The World

Manchus and Shivajis, Bourbons, Stuarts and Villiers

VELáZQUEZ, BERNINI AND ARTEMISIA

Long married to a French princess, Philip saw seven of their eight children die, followed by their mother. The monarchy had no heir. In 1649, Philip, now forty-four, married his pious fourteen-year-old niece, Mariana, who was only four years older than her stepdaughter María Teresa and heroically spent the next decade giving birth to babies who died. Yet the grinding mission to procreate went on as Velázquez recorded the development of the family.

Philip often spent hours in Velázquez’s studio watching him paint. Velázquez was fascinated by his baroque peers: Rubens befriended him and the two visited the Titians at the Escorial. But Velázquez longed to make an aesthetic pilgrimage to Rome, drawn there by the other baroque titan.

‘You are made for Rome,’ Pope Urban VIII told a young sculptor’s son, Gian-Lorenzo Bernini, ‘and Rome is made for you.’ Urban had been introduced to Bernini when he was still a cardinal. ‘This child,’ Paul V told him, ‘will be the Michelangelo of his age.’ Now Urban appointed him to reinvigorate Rome. ‘It’s a great fortune for you, O Cavaliere, to see Cardinal Maffeo Barberini made pope,’ said Urban, ‘but our fortune’s even greater to have Cavaliere Bernini alive in our pontificate.’ Bernini agreed.

As papal curator and chief architect of St Peter’s, Bernini delivered the flashy gigantism of the basilica’s colonnade and the auric gaudiness of the baldachin inside – and, for later popes, the fountain of the four rivers on his Piazza Navona. His faith was embellished with creamy sexuality: his St Teresa was sculpted writhing in ecstasy, but the swagger of his Rome concealed a sexual brutality. Bernini had an affair with a married woman, Costanza Bonucelli, whom he adored and sculpted, but he was so outraged when she slept with his wild brother Luigi (a monster who later anally raped a young studio assistant) that he ordered a servant to slash her face with a razor blade. The furious pope forced Bernini to marry a young Roman woman at once and the razor-slashing servant was imprisoned – but so was Costanza, the victim, for adultery.

Bernini’s crime was forgiven. His contemporary, Artemisia Gentileschi, also an artist’s child recognized as a prodigy, was another victim treated as a criminal. Her father Orazio was son and brother of painters who had painted for Henrietta Maria in London and many other royal clients. In 1611, Artemisia, seventeen years old and a virgin with curly auburn hair, full lips and a wide face, was painting with the artist Agostino Tassi, twenty years older, when he and a male helper raped her, aided by a female tenant.^* Tassi, who had been tried for incest and would later be tried for trying to kill a pregnant courtesan, promised marriage but then changed his mind, at which her father brought charges. Gentileschi had to relive the agony by giving testimony. Tassi, devious and violent, tried to suborn witnesses and taint her as a whore. Astonishingly, she was then taken to visit Tassi in prison and tortured with a thumbscrew to test her veracity. ‘È vero, è vero, è vero,’ she repeated. ‘It’s true!’

‘You’re lying in your throat,’ Tassi shouted. He was found guilty, though his sentence was later overturned.

Artemisia – passionate, independent, inconsistent – rebuilt her life. Soon after her ordeal, she painted Susanna and the Elders, showing a half-naked girl disdaining the ogling elder men; her later works Judith and Holofernes and Salomé with the Head of John the Baptist depict women decapitating men. They were typical subjects for their time, but all gleam with the glee of redemptive vengeance. Moving to Florence, where the Medici and the poet Michelangelo Buonarroti (the artist’s great-nephew) became her patrons, Gentileschi married a Florentine painter with whom she had children – but he also managed her business and colluded in her romance with the aristocratic Francesco Maringhi. Both lover and patron, Maringhi was the love of her life. Now in her fifties, this donna forte grew in confidence: ‘I will show Your Illustrious Lordship,’ she wrote to her Neapolitan patron Antonio Ruffo, ‘what a woman can do,’ adding, ‘You will find the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman.’ In 1649, when Philip allowed Velázquez to go to Italy for a second visit, to buy and study art, both Bernini and Gentileschi were in their prime – and he met and painted the new pope, Innocent X.^* Velázquez imbibed the sensuality of Italy, leaving a child behind. In Italy or soon afterwards, the Habsburg courtier painted Venus and Cupid, his back view of a lushly beautiful woman who admires herself in a mirror that reflects her face but should reflect the view between her legs.

Velázquez returned to a crestfallen Philip IV, who promoted him to director of palace spectacles, in which role he redesigned the pantheon of Habsburg coffins at El Escorial^* while still painting the now sad, saggy face of the Planet King until he banned more portraits. When Queen Mariana delivered a daughter, Margarita, Velázquez recorded the development of this very Habsburgian child whom Philip called ‘my joy’. Philip gave him the Main Room of his dead heir’s apartments in the Alcázar, where he spent much time and which inspired his Las Meninas – the Ladies-in-Waiting – painted around 1656. At its centre is the flaxen-haired, cheerful Margarita herself, joined by two meninas, three courtiers, her dog, two female dwarves, a self-portrait of the artist – and Philip and Mariana watching: the realities and deceptions of court alongside universal themes of family.

Now Velázquez, finally knighted by the king, produced a different sort of masterpiece. On 7 June 1660, at the Isle of Pheasants on the French border, he stage-managed a marriage – the handover of Philip’s daughter María Teresa to the young French king who would dominate Europe for the next fifty years.

ANNE AND MAZARIN

Louis XIV, aged twenty, could not wait to consummate his marriage,^* but he had not wanted to marry at all. He had been tutored in statesmanship and intrigue by his glamorous Habsburg mother Anne and Julio Mazarini, an Italian priest transformed into a professional Frenchman as Cardinal Jules Mazarin.

It was Mazarin who had negotiated the Habsburg marriage. He had been selected and trained by Louis XIII’s minister Cardinal Richelieu, whose far-sighted finesse he shared, to which he added an Italianate flamboyance and shameless venality all his own. On his deathbed Louis XIII had appointed Anne his son’s regent, Mazarin his godfather.

