The Prince's obsessional Anglomania now exploded into one of the most energetic recruitment campaigns ever designed to lure British experts to distant climes. Anglophilia ruled Europe.32 In Paris, men sported 'Windsor collars' and plain frockcoats, ladies drank Scotch whisky, took tea while betting on jockeys at the races and playing whist.[50] Potemkin did not care about the details but he knew that he wanted only Englishmen, not only to drive the looms of Krichev but also to run his botanical gardens, dairies, windmills and shipyards from the Crimea to Krichev. The Benthams placed advertisements in English newspapers. These advertisements unconsciously catch the capricious demands of Potemkin. 'The Prince wants to introduce the use of beer,' announced one. Or he 'means to have an elegant dairy' with 'the best of butter and as many kinds of cheese as possible'. Soon the advertisements had expanded to anyone British: 'Any clever people capable of introducing improvements in the Prince's Government might meet with good encouragement,' read one Bentham advertisement in Britain. Finally Potemkin just declared to Samuel that he wished to create a 'whole colony of English' with their own church and privileges.33 Potemkin's Anglophilia of course extended to his subordinates. Local landowners wanted their peasants trained with English smiths so Dashkov's serfs were sent over to learn English carpentry.34 After Potemkin's future Admiral Mordvinov married Henrietta Cobley, Nikolai Korsakov confessed to Samuel that he too 'was exceedingly desirous of an English wife'.35 Gardeners, sailors and artisans were not enough. The Russians wanted wives too.
Bentham's budget was limitless. When he bothered Serenissimus to fix some bounds on the credit, ' "What is necessary" was the only answer I could get.' Sutherland, Potemkin's banker, simply arranged the credit in London.36 Samuel Bentham immediately saw opportunities for him and his brother Jeremy to trade in goods between England and Russia and to be the middlemen of Potemkin's recruiting campaign. Within weeks of the first advertisements, Samuel was sending Jeremy shopping lists by the dozen: one, for example, demanded a millwright, a windmill expert, a cloth-weaver, barge-or boat- builders, shoemakers, bricklayers, sailors, housekeepers, 'two under-maids, one to understand cheese-making, the other, spinning and knitting.'37
Father and brother, Jeremiah and Jeremy Bentham, enthusiastically scoured
Britain. Old Jeremiah excelled himself - he called on Lord Howe at the Admiralty, then invited Under-Secretary of State Fraser and two recently returned Russian veterans, Sir James Harris and Reginald Pole Carew, to his house to discuss it. He even roped in the former Prime Minister Shelburne, now first Marquess of Lansdowne38 - 'all to procure shipwrights to be sent to my son's assistance'. The Marquess thought Potemkin was interesting but untrustworthy and his compliments about the Bentham brothers were distinctly back-handed: 'Both your sons are too liberal in their temper to adopt a mercantile spirit and your Sam's mind will be more occupied with fresh inventions than with calculating compound interest which the dullest men Russia can perhaps do as well ...', wrote Lansdowne from Weymouth on 21 August 1786. 'He is spending his best years in a changeable country and relying on men of changeable tempers.'39
The whole frantic project now assumes some of the absurdity of an eighteenth- century situation comedy in which a mixed group of philosophers, sailors, phoneys, hussies and workmen are dropped without a word of any foreign language into a multilingual Belorussian village owned by an often invisible but impulsive Serenissimus. Each of these characters turns out to have a completely different agenda to the one assigned by the Benthams.
Jeremy became possessed by a sort of Catherinian graphomania and kept writing to Samuel with interminable superfluous details on a parade of candidates for posts varying from chief of botanical gardens to milkmaid: 'With the respect to the Botanist, I conceive there cannot be the least difficulty in finding a man of science' and then debated the costs of 'The Dairy Lady'. Finally, Jeremy recruited a Logan Henderson to run the said botanical garden. Naturally such an adventurous expedition attracted a motley crew: Henderson for example was a Scotsman who claimed to be an 'expert' on gardens, steam-engines, sugar-planting and phosphorous fireworks. He signed up, promising also to deliver his two nieces, the Miss Kirtlands, as dairymaids. Dr John Debraw, the ex-apothecary of Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, and revered author of that significant work, Discoveries on the Sex of Bees (just published to mixed reviews), signed up as Potemkin's experimental chemist along with gardeners, millwrights, hecklers, mostly from Newcastle or Scotland: the first tranche reached Riga in June 1785.
Jeremy Bentham longed to join Samuel in Belorussia: he saw not only mercantile opportunities but peace in which to work on his treatises, and statesmen like Potemkin who could put his utilitarian ideas into practice. (His utilitarian theory measured the success of rulers by their ability to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number.) Potemkin's estates sounded like a philosopher's dream. Jeremy decided to bring out another group of his recruits. By the time he set off, Samuel was exasperated with his brother's ludicrous letters. Things really deteriorated when the philosopher began to write directly to the Prince himself suggesting quixotic ideas and telling him about gardeners and chemists: Potemkin's archives contain many of these unpublished works of Jeremy Bentham. They are priceless both as historic documents and as works of comic entertainment: the phrase 'mad professor' comes to mind.
Jeremy planned to buy a ship to bear the Prince's artisans, proposing to name it The Prince Potemkin. Then to business: 'Here, Monseigneur, is your Botanist. Here is your milkmaid. The milk is good in Cheshire, county of cheese ...'. Mademoiselle Kirtland, the milkmaid who was also an admirable chemist, stimulated this Benthamite exposition of feminism: 'Knowledgeable women so often lose the perfection of their own sex by acquiring those of ours ... That is scarcely true with Mademoiselle Kirtland.' The philosopher really wanted to sell Potemkin a 'machine de feu' or, even better, the latest steam-engine of Watts and Bolton, explaining that these were mechanisms 'which play by the force of water reduced to vapours in boiling. Of all the machines of modernity ... the easiest to construct is the machine de feu\ but the hardest and costliest was the Watts and Bolton. If the Prince did not want the steam-engine, how about setting up a printing press in the Crimea with a Mr Titler? What would this printing press publish? Jeremy suggested Project of the Body of the Laws by one J. Bentham. Jeremy apologetically signed himself, 'Here for the fourth time, Your Eternal Correspondent'.40
Samuel panicked. Serenissimus hated long letters and wanted results. Colonel Bentham feared his career was being ruined by the 'Eternal Correspondent' so he told off his bungling brother. The Prince would have found the details 'troublesome' and 'expected to hear no more until the people made their appearance'. Samuel was anxious because Potemkin had not replied: 'I fear the worst ... I hope to lay the blame on your over-zeal.'41 But the philosopher finally received a courteous letter from the Prince via the Russian Embassy in London. 'Sir,' the Prince wrote to Jeremy, 'I have to thank you for the care you have given yourself in the execution of the Commissions ... on my account. The time did not permit me to come to a resolution sooner ... but now I have to beg you to engage Mr Henderson to accompany the Persons ...'. Indeed, Jeremy Bentham's long but brilliant letters were exactly the sort of fascinating distraction that the Prince relished: he sent word he enjoyed them immensely and was having them translated into Russian.42