Bentham became inspector-general of Navy Works and was responsible for building the fleet that won Trafalgar. Jeremy Bentham actually built a Panopticon prison, backed by George III, but the experiment failed. He blamed this on the King.
John Paul Jones was commissioned by Washington and Jefferson to defeat the Algerian pirates of the Barbary Coast, but he died in Paris on 7/18 July 1792 aged just forty-five and was given a state funeral. He became revered as the founder of the US Navy. His grave was lost until 1905, when General Horace Porter discovered Jones well preserved in a lead coffin. In an example of necro-imperialism, President Theodore Roosevelt sent four cruisers to bring Jones home and on 6 January 1913, thousands of miles and 125 years after parting with Potemkin, he was reburied in a marble sarcophagus, based on Napoleon's at Invalides, at the Naval Academy at Annapolis, where he now rests.43
Catherine saw Branicka as Potemkin's emotional heir, granting her Potemkin's apartments in the imperial palaces so they could spend time together, but specifying that Sashenka should be served by different servants because the faces of Potemkin's old retainers would break her heart.44 Catherine promoted Platon Zubov to many of Potemkin's posts, but he proved himself direly inadequate for any position.45 Many missed Serenissimus when they contemplated the insolent mediocrity of the Zubovs - 'the rabble of the Empire'.46
Catherine, encouraged by Potemkin, had almost certainly planned to disinherit the 'unstable' Grand Duke Paul and pass the Crown directly to her grandson Alexander. Without Potemkin, she probably did not have the will to do it.47 On 5 November 1796, Catherine II rose at the usual time. She withdrew into her privy closet where she was struck down by a massive stroke. So, like George II of England, she was taken ill at a moment that unites kings and commoners. After her valet and maid had broken open the door, they bore her into her bedchamber where Dr Rogerson bled her. She was too heavy to lift on to the bed, so they laid her on a mattress on the floor. Emissaries galloped out to Gatchina to inform Grand Duke Pauclass="underline" when they arrived, he thought they had come to arrest him. He set off for Petersburg. Some time in the afternoon, it is said, he and Bezborodko destroyed documents that suggested passing over Catherine's son. On 6 November, Catherine died at 9.45 p.m., still on the mattress on the floor.
Paul I reversed as many of the achievements of his mother's reign as possible. He avenged himself on Potemkin by making the Taurida Palace into the Horse-Guards' barracks and the Winter Garden their stables. Potemkin's library was childishly 'exiled' to Kazan, a unique example of bibliographic vengeance. He ordered the renaming of Gregoripol. He brought back the Prussian paradomania of his father, treating Russia like a barracks, and did his best to destroy the tolerant 'army of Potemkin' that he so hated.48 His brand of despotic inconsistency united against him the same elements that had overthrown Peter III. So Paul's haunting fear of assassination became self-fulfilling. (Platon Zubov was one of his assassins.) Though Potemkin's Cossacks remained as pillars of the Romanov regime, Paul's sons, Alexander I and Nicholas I, enforced the same Prussianized paradomania that remained the face of the monarchy for the rest of its history: the 'knouto-Germanic Empire' is what the anarchist Bakunin called it.49
Sophie de Witte married the richest 'kinglet' of Poland, Felix Potocki, whom she hooked in Jassy after Potemkin's death. Sophie embarked on a passionately incestuous affair with her stepson Yuri Potocki, committing 'all the crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah'. When Langeron visited her, she told him, 'You know what I am and whence I come, eh bien, I cannot live with just 60,000 ducats of revenue.' Four years after her old husband died in 1805, she threw out the son and built up a fortune while raising her children. Countess Potocka died 'honoured and admired' in 1822.50
