[49] Potemkin took Reginald Pole Carew on a tour of his industrial holdings in 1781, including his glass and brick factories near Schltisselburg, another glass factory near the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, and his iron foundry twenty miles outside Petersburg on his Eschenbaum estate, which was run by an Englishman, Mr Hill. Pole Carew also visited Krichev and Potemkin's other estates down the Dnieper, and suggested founding an English colony on a formerly Zaporogian island where Potemkin later settled immigrants.
[50] Card games followed political fashions. For example, the Comte de Segur explains in his Memoires how in Paris the faro of high aristocracy gave way to English whist, representing moderate liberty as explained by Montesquieu, but when the American War showed that Kings could be defied, 'boston' became the fashion.
[51] Alupka is the remarkable Crimea palace built in a mixture of Scottish baronial, Arabesque and Gothic architecture by Prince Mikhail Vorontsov and his wife Lise, who was Potemkin's great-niece. It is now a museum. See Epilogue.
[52] We can follow some of Gould's adventures in the archives: in 1785, he is paid 1,453 roubles for a tool needed in the Crimea; the next year, 500 roubles for gardeners coming from England to join the team. In 1786/7, Gould headed from Petersburg to the Crimea with 200 roubles for the journey and 225 for his carriage. Then he joined the Prince in Moldavia during the war, travelling with him to Dubossary in 1789 (800 roubles) and the next year to Jassy (650 roubles).
[53] The bitchy Horace Walpole laughed at the appropriateness of the subject since two tsars had been killed, at least one strangled, to secure Catherine's crown.
f Potemkin's paintings were admired in the Hermitage by Parkinson in 1792. None of the three Reynoldes is now on display in the Hermitage, but they are exhibited abroad. When the author searched for them in 1998, they were in a dusty corridor used as a storeroom, leaning forlornly against the wall.
[54] Potemkin may never have got the chance to encounter Jeremy Bentham. But we can: he rests, stuffed, pale and desiccated but clearly recognizable, his 'auto-icon', in the corridors of University College, London.
[55] Dr Rogerson had just claimed another victim. Soon after seeing off Samuel Bentham's love for his niece, Field-Marshal Prince Alexander Golitsyn died in Rogerson's care, probably bled and purged to death. 'I'm afraid', Catherine half joked to Potemkin, 'that anybody who gets into Rogerson's hands is already dead.'
[56] On his death, the Palace passed to the Romanovs: it was the Petersburg residence of Alexander I's adored sister Catherine until her death in 1818. Then it belonged to Nicholas I until his accession and was then used to hold the Empress's dances: Pushkin and his wife often danced there. Later, it belonged to Tsar Nicholas I I's mother, the Empress Maria Fyodorovna, until 1917. In February 1914, Prince Felix Yusopov, the future killer of Rasputin, married Grand Duchess Irina there.
[57] A hideous Soviet cinema stands there today.
f There was a sinister tradition that 'Princess Tarakanova' was kept here for a while, with the child supposedly fathered by Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky, but there is no evidence for this stay or the child. Ostrovky survived until the Nazis destroyed it, but luckily it was photographed during the 1930s.
[58] The author found its ruins in the Bablovsky Park. There is a surprise inside the tower: a circular red granite bowl with a diameter of about ten feet. This was the early version of a swimming pool built by Alexander I, where he used to swim privately during hot Tsarskoe Selo summers.
[59] The author found its ruins in the Bablovsky Park. There is a surprise inside the tower: a circular red granite bowl with a diameter of about ten feet. This was the early version of a swimming pool built by Alexander I, where he used to swim privately during hot Tsarskoe Selo summers.
[60] Yermolov's demand for an audience with George III when he visited London caused some awkwardness a year later. He later settled in Vienna.
[61] Giambattista Lampi, 1751-1830, was one of the most fashionable portrait painters in Vienna - Joseph II and Kaunitz sat for him. Potemkin seemed to have shared him with the Austrians, sometimes asking Kaunitz to send him over. The paintings done in 1791 before he died were copied by painters like Roslin and sold in prints.
[62] The great favourites of earlier epochs, such as the Count-Duke of Olivares and Cardinal Richelieu, both suffered recurring nervous collapses.
[63] In our times, this resembles President L.B. Johnson humiliating his cabinet from his lavatory seat.
[64] The Prince loved his food and when Monsieur Ballez's much anticipated arrival from France was delayed by his being stranded at Elsinor in Denmark, Potemkin mobilized the Russian Ambassador and various special envoys to get him quickly overland to Petersburg.
[65] This was an earlier, more proactive version of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's description of politics as 'Events, dear boy, events.'
[66] 'Blessed is he who does not go to the council of the ungodly.'
[67] 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 problem.
[68] This was Countess Mniszech, nee 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.
[69] Once in this intimate circle, Segur 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 Segur 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.