They were the most important people in Louis’s life, and they were almost certainly lovers. In their surviving letters, peppered with secret signs and codes that semaphored love and sex, Mazarin reflects, ‘Never has there been a friendship approaching what I have for you,’ and ‘I am till the last breath ***,’ while the queen, admitting she could not put much in writing, proclaimed, ‘I will always be as I ought to be, whatever happens … a million times till the last breath.’ Their codename for the little king was the Confidant. Unusually for a royal family, Louis was extremely close to his mother, and to her lover, whom he adored like a father. Royalty can never trust their own families; they have to make their own.

Yet as the war against the Habsburgs bled the state, France was hit by five years of turbulence – La Fronde, named after the slings used by the mobs to smash the windows of their enemies – as bad harvests, exorbitant taxes and royal corruption unleashed Bourbon princes, overmighty grandees, Parisian mobs, unpaid soldiers and parlements (the ancient law courts which also registered royal edicts). At its worst, mobs terrified the boy-king who along with his mother and Mazarin was forced to flee Paris. That the Fronde coincided with the execution of Charles I and the enthronement of Cromwell only heightened that terror. The humiliations never left Louis. After Mazarin had fled into temporary exile (accompanied by his most trusted henchman, d’Artagnan), mother and son returned. But when the danger had passed and peace had been signed with Spain, the threesome were reunited.

Louis’s first loves were Mazarin’s nieces (known as the Mazarinettes), Olympe and Marie Mancini, but this rapidly became a problem. His libido was as powerful as his appetite for la gloire: in his late teens, his bouts of frottage with Marie Mancini so chafed his genitals that ‘essence of ant’ had to be applied.

When Anne and Mazarin started to negotiate his Spanish marriage,^* Louis refused to contemplate it, determined to marry Marie Mancini. ‘Remember I beg you what I had the honour to tell you several times when you asked what you needed to be a great king,’ wrote Mazarin to Louis. ‘It was this: not to be dominated by any passion.’ When Louis sent Marie a puppy with a collar engraved ‘I belong to Marie Mancini’, Mazarin was beside himself. Finally Louis gave her up. ‘You are king,’ she said: ‘you cry and I leave.’ Nine months after his marriage to his cousin María Teresa, a son, the dauphin, was born – but their consanguinity explains why, of their six children, only the first survived beyond the age of fifteen.

In March 1661, Mazarin, fifty-eight, was dying. Louis was at the bedside, tearfully bringing water and medicines. He sobbed so loudly he was asked to leave the chamber. The cardinal left France as the greatest state in Europe – an absolutist monarchy of nineteen million people (with England an unstable mixed monarchy of four million), but his death was, Louis wrote to Philip IV, ‘one of the greatest afflictions I could feel’. Soon afterwards, Louis’s mother fell ill with gangrene, abscesses and ulcers. Louis slept at the foot of her bed, and, as he watched her dying, murmured, ‘Look how beautiful she is, I’ve never seen her look so beautiful.’

‘Do what I told you,’ Anne whispered as she died.

‘What I’ve suffered in losing the queen, madame my mother,’ confided Louis, ‘surpasses anything you can imagine.’

Now Louis declared, ‘I am determined henceforth to govern the state by myself,’^* with a mission to win France world dominion in place of his Habsburg cousins. While he enjoyed a string of love affairs (ignored by Queen María Theresa, who just said, ‘I’m not a dupe as they imagine, but I’m prudent, I see things clearly’), Louis devised a new French court. He improved the Louvre (advised by Bernini, who arrived from Rome but hated Paris), but then in 1665 commissioned a new palace at Versailles, where he staged elaborate rituals around his own sacred person to distract his nobles from power and Paris.^*

Louis knew he was giving ‘an infinite value’ to something in itself worth nothing. The court was a multipurpose institution, family hive, power brokerage, job centre, escort agency, marriage market, art bazaar and theatre, served by 10,000 servants. ‘Sit down when you can; piss when you can,’ joked courtiers, ‘ask for any job you can!’ A lack of latrines meant courtiers urinated in the stairwells. When a treasurer was dying, Louis complained, ‘The man’s not dead and sixteen people have asked for his job.’ His usual answer was ‘Je verrai’ – I’ll see.

He had a sense of humour, joking to his ailing artist Le Brun, ‘Don’t die, Le Brun, just to raise the prices of your pictures.’ He understood the theatre of royalty: ‘Kings should satisfy the public.’ Until he was thirty he himself acted and danced on stage – he loved dancing; and it was Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, a well-off courtier known to his family as Le Nez for his proboscis and to his audiences as Molière, who wrote many of the plays, his mission being ‘to bring laughter to the monarch who makes all Europe tremble’. But behind the pleasure and gossip was a dark struggle for one man’s favour.

SEX, POISON AND WAR AT THE COURT OF THE SUN KING

Louis was a promiscuous serial monogamist, turning the position of maîtresse en titre into a semi-official job. The first was the ambitious, voracious, blue-eyed, blonde and witty Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, born into the grandest nobility and married to the marquis de Montespan. When both the queen and Louis’s existing mistress were pregnant, they unwisely asked Montespan to entertain the highly sexed king, who fell in love with her. For a while he kept both mistresses in adjoining apartments, even as he regularly seduced just about any girls who crossed his path, including servants of all three women. Montespan ruled the court and produced seven royal children. But she was grasping and petulant: her nickname was Quanto – how much? When she herself was supplanted by the most unlikely rival, she lost all perspective.