Sashenka Branicka, on the other hand, retired to her estates and became so rich she could not count it. 'I don't know exactly,' she said, 'but I should have about twenty-eight million.' She lived majestically and almost royally into a different era. The witness of Potemkin's last breath became the 'bearer of his glory'. She kept her lithe, slender figure and fresh complexion into middle age but always wore those long Catherinian dresses, held in at the waist with a single wide buckle. She created a shrine to Potemkin at her estate and was painted with his bust behind her. Alexander I visited her twice and appointed her grand mistress of the Court. Even twenty years after Catherine's death, Wiegel was amazed to observe the grandest noblewomen kissing her hand as if she were a grand duchess, which she seemed to accept 'without the slightest unease or embarrassment'. Swathes of the Polish and Russian aristocracy were descended from her children by the time she died aged eighty-four in 1838, when Victoria was Queen of England.51
Potemkin's 'angel', Countess Skavronskaya, was liberated by the death of her melomaniac husband and married an Italian Knight of Malta, Count Giulio Litta, for love.52 Tatiana, the youngest niece, Mikhail Potemkin's widow, married the much older Prince Nikolai Yusupov, the descendant of a Tartar khan named Yusuf and said to maintain a whole village of serf-whores. Princess Yusupova was unhappily married but, like her uncle, amassed jewels that included the earrings of Marie-Antoinette, the Polar Star diamond and the diadem of Napoleon's sister, Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples. Felix Yusupov, who killed Rasputin in 1916, was proud of his connection to Serenissimus.53
Two great-nieces complement Potemkin's life. Branicka's daughter Elisabeth, known as Lise, married Prince Michael Vorontsov, the son of Potemkin's enemy Simon, who brought him up in England as a dry, phlegmatic milord. He became viceroy of New Russia and the Caucasus like his wife's great-uncle. Lise was said to have inherited the secret certificate of Potemkin's marriage to Catherine and tossed it into the Black Sea - an appropriate home for it. 'Milord' Vorontsov found it impossible to control his flirtatious, exquisitely mannered Princess. She was already involved in a secret affair with one of her Raevsky cousins, when in 1823 she met Alexander Pushkin, who had been exiled to Odessa. Her Potemkin connection was surely part of the attraction to the poet: he knew Potemkin's nieces and noted down the stories they told. He fell in love with Princess Vorontsova. The poet hinted in his poems that they made love on a Black Sea beach. She was believed to be the inspiration for the women in many of his poems, including Tatiana in Eugene Onegin. In his poem 'The Talisman' he wrote, 'There where the waves spray, The feet of solitary reefs ... A loving enchantress, Gave me her talisman.' The gift was a ring engraved in Hebrew.
Vorontsov ended the affair by sending Pushkin away. The poet avenged this by writing doggerel that mocked Vorontsov and (probably) by fathering his daughter Sophie, born to Lise nine months after Pushkin's departure. Thus the blood of Potemkin and Pushkin was fused. Pushkin was wearing her 'talisman' when, in 1837, he was killed in a duel.54
Skavronskaya's daughter, also Ekaterina, became a European scandal. Known as the 'Naked Angel' because of her fondness for wearing veil-like, transparent dresses and 'le Chat Blanc' - the 'White Pussycat' - for her sensual avidity, she married the heroic general Prince Peter Bagratian. Like her mother, who was Potemkin's 'angel', her face had a seraphic sweetness, her skin was alabaster, her eyes were a startling blue and her hair was a cascade of golden locks. She became Metternich's mistress in Dresden in 1802 and bore him a daughter, Clementine, who was thus related to both Potemkin and the 'Coachman of Europe'. Goethe saw her at Carlsbad and raved about her as she began another affair with Prince Louis of Prussia. After Bagratian's death at the Battle of Borodino, she flaunted herself and dabbled in European politics at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. She competed ruthlessly with the Duchess of Sagan for the favours of Tsar Alexander I: each occupied different wings of the Palais Palm. The Austrian policemen who spied on her bedroom in Vienna reported on her superb 'practical expertise'. The White Pussycat then moved to Paris, where she was famous for her promiscuity, fine carriage and Potemkin diamonds. In 1830, she married an English general and diplomat Lord Howden. Touchingly, when she visited the old Metternich thirty-five yeas later in his exile in Richmond, his daughter remembered that she could barely stop laughing because the old 'Angel' was still ludicrously wearing the see-through dresses that had once enraptured the princes of Europe. She lived until 1857, but her daughter Clementine, who was brought up by the Metternichs, died young.55