Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (36 page)

One of those who was so vexed was Catherine’s son, Paul. But, groundless as it was, von Helbig’s mud stuck. Potemkin’s detractors, including Paul, were even unwilling to believe that there was water in the Crimea. Paul preferred the sham to stand and the lies to be perpetuated even after he had been proven wrong.

Not only were the vessels not oil paintings, but by 1787, Potemkin had created a formidable navy, including twenty-four ships of the
line, warships carrying over forty cannon apiece. He became known as the father of the Black Sea Fleet. Another remarkable feat of the prince’s was his ability to attract peasants, tradesmen, and professionals to populate his new Crimean cities by offering incentives, such as no taxes for ten years.

When Potemkin’s enormous achievements in the Crimea were disbelieved, or worse, written about as shams or deceptions, he spiraled into one of his depressions, maniacally chewing his nails. During the last years of his life he lived and governed from Jassy in Dacia, Moldavia (modern-day Bucharest), enjoying a sybaritic lifestyle with a series of beautiful young mistresses.

In 1785, the year after imperial paramour Alexander Lanskoy’s death, while Potemkin was in the Crimea planning for her visit, Catherine took another lover, Count Alexander Matreievech Dmitriyev-Mamonov. She nicknamed the twenty-six-year-old athletic guardsman “Monsieur Redcoat.” But the empress dismissed him in 1789 when he cheated on her, impregnating one of her ladies-in-waiting. Catherine gave Mamonov and his fertile girlfriend a generous gift and even presided at their wedding.

Later that year, at the age of sixty, Catherine took a new bedfellow, a twenty-two-year-old handsome and swarthy boy toy named Platon Zubov, although the empress called him “Blackie” because of his dark complexion. Zubov was very ambitious, yet he seemed to satisfy Catherine, which kept Potemkin, now at Jassy, at least cautiously pleased. But the prince was anxious to come to St. Petersburg in order to personally check out Zubov, and to gauge the present status of his own influence with the empress.

Potemkin arrived in the capital around the end of February 1791, and Catherine pronounced him “more handsome, more lovable, wittier, more brilliant than ever, and in the happiest mood possible.” But the couple argued over Prussian foreign policy, and Potemkin’s visit was fraught with much door slamming and tears. On his last night in the capital Potemkin dined with his niece Tatiana. He mentioned during the meal that he was certain he would die soon. Months earlier he had remarked with equal certainty that the sixty-two-year-old empress would outlive him.

Potemkin returned to Jassy, falling ill that August 13. He convalesced
by composing hymns, and was moved from the palace to a country house. The arrival of Catherine’s letters both cheered him and released a flood of nostalgia. Potemkin wept bitterly, knowing that they would never see each other again. But he continued to correspond with the empress, writing on September 21, “My paroxysms continue for a third day. I’ve lost all strength and don’t know what the end will be.” Six days later he told Catherine, “Beloved matushka, my not seeing you makes it even harder for me to live.” He turned fifty-two on September 30.

On October 2, he slipped into a coma for several hours, but awoke the following day and was given last rites. On October 4, he insisted on quitting Jassy, convinced that if he could reach the sea air of Nikolaev, he would recover. He penned his last letter to Catherine, signing it, “Your most loyal and grateful subject.”

They set out at eight a.m. on October 5, 1791, but Grigory Potemkin, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, died on the roadside about forty miles from Jassy in the arms of his niece Alexandra. After realizing he was too ill to continue the journey, he had asked his companions to “[t]ake me out of the carriage and put me down. I want to die in the field.” A Persian carpet was unfurled to make him more comfortable; he was covered with the silken dressing gown that had been a gift from his beloved Catherine. A search was made for a gold coin to place over his (good) eye, according to Orthodox tradition, but none was to be found in such a remote location. One of the Cossacks escorting the party offered them a copper five-kopeck coin instead, which closed the eyes of His Serene Highness at midday. The cause of death was most probably bronchial pneumonia, undoubtedly exacerbated by exhaustion.

Catherine, who did not receive the news until it arrived by courier at six in the evening on October 12, was inconsolable. She fainted and had to be bled. Then she went into seclusion. At two in the morning, in a letter to her friend and correspondent of many years Friedrich Melchior Grimm, she poured out her heart and the contents of her pen in a eulogy that encapsulates why she had loved Potemkin.

