not seen the woman he never really stopped loving for twenty-eight years and had probably indulged himself with fantasies of a reunion. ‘You can easily imagine’, the King confessed to Potemkin in an unpublished note back in February, ‘with what excitement I await the moment which should give me this joy.’ It was the sort of doomed sentimentality that would have struck a cord in Potemkin.3
Stanislas-Augustus remained handsome, sensitive, cultured, but above all he wanted to do the best that he could for Poland. Potemkin and Stanislas-Augustus shared interests in opera, archit
ecture and literature, yet the latter could not afford to trust the former. The King’s lot was nothing but frustration and humiliation. Politically, he had been dealt the weakest imaginable hand. Personally he was no match for politicians like Potemkin. Catherine found the King’s political dilemmas irritating and inept – and his personal sincerity almost unbearable. Perhaps, having once loved him so much in the prison of her miserable marriage, the very thought of her impotent naivety in those times embarrassed her.4
The real purpose of the meeting was not amorous nostalgia but the survival of Poland. The sprawling chaos, feeble grandeur, stubborn liberty and labyrinthine subtleties of the Commonwealth made it the only political issue that confounded Catherine’s orderly mind. Yet these were the very conditions in which the serpentine Potemkin flourished. The plan of the King and Prince, sealed at Chwastow, to form an anti-Turkish alliance and reform the Polish constitution, might have prevented the tragedy of Poland’s destruction. But this was an occasion where personal awkwardness undermined political understanding.
The flotilla dropped anchor off Kaniev. At 11 a.m. on 25 April, Bezborodko and Prince Bariatinsky, Marshal of the Court, collected the King in a launch. ‘Gentlemen, the King of Poland has asked me to commend Count Poniatowski to your care,’ he said, assuming his original name, since kings of Poland could not leave Polish soil. When the King met the Empress, Ségur and the others formed a circle around them to witness their first words ‘in circumstances so different from those in which they first met, united by love, separated by jealousy and pursued by hatred’. But their expectations were immediately crushed. There was no spark now. The monarchs walked stiffly on deck. Probably his surging nostalgia could not resist some painful allusions to the past for, when they returned, she was strained and embarrassed, and there was a ‘certain trace of sadness’ in his eyes. Some said that she used his blandishments to make Mamonov jealous. ‘It was thirty years since I’d seen him,’ Catherine wrote afterwards, ‘and you can imagine that we found each other changed.’5
Catherine the Great & Potemkin Page 56