Montespan chose a safe option as governess for her children: the thirty-nine-year-old Françoise d’Aubigné. Dark-eyed, pious, intelligent, childless, she was the daughter of a murderer, widow of a drunken poet. But to everyone’s surprise, after a run of younger girls, Louis started to fall in love with her, raising her to marquise de Maintenon; and later, in 1683, after the death of the queen, he married her. Maintenon spoke to him plainly, loathed court, believed the minds of men and women were equal and was sceptical of patriarchy. ‘Men are unbearable when you see them at close quarters,’ she said. Instead she ran a school where girls were taught history and mathematics, and soon she herself was powerful, though she claimed she was ‘nothing’. Louis adored her: ‘I always cherish you and respect you to an extent I can’t express,’ he wrote, ‘and indeed whatever affection you have for me, I have even more for you, being totally yours with all my heart.’ Although she was seconde dame d’atours to the dauphine, she now dominated the court.

Her rise was unbearable for the now obese Madame de Montespan, who consulted denizens of the twilight zone where high society and underworld overlap: La Voisin, sorceress, abortionist and purveyor of poisons and love potions, and La Bosse, who used the blood of killed or stillborn babies in black rituals. These harridans were regularly employed by courtiers and fallen mistresses. Montespan’s maid Claude des Oeillets, whom Louis had slept with, consulted La Voisin, while another ex-mistress, Mazarin’s niece Olympe de Soissons, had resorted to Voisin when Louis moved on. Voisin was said to have jinxed Louis’s food by sprinkling it with baby’s blood. The hex came to light during the murder trial of an aristocrat. When the king was informed, he ordered an investigation that, exploited by politicians and garnished with denunciations, exposed witchcraft,^* poisoning and infanticide: 194 people were arrested and tortured. Voisin and thirty-five others were burned at the stake, tortured to death or broken on the wheel. But, as the police chief put it, the real culprits were too important to fall: ‘The enormity of their crimes proved their safeguard.’ Louis called a halt, and Montespan retired to a convent.

The other way to distract the nobility was war and empire. Louis regarded la gloire as the pastime and duty of kings, his huge population allowing him for fifty years to field and fit out bigger armies than anyone else. He drilled his troops for hours while encouraging his nobles to dress up as if battle was a party. His splendidly attired killer dandies were copied by aristocrats across Europe, though the bright coats worn by officers and soldiers helped identify them in battlefields obscured by the smoke of black gunpowder. Louis systematically embarked on expansion: in 1667, he invaded and seized Spain’s Netherlands and Franche-Comté, then swallowed Luxembourg. But in 1672 he came up against the ‘ingratitude, ignorance and insupportable vanity’ of the tiny Dutch republic – its population just 1.5 million to Louis’s twenty – now directed by the most brilliant of the dynasts. This was Johan de Witt, imperial mastermind and mathematical scholar – he used survival rates from the first studies of the causes of death to calculate life insurance rates and also devised the financial annuity – who had ruled, informally, for twenty successful years.

Slim, dark, handsome and intense, de Witt was the protégé of Cornelis de Graeff, long-serving regent of Amsterdam and president of the VOC, whose niece Wendela Bicker he married, placing him at the fulcrum of the patrician dynasties that had, through the East and West Indies companies, promoted the global Dutch offensive. In 1650 William, prince of Orange, died young – a son, the William who would rule England, only being born eight days after his death. De Graeff and de Witt, then aged twenty-four, saw the chance to dispense with Orange stadtholders, declaring the prince a Child of State (a ward of the government), his education vigilantly managed by the regenten.

Three years later, de Graeff helped raise de Witt to raadpensionaris – grand pensionary of Holland, effectively premier. De Witt waged war against England so implacably that it drove its new king Charles II into the arms of Louis, with catastrophic consequences.

THE MERRIE BROTHERS AND THE AFRICA COMPANY

On 14 May 1660, when the admiral Montagu arrived in The Hague with the tranche of cash granted by Parliament for Charles II, the king, dressed shabbily, was so excited at the sight of money he called in his brother, James, duke of York, just to gaze at it in amazement. The brothers were determined to enjoy the throne and, by any means possible in an England bedevilled by religious rancour and political instability, to preserve the monarchy for which their father had died.

Conveyed in Montagu’s flagship, Charles arrived in Dover accompanied by a mix of royalists – led by James, ex-Cromwellians^* and a waspish clergyman, Gilbert Burnet, who noted that the king ‘has a very ill opinion of men and women, and so is infinitely distrustful; he thinks the world is governed wholly by [self-]interest’. But he admired his ‘strange command of himself: he can pass from business to pleasure, and from pleasure to business, in so easy a manner that all things seem alike to him’.

In exile, pleasure-seeking had been the Stuarts’ consolation, in power their revenge. In twelve penurious years, Charles had indulged in just two recorded mistresses, complaining that the ‘blind harpers [gossips] have done me too much honour assigning me so many fair ladies as if I were able to satisfy the half’. He had fallen in love with Lucy Walter, who had given birth to a son he doted on: the duke of Monmouth. Now he would make up for those dark years.

There was no purge and many prizes, but the dizzy merriness of Charles’s court glossed over a precarious and darkling tension: this England was paranoic, fissiparous and vicious. Regicides were hanged and quartered; the great Oliver was exhumed, his head displayed.

Tall, swarthy, playful, insouciant and Italianate (via his Medici grandmother) in looks and temperament, Charles was a maestro of secret manoeuvrings, but no orator – ‘he speaks the worst ever I heard a man’, noted Pepys. ‘All I observed is the silliness of the king, playing with his dog or his codpiece.’ As flawed as he was debonair, Charles avoided decisions whenever possible – not always a bad habit in politics. ‘The king,’ wrote Pepys, ‘do mind nothing but pleasures and hates the very sight or thoughts of business.’ Charles made no apology. ‘Appetites are free,’ he said, ‘and Almighty God will never damn a man for allowing himself a little pleasure.’ In fact his appetites were far from free, and he still depended on Parliament for money.

An heir was essential: a Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza, brought the dowry of Bombay and Tangier, but she was unable to have children, awkward when her husband could not stop fathering them. His heir remained his brother, James, duke of York, which soon became a problem that encapsulated and exacerbated the English crisis.