…my pupil, my friend and almost my idol, Prince Potemkin-Tavrichesky, has died after about a month’s illness in Moldavia!
You can have no idea of how afflicted I am: he joined to an excellent heart a rare understanding and an extraordinary breadth of spirit; his views were always great and magnanimous; he was very humane, full of knowledge, singularly lovable, and always with new ideas; never did a man have the gift of
bon mots
and knowing just what to say as he had; his military talents during this war must have been striking, for he did not miss a single blow on land or sea. No one in the world was less capable of being led than he; he also had a particular gift for knowing how to employ his people. In a word, he was a statesman in counsel and execution; he was attached to me with passion and zeal; he scolded and became angry when he thought one could do better; with age and experience he was correcting his faults…. But his most rare quality was a courage of heart, mind and soul which distinguished him completely from the rest of humankind, and which meant that we understood one another perfectly and could let those who understood less prattle away to their hearts’ content. I regard Prince Potemkin as a very great man, who did not fulfill half of what was within his grasp.

Catherine spent the next several days weeping, convinced that she would never be able to survive without him. “Prince Potemkin did me a cruel turn by dying! The whole burden falls on me.”

“How can I replace Potemkin?” she lamented to her secretary, Alexander Khrapovitsky. “He was a real nobleman, a clever man, no one could buy him. Everything will be wrong….”

As the days passed, Khrapovitsky could only report, “Tears and despair…tears…more tears.” On December 12, continuing to grieve, Catherine confided to Grimm, “I am still profoundly afflicted by it. To replace him is impossible, because someone would have to be born as he was, and the end of this century announces no geniuses….”

Potemkin’s funeral was held at Jassy. He had wanted to be buried in his birthplace at Chizhova, but Catherine played the empress card and decided that his final resting place should be at one of his Crimean cities. She settled on Kherson, where Potemkin’s body arrived
on November 23, 1791. As if he were a royal, his heart and viscera were removed and buried elsewhere: His organs, including his brain, rest beneath the floor before the Hospodor of Moldavia’s red velvet medieval throne. Potemkin’s heart was supposed to have been placed under the throne of St. Catherine’s in Kherson, but there’s no trace of it there. The villagers of Chizhova believe it was taken there in 1818 by Archbishop Ivov Potemkin.

After Catherine’s death in November 1796, her son commanded the destruction of Potemkin’s tomb, but apparently his orders were botched. The marble monument that Catherine had commissioned wasn’t completed at the time of her demise, so the prince rested in an unmarked grave, and perhaps the emperor Paul’s lackeys never found it. The grave was desecrated during the Russian Revolution of 1918, and Potemkin’s corpse was as defiled as that of Madame de Maintenon during the French Revolution.

In 1930, a writer and native of Kherson, returning to his hometown for a visit, noticed Potemkin’s skull and burial clothes displayed behind glass in the “Anti-Religious Museum.” He sent a telegram to the ministry responsible for protecting art, and Potemkin was reburied.

On May 11, 1984, his coffin was exhumed and analyzed. Some additional items had found their way into the more modern casket, such as a British officer’s Crimean War–era epaulette, but forensic tests concluded that the body was Potemkin’s. In July 1986, the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed. It was confirmed that the coffin dated to 1930. It was also supposed that any icons that would have been buried with Potemkin’s body had disappeared during the looting of the Russian Revolution. At St. Catherine’s Cathedral in Kherson, Potemkin was reinterred for the final time, with a proper headstone.

Everything about Potemkin had been larger than life. Leonine, broad chested, well over six feet tall, the prince, known across Russia as Serenissimus, had coruled the empire with Catherine for seventeen years. They had met three decades before his death during a time of crisis, and a gallant gesture sealed their combined destiny. After their romance ended, he remained Catherine’s partner, friend, adviser, minister, and confidant, and she surely loved him more deeply than
she had ever loved another. Catherine called him her “Colossus,” her tiger, her idol, her hero, and her greatest eccentric. They were unquestionably each other’s grand passion.

