The accession of the facile and dissolute Frederick William to the Prussian throne in 1786, and the preoccupation of England and France in the Dutch crisis which followed, now left Joseph free to comply with the request of the Czarina that he would join her in the journey to the Crimea. After long hesitations he reluctantly gave his assent. His aged Chancellor, Prince Kaunitz, the champion of the connection with Russia and France, advised him to direct the imperial conferences towards the Bavarian Exchange and the dissolution of the Fürstenbund. Catharine willed otherwise. Under her influence the views of Joseph underwent a notable orientation. He came back to Vienna virtually pledged to a war for the partition of Turkey.
The change in Joseph’s policy was a tribute to the potency of the Czarina’s will. In her personality, as we have already seen, there were singular powers of fascination and command. Her vivacity and charm, varied by moods of petulance or fury, made up a character feminine in its impulsiveness and of masculine strength. The erstwhile Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, who by a series of audacious intrigues, and probably by the murder of her consort Peter III, had become the greatest autocrat of the century, still retained the intellectual freshness of youth. Her character and career present a series of bizarre contrasts. The poverty of her upbringing, the dissolute adventures of her early life, and the outrageous crimes of her womanhood would have utterly tainted a personality less remarkable and attractive. But in the loose society of St. Petersburg it had long been customary to gloze over lapses of virtue by easy descriptions, like that which the stately rhetoric of Burke applied to the chivalry of Versailles, that “vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.”
Certainly the intellectual keenness and social witcheries of the sorceress threw a charm over her rout. French and German philosophers praised her learning and wit, but innate shrewdness kept her from more than a passing dalliance with the unsettling theories which were to work havoc in France. Here as in her amours she observed some measure of worldly prudence; so that no favourite could count on a long reign of pillage. Thus, whether by whim or by design, she kept devotion and hope ever on the stretch; and one might almost apply to her, even at the age of fifty-nine, Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety; other women cloy
The appetites they feed; but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.
Like the “serpent of old Nile,” Catharine had many weaknesses; and they might have worked her ruin in the more strenuous age which followed; but fortune brought her to the front at a time when Frederick the Great desired the friendship of Russia, and when Hapsburg policy vacillated between the conservatism of Maria Theresa and the viewiness of her son Joseph. Thus the Czarina could work her will on the decaying Powers, Turkey and Poland, and raised the prestige of her Empire to unimagined heights.
A few shrewd observers were not dazzled by this splendour. Sir James Harris, who went as British envoy to Russia in 1778 to cultivate the friendship, and if possible the alliance, of Catharine, rightly probed the inner weakness of her position. It lay in the suddenness of her rise, the barbarousness of her people, the unblushing peculations of Ministers and officials, and the shiftiness of Muscovite policy. This last defect he traced to the peculiarities of the Empress herself, which he thus summed up: “She has a masculine force of mind, obstinacy in adhering to a plan, and intrepidity in the execution of it; but she wants the more manly virtues of deliberation, forbearance in prosperity, and accuracy of judgment, while she possesses in a high degree the weaknesses vulgarly attributed to her sex—love of flattery and its inseparable companion, vanity; [and] an inattention to unpleasant but salutary advice.” Six years later he sharpened his criticism and described her as led by her passions, not by reason and argument; her prejudices, though easily formed, were immovable; her good opinion was liable to constant fluctuations and whims; and her resolves might carry her to any lengths.[786] Such, too, was the opinion of the Comte de Ségur, the French ambassador, who wrote about the Turkish schemes renewed in 1787: “We are so accustomed to see Russia throw herself offhand into the most risky affairs, and Fortune has so persistently helped her, that there is no accounting for the actions of this Power on the rules of a scientific policy.”[787]
This peculiarity was far from repelling Joseph II. While pluming himself on the application of reason to politics, that crowned philosopher forgot to take counsel of her twin-sister, prudence. On his polyglot Empire, which already felt the first stirrings of the principle of nationality, he imposed centralizing laws, agrarian, social, and religious, which speedily aroused the hostility of those whom he meant to uplift. Along with all this he pushed on schemes which unsettled Germany, Belgium, and Poland; and now, as if all this were not enough, he was drawn into the vortex of the Turkish enterprises of Catharine.