The ‘Merrie brothers’ were very different: Charles, a wavering Protestant, was courageous but supple, subtle and patient; James, who converted to Catholicism in 1669, was darkly sturdy, brainlessly brave and obstinate. He shared the king’s sexual enthusiasm but not his taste: Charles laughed that James’s ‘ugly wenches’ were so plain they must be a penance ordered by his confessor.^* While they were in exile, James had seduced Anne, daughter of his brother’s adviser, Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon and Lord Chancellor, promising her marriage if she succumbed. Honouring his word, he married her and, after six of their children had died, she gave birth to two daughters, Mary and Anne, both raised as Protestants, both future queens. James was lord high admiral and so worked closely with Pepys, who praised his modesty and industry, and observed how affectionate he was with his daughters – ‘like an ordinary private father’ – though he was also a lothario who ‘did eye my wife mightily’.

The brothers immediately unleashed England’s mercantile spirit to compete globally with the paramount trading power, de Witt’s Holland. Charles followed Oliver in passing Navigation Acts designed to promote trade in African slaves and Indian luxuries. Hearing about Gambia’s ‘mountain of gold’, Charles and James founded the Company of Royal Adventurers, rechartered as the Royal Africa Company (RAC) in 1672, which traded 16,000 Africans in seven years, founded forts along the coast and seized the Dutch slave castle Cape Coast, built by the Swedes. James was its governor, its shareholders ranging from Charles and Prince Rupert to the philosopher John Locke (whose ancestor John Lok had been a west African pioneer), Pepys and a merchant from Bristol named Edward Colston, later its deputy governor. In Africa, nine out of ten of its English representatives died of disease, and the RAC like other European slave traders were never powerful enough to defeat the African leaders who often challenged them. Nonetheless, the British share in the trade rose in the first ten years from 33 per cent to 74. Between 1662 and 1731, the Company transported approximately 212,000 slaves, of whom 44,000 died en route during over 500 voyages. Most were sold to the Caribbean.

Clashes with the Dutch outraged the ‘mad for war’ public. ‘All the world rides us,’ said James to Pepys, ‘and I think we shall never ride anybody.’ Actually England’s time was coming. In 1665, the two Protestant powers went to war with James commanding the fleet, fitted out by Pepys. Off Lowestoft, James defeated the Dutch, though he was spattered with brains when the head of a nearby officer was pulped; and the English took Trinidad and New Amsterdam, which Charles renamed New York, completing the contiguous coastline of English colonies from New England to another newly created estate, the Carolinas, named after Charles himself.^*

De Witt and the Dutch believed that God would punish English depravity. Sure enough, in 1665, a wave of plague sent the country into a lockdown: thousands left London; universities closed. Even as 7,000 Londoners died a week, Pepys was on a professional and sexual roll – ‘I’ve never lived so merrily’ – while one Oxford student who had no interest in girls or parties benefited from being locked down for two years at his parents’ Lincolnshire home: Isaac Newton experimented on himself. ‘I took a bodkin [needle] and put it betwixt my eye and bone as near to the backside of my eye as I could,’ he wrote, drawing his eyeball. It was a revelatory moment: Newton, experimenting in gravity and mathematics, was one of the new European polymaths who believed above all else that science demanded proof – even if it meant a bodkin alongside his own eyeball.

The epidemic was followed by a fire that demolished much of London; it was Pepys who rushed to warn the king at Whitehall and advised him to blow up houses to stop its spread.^* Then de Witt orchestrated a killer blow. He visited the Dutch fleet and hanged three captains as encouragement, then, placing his brother Cornelis de Witt on board, he unleashed his plan. On 19 June 1667, the Dutch broke into the Medway and raided the naval base at Chatham, burning or capturing fourteen ships-of-the-line as London descended into panic. ‘The whole kingdom is undone,’ thought Pepys, who now found himself missing Cromwell: ‘strange how … everybody doth nowadays reflect upon Oliver and commend him’. Charles mocked ‘those pure angelical times’, sacrificed his chancellor Clarendon and sued for peace, marrying James’s daughter Mary to the young William of Orange.

Charles turned to his best friend in the world to deliver vengeance against the Dutch and money to stave off Parliament: his twenty-six-year-old sister, Henrietta.

MINETTE, BARBARA AND THE EATING OF DE WITT

The princess, whom Charles called Minette, was married to Louis XIV’s vicious brother, Philippe d’Orléans, known as Monsieur. Clever, cultured and passionate, she had charmed Louis and endured the bullying of Monsieur and his envious male lovers. Charles adored Minette and missed her a great deal: ‘I’m sure I’ll be very impatient till I have the happiness to see my chere Minette againe.’ And nothing pleased her like pleasing Charles. ‘Everyone has his private fancy, and mine is to be very much alive to all that concerns you!’ she wrote, adding, ‘There’s no one who loves you as well as I do.’ Now she proved it by shuttling between the kings, negotiating a secret treaty under which Louis XIV promised payments that offered Charles independence from Parliament in return for Charles’s secret promise to convert to Catholicism – none of which was contained in the associated public treaty. Minette’s performance showed how dynasty could empower women. But on her return to France she died in agony of a punctured ulcer. ‘Monsieur’s a villain!’ shouted a heartbroken Charles, sure Minette had been poisoned.

Now committed to a Catholic alliance, backed by a ‘cabal’ of ministers^* led by George, duke of Buckingham, slippery, graceful and vicious, who had negotiated the public treaty with Louis, Charles was already in bed with the Catholics.

Charles’s favourite for over a decade was the exuberant Barbara Villiers, great-niece of the first Buckingham, a curvaceous, tempestuous libertine, promoted to countess of Castlemaine^* and giving birth to five children, all ennobled. But she was brazenly Catholic.