Potemkin won the Second Turkish War for her, annexed the Crimea, created Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and founded the cities of Kherson, Nikolaev, Sevastopol, and Odessa. He was as intelligent, creative, and brilliant as he was arrogant, indolent, and debauched.

Perhaps the most succinct epitaph, although it was not written as one, was penned by Charles-Joseph, the Prince de Ligne. The Austrian ambassador found Potemkin to be “…the most extraordinary man I have ever met. He gives the appearance of laziness yet works incessantly…always reclining on his couch yet never sleeping, day or night, because his devotion to the sovereign he adores keeps him constantly active…melancholy in his pleasures, unhappy by virtue of being happy, blasé about everything, quickly wearied of anything, morose, inconstant, a profound philosopher, an able minister, a sublime politician and a child of ten…prodigiously wealthy without having a sou, discoursing on theology to his generals and on war to his archbishops; never reading, but probing those to whom he speaks…wanting everything like a child, capable of dispensing with everything like a great man…what then is his magic? Genius, and then genius, and then more genius!”

In addition to the numerous titles and offices that Catherine awarded Potemkin, she gave him several palaces, the most famous of which was the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg. Tsar Paul I avenged himself on his mother and her lover after Catherine’s death by turning the Tauride into the Horse Guards barracks.

And since our thoughts have turned to horses…

While Potemkin was Catherine’s most famous and influential lover, history has all too often assigned her a more original and unusual partner—one of the equine species. The origin of this ridiculous horse tale begins long before Catherine’s birth, with a courtier from Holstein named Adam Olearius. In 1647, Olearius published an account of his travels throughout Russia in 1630, writing that the Russians were fond of practicing sodomy, even with horses. In the ensuing misogynistic decades after Catherine’s death, accounts of her passion for horseback riding morphed into the legend of bestiality,
which was taken to its preposterous conclusion with the story that the empress met her untimely end when the harness broke as it was lowering a stallion on top of her, and the horse crushed her to death. The truth is far more prosaic, to say nothing of plausible. The great Catherine suffered a stroke in the commode.

C
AROLINE
M
ATHILDE

1751–1775

Q
UEEN
OF
D
ENMARK
: 1766–1772 (
BANISHED
)

A
s king of England, George III, who acceded to the throne in 1760, had the authority, if not also the obligation, to unite his younger siblings in marriages that would be strategically advantageous for Great Britain. Princess Caroline Matilda was the prettiest of George’s sisters—the youngest child of Augusta, Princess Dowager of Wales, and Frederick, Prince of Wales—born only four months after their father died.

Even as a little girl, Caroline Matilda was made aware that no royal child could marry for love. If you wanted to stay home, then you remained a spinster. Otherwise you were sent off to another land, ostensibly forever, to cement a diplomatic alliance with a foreign entity. Caroline Matilda had known since 1765 of her connubial destiny—to wed Christian, the Crown Prince of Denmark. Walter Titley, the British envoy to Copenhagen, made sure to emphasize Christian’s handsome, if slightly fey, looks as well as his many other fine qualities.

“To an amiable and manly countenance, a graceful and distinguishing figure, he joins an address full of dignity and at the same time extremely affable,” observed the assistant British envoy William Cosby, who described the young crown prince with effusion after visiting Copenhagen in the spring of 1764. When he wasn’t terrorized by his own fears, the small, slight, tow-haired prince was witty and charming. The problem with Christian was that he would probably be diagnosed today as a bipolar paranoid schizophrenic. Nowadays he’d be medicated to quiet the demons in his head and modify his masochism, fetishism, and other behaviors deemed outside the norm.

His mother, Queen Louise, the youngest daughter of George II of England and Caroline of Anspach (making Christian and Caroline Matilda cousins), died when Christian was only two. His father, King Frederick, consoled himself with alcohol and took a second wife, a daughter of the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Juliane Marie. Christian’s stepmother wasn’t cruel to him, but she wasn’t exactly maternal. After her own son, Prince Frederik, was born in 1753, she focused all her energy and her love on her biological child.

When Christian was six he was given his own household, and his head was crammed with mathematics and theology by his strict and humorless tutor, Count Dietlev Reventlow. The prince was a sensitive and intelligent boy but was never nurtured, and consequently began to dwell inside his mind, where his phobias grew and multiplied.