Catherine distracted Panin from his schemes by confining him to foreign policy as ‘senior member’ of the College of Foreign Affairs – Foreign Minister – but she never forgot that Panin had wanted to place Paul, not her, on the throne in 1762. It was safer for this reptilian schemer to be the serpent inside her house. They needed each other: she thought Panin was ‘the most skilful, intelligent and zealous person at my Court’, but she did not particularly like him.27
Beneath these two main factions, the court of the new Empress was a labyrinth of families and factions. Catherine appointed her admirer from the 1750s, Zakhar Chernyshev, to run the College of War, while his brother Ivan was made head of the navy: the Chernyshevs initially remained neutral between the Panins and Orlovs. But members of the big families often supported different factions as we saw with Princess Dashkova and the Vorontsovs.28 Even she soon overreached herself by claiming to exercise power she did not possess.29 ‘This celebrated conspirator who boasted of having given away a crown…became a laughingstock to all Russians.’30 Dashkova, like the Elisabethan magnates Chancellor Vorontsov and Ivan Shuvalov, would ‘travel abroad’, the euphemism for a gentle exile in the spa-resorts of Europe.
Catherine’s Court became a kaleidoscope of perpetually shifting and competing factions that were groups of individuals linked by friendship, family, greed, love or shared views of the vaguest sort. The two basic shibboleths remained whether a courtier supported a Prussian or Austrian alliance, and whether he or she was closer to the Empress or the Heir. All was dominated by the simplest self-interest – ‘Thy enemy’s enemy is my friend.’
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The new regime’s first foreign-policy success was the placing of the crown of Poland on the head of Catherine’s last lover. Within days of the coup, on 2 August 1762, Catherine wrote to earnest Stanislas Poniatowski: ‘I am sending Count Keyserling to Poland immediately to make you king after the death of the present one,’ Augustus III.
This has often been presented as an imperial caprice to thank Poniatowski for his amorous services. But that tautological institution, the Serene Commonwealth of Poland, was not a frivolous matter. Poland was in every way unique in Europe, but it was an infuriating state of absurd contradictions: it was really not one country, but two states – the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; it had one parliament, the Sejm, but parallel governments; its kings were elected and almost powerless; when they appointed some officials, they could not dismiss them; its nobility, the szlachta, were almost omnipotent. Sejms were elected by the entire szlachta, which, since it included almost 10 per cent of the population, made Poland more democratic than England. One vote was enough to annul the proceedings of an entire Sejm – the famous liberum veto – which made the poorest delegate more powerful than the King. There was only one way around this: nobles could form a Confederation, a temporary alternative Sejm that would exist only until it had achieved its aims. Then it would disband. But really Poland was ruled by its magnates, ‘kinglets’ who owned estates as large as some countries and possessed their own armies. The Poles were extremely proud of their strange constitution, which kept this massive land in a humiliating chaos that they regarded as golden, unbridled freedom.
Choosing Polish kings was one of the favourite diplomatic sports of the eighteenth century. The contestants in this diplomatic joust were Russia, Prussia, Austria and France. Versailles had three traditional allies in the East, the Ottoman Empire, Sweden and Poland. But ever since 1716, when Peter the Great had guaranteed the flawed constitution of Poland, Russia’s policy was to dominate the Commonwealth by maintaining its absurd constitution, placing weak kings in Warsaw, encouraging the power of the magnates – and having a Russian army ever ready on the border. Catherine’s sole interest in all this was to preserve the Petrine protectorate over Poland. Poniatowski was the ideal figurehead for this because through his pro-Russian Czartoryski uncles, the ‘Familia’, backed by Russian guns and English money, Catherine could continue to control Poland.
Poniatowski began to dream of becoming king and then marrying Catherine, hence, as his biographer writes, he could combine the two great desires of his life.31 ‘If I desired the throne,’ he pleaded to her, ‘it was because I saw you on it.’ When told that this was impossible, he beseeched her: ‘Don’t make me king, but bring me back to your side.’32 This gallant if whining idealism did not auger well for his future relationship with the female paragon of raison d’état. Since the usual contestants in this game of king-making were exhausted after the Seven Years War, Catherine and Panin were able to pull it off. Catherine won Frederick the Great’s backing because Prussia had been ruined by the Seven Years War and was so isolated that this alliance with Russia, signed on 31 March/11 April 1764, was his only hope. On 26 August/6 September the Election Sejm, surrounded by Russian troops, elected Poniatowski king of Poland. He adopted the name Stanislas-Augustus.
The Prussian alliance – and the Polish protectorate – were meant to form the pillars of Panin’s much vaunted ‘Northern System’, in which the northern powers, including Denmark, Sweden and hopefully England, would restrain the ‘Catholic Bloc’ – the Bourbons of France and Spain, and the Habsburgs of Austria.33
Now that Poniatowski was a king, would Catherine marry Grigory Orlov? There was a precedent of sorts. The Empress Elisabeth was rumoured to have married her Cossack chorister Alexei Razumovsky. He now lived in retirement in Moscow.
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An old courtier called at Alexei Razumovsky’s Elisabethan Baroque palace and found him reading the Bible. The visitor was Chancellor Mikhail Vorontsov, performing his last political role before ‘travelling abroad’. He came to offer Razumovsky the rank of imperial highness. This was a polite way of asking if he had secretly married the Empress Elisabeth. Catherine and the Orlovs wished to know: was there a marriage certificate? Razumovsky must have smiled at this. He closed his Bible and produced a box of ebony, gold and pearl. He opened it to reveal an old scroll sealed with the imperial eagle…
Catherine had to tread carefully. She absolutely understood the dangers of raising the Orlovs too high. If she married Orlov, she would threaten Grand Duke Paul’s claim to the throne, and possibly his life, as well as outraging the magnates and the army. But she loved Orlov. She owed the Orlovs her throne. She had borne Grigory a son.* This was an age when the imperial public and private lives were indissoluble. All through her life, Catherine longed for a family: her parents were dead; her aunt had terrorized her and taken away her son; the interests of her son were a living threat to her reign if not her life; even Anna, her daughter with Poniatowski, had died young. Her position was extraordinary, yet she yearned for an almost bourgeois home with Grigory Orlov, whom she regarded as her partner for life. So she let the question ride – and probably allowed the Orlovs to send this envoy to ask Razumovsky whether the precedent existed.
Yet the brothers were not the most subtle of operators. At one small party, Grigory boasted with gangsterish swagger that, if he wished, he could overthrow Catherine in a month. Kirill Razumovsky, the good-natured brother of Alexei, replied quick as a flash: ‘Could be; but, my friend, instead of waiting a month, we would have hanged you in two weeks.’34 The guffaws were hearty – but chilling. When Catherine hinted at an Orlov marriage, Panin supposedly replied: ‘The Empress can do what she wishes but Madame Orlov will never be Empress of Russia.’35