While the king encouraged tolerance of Catholics, Parliament banned Catholics from office. Buckingham lost power when Charles’s secret treaty was in part exposed. It suited Charles, who had moved on to younger mistresses, telling Barbara he ‘cared not whom she loved’. She took new lovers, from acrobats to a young Guardsman called John Churchill, whose father was Winston Churchill, a royalist officer, and whose mother was another great-niece of Buckingham. Churchill’s ‘figure was beautiful, his manner irresistible, either by man or woman’; the phrase ‘as slender as Churchill’ became a court saying. His sister Arabella fell off her horse while out hunting with the duke of York, revealing her fine legs and more. She became James’s mistress.

Barbara Villiers used Churchill to discredit a rival royal mistress; he claimed he had had to jump out of the window without his trousers when the king arrived. Charles confined him to barracks, and Barbara compensated him with an annuity. Such was the start of the career of the future duke of Marlborough. Soon afterwards, Churchill married the beautiful, masterful Sarah Jennings. At court he became friends with the courtier Sidney Godolphin, whom the king praised as ‘never in the way, and never out of the way’; Sarah befriended the duke of York’s daughter, Princess Anne. The quartet who would one day rule Britain became inseparable.

In 1672, Louis and Charles went to war against de Witt’s Holland. French armies swept into Holland and the Dutch collapsed, only rescuing their country by flooding it. The Dutch rightly called this Rampjaar – their disaster year – and never recovered their global pre-eminence.

The Orangeists furiously blamed de Witt, who was wounded in an assassination attempt and then forced to resign. All eyes turned to the prince of Orange, the twenty-two-year-old William, who was appointed stadtholder and captain-general and desperately tried to hold back the French. ‘My country’s indeed in danger,’ he said, ‘but there’s one way to never see it lost and that’s to die in the last ditch.’ Flinty, angular and tough, William had known little love, his father dead before he was born, his mother tormented by the killing of her father Charles I, and his frosty relationship with de Witt scarcely alleviated by games of tennis. He saw his chance. Orangeite militiamen, organized by or on behalf of William, seized and shot de Witt and his brother before handing them over to a mob that eviscerated and skinned them, hung them naked, selling ears, fingers and other ‘scraps’ in the streets and then cooking and eating their livers – an astonishing cannibalistic feast in Europe’s most sophisticated city. Yet the gruesome ritual had a logic: Witt had ‘disembodied’ the Dutch state; now the Dutch disembodied him.

Louis seemed unstoppable, next annexing Strasburg and Alsace. Hailed as the Sun King, spoiled by fortune, touched with the self-righteous narcissism that is the fate of those eternally in power, he believed he was master of Europe. French glamour concealed cold ambition. He had the iron constitution necessary for interminable war, ceremony and intrigue: when later he endured an excruciating six-hour operation to cut out an anal fistula without anaesthetic, he never cried out except to say ‘Mon Dieu’ twice.^* But now he was going to need his nerve: as the Oranges and Habsburgs plotted against him, he was laying the foundations for a worldwide French empire to challenge England in America and India.

HIGH QING, GREAT MUGHAL AND CHHATRAPATI

In 1664, Louis founded matching Compagnies Françaises des Indes Occidentales and Orientales to promote, by trade and sword, French empire – though he was far behind his Portuguese, Dutch and English rivals. In 1682, in ‘our territory of New France’, his explorer sieur de La Salle, aided by Native American allies, built forts around the Great Lakes, adding to France’s earlier settlements in Quebec, and claimed the entire Mississippi valley which he called Louisiana. Yet the French colonists were few. Starting in 1663, Louis sent out over 800 women – les filles du roi – to marry settlers.

Louis’s conquistadors were fascinated by the strange liberty of Native Americans, who disdained the Europeans as cruel, money-crazed, status-obsessed slaves to kings and aristocrats. ‘They imagine,’ wrote a French Jesuit, ‘they ought by right of birth to enjoy the liberty of wild-ass colts rendering homage to no one.’ Another observed, ‘There’s no people on earth freer than them,’ noting, ‘Fathers here have no control over their children.’ Ruled by assemblies in which women as well as men could speak and argue, a sort of democracy with elements of matriarchy, they elected rulers only to command wars or special hunts.

In 1691, an ambassador of the Wendat confederacy (Ontario, Canada) was received by Louis, but was unimpressed by the Sun King. The envoy’s identity is still debated but he was probably Kandiaronk, elected ‘speaker’ of the Wendat council, an eloquent and gifted Thuron soldier-politician who had expertly played the French against the rival Iroquois. Debating the merits of French versus Iroquois society with one of Louis’s officers, Louis-Armand, baron de Lahontan, Kandiaronk mocked ‘the faults and disorders they observed in our towns as caused by money’. The natives ‘laugh at the difference of ranks … they brand us slaves … alleging we degrade ourselves subjecting ourselves to one man … They say the name of savages which we call them would fit ourselves better.’ The Native American was touching on the essence of western freedom: much of it was – and is – theoretical since most people were actually bound by their place in society. In Kandiaronk’s society, people often defied their lords and left to join another tribe. He wondered why anyone would allow those with money to establish authority over them and regarded the Jesus story (‘the life and death of the son of the Great Spirit’) as preposterous – though he pragmatically converted later. ‘To imagine one can live in a country of money,’ he said, ‘and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake.’ In 1703, when Lahontan published his conversation with Kandiaronk, entitled Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who has Travelled, it inspired a new generation to question European authority and the origins of civilization.

In the Caribbean, Louis competed in sugar and slaves with the Spanish and English: he took over Saint-Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe where, along with Louisiana, the sugar plantations were worked by 2,000 new slaves supplied annually by his Compagnie de Guinée et du Sénégale (in which the French king was a shareholder) from Africa.^* By the time of Louis’s death there were 77,000 slaves in French America. But he also followed the English and Dutch eastwards, pursuing the conversion and annexation of Ayutthaya – Thailand^* – and backing his Compagnie des Indes Orientales that claimed Isle de France (Mauritius) and Île Bourbon (Reunion), where new sugar plantations were now worked by slaves transported from east Africa. In 1674, Louis’s envoys approached Emperor Alamgir for Indian concessions to compete against the English, just as his Hindu nemesis – Shivaji – created his own kingdom.

