390 AGONIA
throne of All-the-Russias after the murder of her husband, Peter III, was the
daughter of a Prussian Field Marshal. She was as heavy handed with her allies
as with her countless lovers. Maria Theresa, 'widow Queen of Hungary and
Empress of Austria', was devout and anxious. When the First Partition was
eventually complete, Frederick remarked: 'Catherine and I are simply brigands;
but I wonder how the Queen-Empress managed to square her confessor!... Elle
pleurait quand elle prenait; et plus elle pleurait, plus elle prenait.' Finally, there
was Stanislaw-August Poniatowski, the polished, pliable, cosmopolitan nephew
of the Russian-backed Czartoryski faction. When Polish plenipotentiary in St.
Petersburg in 1755-8, he had been Catherine's most passionate lover - 'poor,
foolish Poniatowski', in Carlyle's unkind words, 'an empty, windy creature,
redolent of macassar'. He was the obvious instrument for displacing the som-
nolent Saxons from the throne of Poland. To everyone's surprise, he turned out
to be an ardent patriot, and a convinced reformer.^6
The prospect of a Royal election in Poland accelerated existing intrigues.
Both Frederick and Catherine had anticipated the event, the one in 1762, by co-
ordinating his plans with the ill-fated Peter III, the other in January 1763 by
imposing a new ruler by armed force on the Duchy of Courland. Now they con-
spired more closely. On 11 April 1764 a treaty was signed in which Frederick
succeeded in winning Catherine to the points agreed earlier with Peter: namely,
that both would support a 'Piast' candidate, for the Polish throne, and that both
would act together in defence of the 'Golden Freedom' and of the rights of reli-
gious dissidents. Frederick's main motive was to unseat the Saxons, his rivals in
Germany. Catherine's motive was to smooth the way for Poniatowski. At the
outset of this exercise, she was sufficiently ingenuous to issue a declaration to all
the courts in Europe, disclaiming the rumour that a Partition was being pre-
pared. 'If ever malice in concert with falsehood', she wrote indignantly, 'has
been able to contrive a completely baseless rumour, it is assuredly the one which
dares to imply that we have resolved to support a Piast for one purpose only,
namely that, with his help, we could then easily invade several provinces of the
Realm of Poland, dismember them, and appropriate them forthwith to
Ourselves and Our Empire.'^7 Seeing the anaesthetic effect of this disclaimer on
the European powers, the Prussian and Austrian Ministers in Warsaw made
similar statements of their own.
As it happened, Poniatowski's road was smooth enough. The Electoral Field
was lined with Russian soldiers and with retainers of the Czartoryski. On 6
September 1764, those nobles of the Republic who had not already left in dis-
gust acclaimed their new King with a unanimous shout. As the victor himself
remarked, it was the least troublesome election in the Republic's history.
Stanistaw-August's position was far from comfortable, however. In the first
four years of his reign, he only succeeded in offending all those who had
regarded him as the servant of their interest. He promoted the Whiggish Andrzej
Zamoyski as Crown Chancellor; but he soon fell out with his Czartoryski rela-
tions, who resented his plans for constitutional reform. In 1766, he successfully