While Potemkin had been plotting the defeat of the Sultan, Catherine had been faced with a crisis in the Court theatre. It erupted at the Hermitage on 11 February 1791 when the leading lady threw herself at the empress’s feet at the end of a performance of her latest comic opera,
Beyond the walls of her own palace, few regarded the empress as a plausible guardian of morality of any kind. Now that the storming of Ismail had reinforced the European stereotype of the Russians as a primitive people led by bloodthirsty savages, Catherine’s international rivals drew increasingly explicit parallels between her apparently insatiable appetite for imperial expansion and her notorious sexual rapaciousness. In the age of Gillray and Rowlandson, English caricaturists were in their element. The first semi-pornographic engraving to feature the empress had appeared on 24 October 1787 NS, two months after the beginning of the Turkish war. Backed by a cowering Joseph II complete with dunce’s cap, Catherine appears as ‘The Christian Amazon’ as a simian Louis XVI lobs towards her two grenades that form testicles to the phallic symbol of the Turk’s bayonet.24 The great majority of such satirical prints, however, date from the spring of 1791. One of the most explicit—‘The Imperial Stride’, published anonymously on 12 April NS—features a colossal figure of the empress with one foot in Russia and the other stretched out to Constantinople. Beneath her, ten diminished European rulers gaze up into her skirts in awe: ‘By Saint Jago,’ declares the king of Spain, ‘I’ll strip her of her fur!’ George III splutters his trademark ‘What! What! What! What a prodigious expansion!’, and the Sultan reluctantly admits that ‘The whole Turkish army wouldn’t satisfy her.’25
This sudden rash of derogatory images signalled that Anglo-Russian relations had reached an all-time low. Irritated by the Franco-Russian commercial treaty of 1787 that undermined Britain’s longstanding domination of the Russia trade, William Pitt had been further alarmed by the empress’s gains at the Turks’ expense. In January 1791, spurred on by his ambassador in Berlin, the prime minister demanded an end to the war and a return to the status quo ante by which Russia would have been forced to relinquish Ochakov, whose capture had been interpreted as a harbinger of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.26 In March, when Catherine refused to capitulate, Pitt threatened to send a fleet to the Baltic with Prussian support. As King Frederick William II mobilised 88,000 troops in preparation for an attack on his eastern neighbour, both Bezborodko and Potemkin urged concessions. Catherine was clearly disturbed: ‘Anxiety about Prussia,’ Khrapovitsky recorded in his diary on 15 March. ‘It has gone on a long time. She cried.’27
As so often in her declining years, nervousness led to exhaustion and lapses in concentration. ‘The empress is not what she was,’ Stedingk reported privately to Gustav III at the end of the month. ‘Age and the inconveniences it brings render her less capable of doing business.’28 But there was never anything pathetic about Catherine. ‘Angry,’ her secretary noted on 7 April, ‘obstinacy will lead to a new war.’ Since it is not always clear whose words Khrapovitsky is recording, it is hard to be sure whether this was the voice of Potemkin, irritated by her refusal to appease the Prussians, or an expression of the empress’s own exasperation at the sabre- rattling in Whitehall and Potsdam.29 Whichever it was, Catherine held her nerve and was vindicated when British public opinion, encouraged by her ambassador, Semen Vorontsov, and her admirer, Pitt’s rival Charles James Fox, helped to force the prime minister to back down.30 On 14 September NS, William Dent’s cartoon ‘Black Carlo’s White Bust, or The Party’s Plenipo in Catherine’s Closet’ portrayed the playwright Sheridan urging Fox to visit Russia: ‘your fortune is made—she has certainly heard of your fine parts.’ Indeed she had, though not in the way the cartoonist’s innuendo implied. When the Hermitage had taken delivery of a marble bust of Fox by Joseph Nollekens, a bronze copy was placed between Demosthenes and Cicero in the Cameron Gallery at Tsarskoye Selo. There it stayed until 1793, when Fox doubly disgraced himself in the empress’s eyes by supporting the Poles and expressing sympathy for the revolution in France. At that stage, the visiting English tutor John Parkinson was told that she was prepared to sell the bust, ‘but that it was not worth while, for that she could not get thirty roubles for it’.31
According to a leading historian of international relations, the ‘Ochakov crisis’ of spring 1791 was ‘not just a clash over peace terms with Turkey or a contest of wills between Pitt and Catherine, but a wider contest between the two relatively invulnerable flank powers over which of them would lead Europe and control the balance of power’.32 For the moment, it was the Russians who were in the ascendant and they saw no reason to conceal their glee. ‘General Suvorov has been here for a fortnight,’ Stedingk reported on 14 March. ‘480 flags and regimental colours, along with several Pashas’ tails and other tokens of dignity, carried off from the Turks at Ismail and solemnly paraded on Sunday to the church in the fortress [the Peter-Paul Cathedral], constitute a eulogy to this general far more eloquent than any panegyric.’ Catherine watched the parade from the windows of the Winter Palace.33 The whole city had come to a standstill in anticipation of Potemkin’s arrival at the end of February. On 28 April he staged his own glorification of the fall of Ismail at his new residence, later christened the Tauride Palace in his memory, complete with choruses by Derzhavin: ‘Thunder of victory, resound!’
‘Like all his other plans,’ remarked Catherine’s first Western biographer, this entertainment ‘was extraordinary and great. A whole month was consumed in preparations: artists of all kinds were employed; whole shops and warehouses were emptied to supply the necessaries of the occasion; several hundred persons were daily assembled in making previous rehearsals for the final execution; and each of these days was of itself a grand spectacle.’34 On the appointed evening, Catherine found herself serenaded by Potemkin’s private orchestra as Alexander and Constantine—their very names redolent of Russia’s imperial ambitions in the South— opened the dancing with a stylish quadrille. Then the company moved to the Gobelins Room, where, amidst the tapestries, their host had prepared a typical conceit: a life-size mechanical elephant studded with emeralds and rubies. ‘The Persian who conducted him struck upon a bell, and this was the signal for another change: A curtain flew up as if by magic, and opened to view a magnificently decorated theatre, where two ballets and a dramatical piece afforded entertainment to the spectators with their extraordinary excellence.’ One of the pieces performed was a version of Nicolas Chamfort’s
At the centre of the entertainment, both physically and rhetorically, was Catherine herself. ‘Before her,’ Derzhavin proclaimed in a celebrated description of the event, ‘everything becomes more alive, everything takes on greater radiance… Her bright face encourages smiles, dances, charades, games. This is the image of a mother, this is a monarch surrounded by glory, love, magnificence.’37 Intended for her sixty-second birthday on Easter Monday, the entertainment was delayed only by the scale of its host’s ambition. Once he had persuaded the