In June 1674, at his mountain fortress Raigad, the great Shivaji was crowned chhatrapati of Maratha Swaraj, a hugely symbolic act that sent shockwaves across India – the creation of a new language of Hindu sovereignty that made no mention of the Muslim Mughals. This outraged Alamgir, who denounced the ‘mountain rat’.^* But he failed to defeat the chhatrapati. In 1680, when Shivaji died of dysentery, his eldest wife committed sati on his funeral pyre and his son Sambhaji emerged as chhatrapati. Sambhaji knew the Mughals well, helping Alamgir’s son Akbar in a rebellion that ended with the prince’s death. Alamgir planned a terrible death for the Hindu who had meddled with his family.

In 1684, Alamgir himself tried to take the Maratha capital, Raigad Fort, but failed as Sambhaji ranged up the west coast, attacking Alamgir’s Portuguese allies in Goa. But finally he overreached: in February 1689, Alamgir captured Sambhaji himself. His revenge was terrible: at Bahadurgad, Sambhaji was brought before Alamgir and forced to run the gauntlet through Mughal soldiers, before being ordered to embrace Islam. When he refused, his tongue was sliced and he was asked again. ‘Not even if the emperor pimped me his daughter!’ he wrote. Alamgir was outraged. Sambhaji was tortured for two weeks with metal claws that gouged out his eyes, cut out his tongue, pulled out his nails, then flayed him alive and then quartered him with the claws in mouth and fundament, the body parts fed to dogs. Raigad fell to Alamgir, who relentlessly pursued Rajaram, the new chhatrapati – but he could not quite destroy the dynasty.

Alamgir granted the French a factory in Surat, followed by Pondicherry on the east coast; the latter became the French headquarters (and remained French until 1954). But Louis was most fascinated with the new Qing emperor of China, to whom in 1687 he sent two delegations of Jesuit scholars. In 1669, at the height of Louis’s successes, the Kangxi Emperor started his personal rule: the two had much in common.

At seven, the Kangxi Emperor, great-grandson of the Manchu conqueror Nurhaci, was chosen by his grandmother, Xiaozhuang, widow of the first Manchu emperor, who loved him and whom he loved back. After seven years dominated by the regent Oboi, the grandmother and grandson together plotted his arrest and downfall.

Athletic, pitted with smallpox,^* his eyes bright and intelligent, Kangxi embraced absolute power, possessing the three necessities of politics – the acumen, the vision and the resources. As a Manchu, he had been trained from childhood in archery and riding, and he spent three months a year hunting. ‘When Manchus go hunting in the north,’ he said, ‘the riders mass like storm clouds, the horse archers are as one with horses, they fly together!’ But as a Chinese prince he was also trained in Confucian ethics. The role of an emperor, he said, was simply ‘giving life to people and killing people’.

Ruler of over 150 million, Kangxi was a workaholic, rising at dawn to pore over reports, 16,000 of which survive, all marked in his red ink. He studied cases carefully. ‘Errors are inexcusable in matters of life and death,’ he reflected. ‘I got into the habit of reading the lists, checking name and registration of each man sentenced to death … then I’d go through the list with the Grand Secretaries and decide who to spare.’^* Kangxi waged war on a continental scale, first against overmighty Manchu generals, then against Oirats (western Mongols) in today’s Mongolia and Tibet, but he regarded independent Taiwan, ruled by the pirate king Koxinga, as a special insult to Chinese grandeur.^* Koxinga’s son and grandson defeated a joint Dutch–Manchu fleet and thrived, but finally off Penghu, in 1683, Kangxi defeated the Koxingan fleet and stormed Taiwan.

Kangxi upgraded the Grand Canal and improved communications, all the more important given that the population was surging thanks to new strains of rice combined with American crops – sweet potatoes and maize – leading to bigger cities. Chinese merchants exported tea, porcelain and silk and were paid in American silver: Kangxi’s income soared – but he was careful to limit the wealth of merchants and the access of foreigners. Kangxi’s revenues were so large that he was able to cut some taxes, but his multi-fronted wars absorbed much of his income.

His sense of Manchu superiority was tempered by his curiosity about European innovation: he took lessons from Louis’s Jesuit priests on science, mathematics, astronomy and music, and studied the harpsichord. Yet, while Louis was delighted to help a non-Christian potentate, when the Ottomans menaced the heart of Christendom, he refused to help his Habsburg rivals.

Vienna was about to fall.

* ‘He threw me on to the edge of the bed,’ she recalled, ‘pushing me with a hand on my breast, and he put a knee between my thighs to prevent me from closing them. Lifting my clothes, he placed a hand with a handkerchief on my mouth to keep me from screaming. I scratched his face and pulled his hair and, before he penetrated me again, I grasped his penis so tight that I even removed a piece of flesh.’ Afterwards she grabbed a knife and shouted, ‘I want to kill you because you have shamed me!’ ‘Here I am,’ sneered Tassi. She threw the knife but it missed.

* Velázquez was accompanied by a slave, Juan de Pareja, son of an African mother and Spanish father, his studio assistant, who himself showed talent and became a painter in his own right (his Calling of St Matthew is in the Prado). In Italy, Velázquez manumitted Juan and painted him.

* During the works, Philip enjoyed a macabre audience with the family. ‘I saw the body of Emperor Charles V,’ he wrote, ‘and although he died 96 years ago, his body was whole. In this it can be seen that Our Lord has repaid all that he did in defence of religion.’

* The ailing Philip IV, lacking a male heir, returned to Madrid with Velázquez, who soon after sickened with fever and died. ‘I am crushed,’ said Philip.

* Mazarin was a master of realpolitik – before the word was coined. Still fighting the Habsburgs, he allied with the republican regicide Cromwell against the Spanish, whom they defeated at the battle of the Dunes. And when Oliver died, it was Mazarin who offered to invade England to support Protector Dick. In the twentieth century, Mazarin was the hero of President François Mitterrand, who named his illegitimate daughter Mazarine.

