policy of keeping an independent Poland as a crippled and eccentric buffer- zone. Far from wanting partition, most of Potemkin's plans, such as the Moldavian option, involved enlarging Poland, not diminishing her. If he had lived longer, he might have succeeded and helped prevent partition. If Catherine had predeceased him, it is likely he would have moved to become a Polish magnate.
Potemkin stayed in Petersburg to hammer out a Polish policy, while the stories of his sinister plans circulated in febrile revolutionary Warsaw. The Polish envoy Deboli stepped up the tension by sending Stanislas-Augustus every rumour of Potemkin's royal ambitions. As his enemies united at Court to depose him at last, the scene was set for the bitterest crisis of his long friendship with Catherine.
'We were running things all right without you, weren't we?', Catherine replied to Potemkin, according to the hostile Deboli. The words ring true, though the tone is that of a wife wryly scolding her husband, not divorcing him.23 William Fawkener, Pitt's special envoy, had arrived on 14 May, but the protracted negotiations to settle the Ochakov Crisis only really started in early June, when Catherine and Potemkin held long conversations with him. In his unpublished despatches, Fawkener observed their different styles but united message: during one audience with the Englishman, Catherine was just praising Potemkin's surprisingly good mood when she was interrupted by one of her greyhounds barking outside at a child. She reassured the little boy and, turning pointedly to Fawkener, added: 'Dogs that bark don't always bite.'24
Potemkin, on the other hand, invited the cowed British bulldog to dinner, where the Englishman was utterly overwhelmed by the Prince's ebullient and entertaining soliloquy - 'strange and full of inconsistency'. Serenissimus 'told me he was Russian and loved his country but he loved England too; that I was an islander and consequently selfish and loved my island only'. He made a Potemkinian offer: why did not Britain have Crete (Candia) in the Mediterranean as its prize from the Ottoman bonanza? This pied-a-terre would give Britain control of Egyptian-Levantine trade. And then he went into raptures about his southern lands, the soil, the people, the fleet - 'great projects' whose success depended 'solely on him'. At the end of this performance, the bewildered Fawkener admitted to London that he had not had an opportunity of getting a single word in edgeways, but it left Pitt in no doubt about the seriousness of Russia's commitment to the Black Sea and its refusal to compromise over Ochakov.25 By early July, England and Prussia realized they would simply have to buckle to Catherine's demands.
Fawkener was further humiliated by the arrival in Petersburg of Robert Adair, sent mischievously (and possibly treasonably) by Charles James Fox as the opposition's unofficial envoy. Simon Vorontsov ensured Adair, aged twenty-eight, a good reception by telling Potemkin that even Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the queen of the ton, 'honours him with her friendship'.26 Adair received a 'great welcome' from Empress and Prince. Before he left, Potemkin gave him a present in Catherine's name - a ring with her portrait.27
The Prince, at the height of his dignity, now resembled a noble bear baited by a pack of dogs. Zubov played on Catherine's almost subliminal unease about Potemkin's domineering behaviour by implying that he was becoming a possible threat to her. 'Some secret suspicion hid in the Empress's heart against this Field-Marshal,'28 recalled Gavrili Romanovich Derzhavin, the neo-Classical poet and civil servant. Serenissimus muttered that she was surrounded by his enemies. When Catherine was at Tsarskoe Selo for the summer, Potemkin paid fewer visits than usual and did not stay long. As an agreement with the Anglo-Prussians got closer and the Polish Question more urgent, ambassadors noticed that Catherine seemed to treat him coolly. As so often before, this coolness gave hope to Potemkin's enemies.
Zubov was not just undermining the Prince with Catherine: first he managed to turn Suvorov29 against his former patron by offering favours that Potemkin had already recommended. So Suvorov fell out with Potemkin not because of the latter's jealousy but due to the former's misguided intriguing. Then Zubov told Derzhavin 'in the Empress's name' not to go to Potemkin for favours: Zubov would provide whatever he wanted.
Derzhavin had made his name with an 'Ode to Princess Felitsa', which teasingly described the Procurator-General Viazemsky as 'choleric' and Potemkin as 'indolent', yet the Prince protected him against Viazemsky and other enemies over the years.30 Derzhavin repaid Potemkin's decency with petty betrayal - and poignant poetry. (His masterpiece, The Waterfall, which inspired Pushkin, was a posthumous tribute to Potemkin.)31 Zubov offered Derzhavin the post of secretary to the Empress. The poet accepted the job and moderated praise of Potemkin in his poems.
When he delivered one of these. Potemkin stormed out of his bedroom, ordered his carriage and rode off 'God knows where' into a tempest of thunder and lightning outside. Derzhavin called meekly a few days later and Potemkin, who would have known exactly how Zubov had turned his protege, received the poet coolly but without rancour.32
The Prince always behaved manically at times of political tension. He chewed his nails and pursued love affairs with priapic enthusiasm. Derzhavin and foreigners like Deboli claimed he had gone mad - hinting that he suffered from the insanity of tertiary syphilis, for which there is no evidence. One night, Deboli claimed, Potemkin turned up drunk at a Countess Pushkina's house and caressed her hair. She threatened to throw him out and he drawled that he had not given up the idea of being king of Poland.33 This is an unlikely story. Besides even his enemies admitted that his seductions had never been more successful. 'Women crave the attentions of Prince Potemkin', observed his critic, Count Fyodor Rostopchin, 'like men crave medals.'34 Serenissimus gave a three-day fete in one of his houses near Tsarskoe Selo while 'the town talk is engrossed', Fawkener reported breathlessly to London, 'by his quarrel with one woman, his apparent inclination for another, [and] his real attachment to a third'.35
The trap seemed to be closing on Potemkin. Most histories claim that, when the Prince finally left St Petersburg in late July, he had been ruined by Zubov, rejected by Catherine and defeated by his enemies, and was dying from a broken heart. This could hardly be further from the truth.
In July when the Count was at Peterhof, Zubov thought he had planted enough suspicion in Catherine's mind for his creeping coup to achieve its goal.36 But who was to replace Potemkin? There was no one else of his military or political stature - with one exception. On 24 June, Count Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky mysteriously arrived. His visits to the capital since 1774 always coincided with attempts to overthrow Potemkin: he liked to boast that, when he came in the door, Potemkin left by the window.37 But when Orlov-Chesmensky called at Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine let Potemkin know in a note - hardly the behaviour of a empress about to overthrow him.38 During June and July, Potemkin, in town, wrote to Catherine, in Tsarskoe Selo, about his agonizing hangnail. She was concerned enough to write back, signing her notes 'Adieu Papa'. She enclosed the usual sycophantic letter from Zubov. Potemkin also sent her a dress as a present.39 Even Deboli reported that Catherine emphatically ordered Orlov-Chesmensky not to attack 'her great friend'.40