* Louis first had to solve a problem inherited from Mazarin: his superintendant, Nicolas Fouquet, who bought the title ‘Viceroy of the Americas’ as he planned the French takeover of the New World, lived so regally that he overshadowed the king. Louis learned from spies that Fouquet planned to rule, ‘making himself sovereign arbiter of state’. Louis decided to destroy him. Moving fast and secretly, he turned to a trusted retainer – d’Artagnan. As a young man, Charles de Batz, later comte d’Artagnan, had joined the Mousquetaires du Roi – the royal bodyguard – and served Mazarin as bodyguard and spy. Louis always knew he could trust d’Artagnan. Now he ordered the fifty-year-old d’Artagnan to arrest Fouquet. Fouquet, sentenced to solitary confinement for thirteen years, was joined by a man in an iron mask whose identity was never revealed but was most likely Eustache d’Auger, the valet of Mazarin’s treasurer who knew the details of the cardinal’s colossal corruption. The story contains the germ of two Alexandre Dumas novels.

* His daily lever and coucher were minutely choreographed. His awakening, attended by over a hundred people, started with valets shaving and dressing him, then came the grandes entrées of the premiers gentilshommes. As he washed his hands and prayed, his favourites and illegitimate children entered. His shirt and jacket were presented to him by the premiers gentilshommes, and the third level, the entrées de la chambre, the bishops, marshals and ambassadors, were allowed in. Finally, wig in place, he ate a quick breakfast; then, gloves and cane in hand, he started his day. At 10 p.m., he feasted in public au grand couvert, after which his undressing took an hour and a half, with the top honour going to those who handed him his candle and accompanied him to the commode where special favourites – the brevets d’affaires – chatted to a king in motion on his throne.

* L’Affaire des Poisons took place twelve years before the Salem witch hysteria in Massachusetts.

* Pepys started his famous diary on 1 January 1660 in time to recount the Restoration – he sailed back to England with the king – with an irrepressible joie de vivre that at least partly derived from his survival of a lithotomy procedure or ‘cutting for the stone’. He celebrated the date annually with a feast for the rest of his life. The Cromwellians who delivered the army and navy, Monck and Montagu, were made duke of Albermarle and earl of Sandwich, becoming two of the king’s top courtiers: young Pepys rose with them. The king appointed him clerk of the acts at the Navy Board.

* James’s favourite, the acute Catherine Sedley, was under no illusions about the duke’s stupidity nor her own looks. ‘It can’t be my beauty for he must see I have none,’ she joked. ‘And it can’t be my wit, for he has not enough to know that I have any.’ Her wit remained sharp. Years later, at the court of George I, she bumped into the mistresses of Charles II (duchess of Portsmouth) and William III (Elizabeth Villiers, countess of Orkney). ‘God!’ she laughed. ‘Who would have thought that we three whores should meet here?’

* Charles carved out territory for William Penn, the Quaker son of that pragmatic Admiral Penn who had commanded the Caribbean expedition for Cromwell and had then managed to accompany Charles II back to London, lending him much-needed funds. Rather than pay them back, Charles granted Penn a vast stretch of north America, enabling Penn to found Pennsylvania as his ‘Holy Experiment’ where he drafted a tolerant constitution and initially negotiated gentle relations with the Lenape Native Americans. But the unclear borders brought him into conflict with the royalist Catholic family of the second Lord Baltimore, proprietor of Maryland. Both families remained the proprietors until the American revolution. But their border tensions led to years of antagonism and even to a short Baltimore–Penn war. Starting in 1730 in the Conejohela Valley with the forward actions of Colonel Thomas Cresap, an Indian-killing agent of the fifth Lord Baltimore, against Quaker settlers loyal to the Penns, Cresap’s War culminated in a mobilization of Maryland and Pennsylvanian militias. It was ended by the mediation of George II, who ordered Baltimore and John Penn, son of the founder, to negotiate a new border, confirmed in 1767 as the Mason–Dixon Line, which became the border between the slave-owning south and the north. At the same time John Penn tricked the Lenapes into ceding a territory that could be walked in a day and a half, then hiring fast runners to inflate its span – the so-called Walking Purchase.

* The plague had killed 30,000 people in the first years of James I’s reign, and 40,000 in 1625. This wave first killed 50,000 in Amsterdam, then killed 100,000 Britons out of a population of 5.2 million in the summer of 1665. A quarantine imposed on plague-ridden houses – marked with a red cross and the words ‘Lord have mercy on us’ – and the Great Fire may have halted its spread. In 1720, the plague’s last European wave killed 90,000 out of 150,000 people in Marseilles. It was far from finished in the east.

* ‘The Duke of Buckingham doth rule all now,’ wrote Pepys. The word cabal derives from the ministry led by Buckingham (an acronym from the names Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale). The Restoration was less merry than thuggish, rapacious and venal, with ‘a lazy prince, no council, no money, no reputation’. What Pepys called ‘the viciousness of the court’ was personified by Buckingham. Although he wrote plays, performed his own sketches and studied science at the Royal Society, the duke openly brawled with rakes at the theatre and court and in 1666 fell in love with Anna Maria, countess of Shrewsbury. The affair led to a duel in which he killed her husband and his second, while she ordered the ambushing and stabbing of an ex-lover who had mocked the pair. ‘This will make the world think the king hath good councillors,’ wrote Pepys in disgust, ‘when the duke, the greatest man about him, is a fellow of no more sobriety than to fight about a whore.’ Buckingham then moved Anna Maria into his household with his wife, who naturally complained. Buckingham sent her back to her father and lived with a ‘widow of his own creation’ at their new and grandiose lovepad, Cliveden House.

* Her first title was Baroness Nonsuch – Charles actually gave her the royal palace of Nonsuch – and she was later promoted to duchess of Cleveland. Pepys was excited by her, noticing in the Privy Garden that she wore ‘the finest smocks and linen petticoats, laced with rich lace at the bottom, that ever I saw, and did me good to look upon them’. He ogled her madly at the theatre – ‘I glutted myself with looking at her’ and ‘filled my eyes with her’, though ‘I know well enough she’s a whore.’

* The operation’s success was responsible for the improved status of surgeons. The king’s barber-surgeon Charles-François Félix, who had succeeded his father as premier chirurgien du roi, had practised the procedure for six months on seventy-five humbler anuses, mainly belonging to ‘fistulous’ criminals, and had developed new instruments, a scythe-like scalpel and a retractor. There were no antiseptic measures. The king loathed bathing, the fistula seeped and a Russian ambassador reported that Louis ‘stunk like a wild animal’. At 7 a.m. on 18 November 1686, Félix operated on the royal anus in the presence of the king’s mistress, Madame de Maintenon, the dauphin, his confessor and his minister of state who held his hand. The king was back on horseback within three months; since everything the king did was fashionable, courtiers wore celebratory bandages around their bottoms. Most importantly, Félix was awarded nobility, estates and money, and was succeeded as first surgeon by his son, who served Louis XV.

* In 1685, Louis signed a Code Noir to manage ‘les Esclaves Nègres de l’Amérique’. The Code stipulated that slaves had no legal rights, could not marry, inherited the servitude of their parents and could be whipped and chained but not mutilated or tortured by masters. But runaways could be branded and their ears cut off after one escape attempt; after two misdemeanours, their hamstrings would be cut; after three: execution. For striking a master, they could be executed; a master who killed a slave would merely be fined. The Code banned the break-up of enslaved families but only while the children were prepubescent; it prohibited masters from having sex with slaves (the fine for fathering a child by a slave: 2,000 pounds of sugar). All of this was ignored by governors and slave masters. In 1684, the French physician François Bernier, who had served Alamgir in India, devised a theory of racial superiority that would later be used to justify slavery: ‘A New Division of the Earth According to the Different Species or Races of Men Who Inhabit It’. Yet French law specified that slavery could not exist in mainland France: in 1691, Louis freed two slaves who had escaped in Martinique and arrived as stowaways in France, ‘their liberty being acquired by the laws of the kingdom concerning slaves as soon as they touch the soil’.

* In Ayutthaya, a Greek adventurer called Constantine Phaulkon, who had fought for the Dutch and the English, had become the top aide to King Narai, hinting to Louis that he could convert the kingdom to Catholicism if Louis sent French troops to guard against the English EIC. Narai and Louis exchanged embassies, and 1,300 French soldiers arrived in Thailand. But Phaulkon’s domination provoked a coup in 1688 by Phetracha, royal cousin and elephant corps commander, who overthrew the king, murdered his sons, executed Phaulkon and, marrying Narai’s daughter, usurped the throne – thus defying French imperialism and ending Louis’s dream. One of Narai’s ambassadors to Louis, Kosa Pan, was the great-grandfather of Rama I, the king who in 1788 would found the dynasty that still rules Thailand today.

* Shivaji had conquered much of southern-central India from coast to coast, setting up his ashta pradhan, a modern council of ministers led by a peshwa, chief minister, who organized the building of hundreds of forts and the commissioning of a navy from the Portuguese, manned by Malabar pirates and commanded by a Portuguese renegade. All this was funded by tribute and conquest, and by lucrative raids on English and Dutch factories in Surat and Bombay that interfered with Mughal profits. Ruling as much of southern India as had great medieval kings like the Cholas, Shivaji aspired to the crown, but his Bhonsale family had been mere village chiefs; the Brahmins regarded him as a member of the shudra (farmer) caste; only a kshatriya could be a king. So Shivaji persuaded a respected pandit to invent his kshatriya genealogy and took the title chhatrapati – Lord of the Parasol – equivalent to emperor.

* Scarring was an advantage: smallpox was so deadly that it became usual to choose emperors who had already survived a bout of the disease.

* Few rulers have mastered all the facets of power so well and thought about them so deeply. ‘Be kind from afar and keep able ones near,’ he advised his successor, ‘nourish the people, think of the profit of all as being the real profit; be considerate to officials and act as father to the people and maintain the balance between principle and expedience,’ adding with dry humour: ‘That’s all there is to it.’ Kangxi carefully supervised the history of the dynasty. History remained a dangerous pursuit in China. ‘It’s the emperor in whose reign the history is written who is finally responsible and will be blamed by posterity if there are distortions and errors.’ When the historian Dai Mingshi criticized Manchu rule, Kangxi ordered his execution – ‘the only scholar I executed’ – though ‘The Board of Punishment recommended Dai be put to lingering death and all his male relations over sixteen be executed, females and children enslaved, but I was merciful and lowered it to beheading.’

* When the Manchus had taken northern China from the Ming, an extraordinary polyglot pirate, Zheng Zhilong, had backed a Ming emperor in the south. Zheng started as a translator for the Dutch VOC, which he helped seize Taiwan from the Portuguese, and then moved on to building a fleet of 400 warships and his own army. Protected by a bodyguard of enslaved Africans escaped from the Portuguese, he led the piratical cartel Shibazhi of 800 ships, which was not dissimilar to the Dutch or English trading companies, and which then defeated the Dutch, whereupon he enrolled as admiral for the southern Ming. In 1645 the Manchus persuaded him to defect but his dementedly ferocious son Zheng Sen, half Japanese and trained as a samurai, took over the command, with the title Koxinga (Lord of the Imperial Name), of the southern coast, fighting the Manchus for fifteen years. Then in 1661, just as Louis XIV started his rule, Fujian, on the south-western coast, fell to the Manchus and Koxinga expelled the Dutch from Taiwan. Many of the Dutch wives were enslaved as Chinese concubines. Syphilitic, unstable yet capable, Koxinga killed a Dutch missionary and took his daughter as concubine. Advised by a renegade Italian friar, he established his own kingdom which blocked the expansion of Kangxi’s China. In the twenty-first century, China, again defied by an independent Taiwan, promotes the example of Kangxi.