The World

Romanovs and Durranis, Pitts, Comanche and Kamehamehas

PITT’S WAR: THE GREAT COMMONER

A born performer, melodramatic, tempestuous and hard-drinking, Pitt, after an early spell of soldiering, had made his name with vicious attacks on Walpole and the Pelhams, skewering their domestic corruption and global inertia. While raging against venal factions (and brilliantly coordinating them), Pitt sat for the constituency Old Sarum, an uninhabited ruin bought by Diamond Pitt. Married to Lady Hester Grenville, daughter of a powerful clan, he was supported by his own faction: this tiny clique of Pitt–Grenvilles dominated politics for the next half-century.

George II loathed Pitt, but in December 1756, realizing that Newcastle was out of his depth, he accepted that the preeningly vain orator had a plan and acquiesced in a Pitt ministry, nominally under the Duke of Devonshire. ‘I am sure I can save this country,’ boasted Pitt, now secretary of state for the south, ‘and no one else can.’ When he was manoeuvred out of power, Pitt launched a national campaign that revealed the new importance of public opinion and forced his recall, now popularly acclaimed as the Great Commoner; this time he was in partnership with Newcastle.

Pitt masterminded the country’s first global conflict, the Seven Years War: his strategy was to win ‘Canada on the banks of the Rhine’, paying Frederick to fight France while his swashbuckling protégés – ‘Pitt’s boys’ – attacked French colonies. He seized French slaving castles in Senegal and Gambia, and stormed Guadeloupe; in America, Louisburg and Quebec fell. But not everything went right: at Monongahela, in the Ohio valley, a bunglingly arrogant British general, Edward Braddock, ignored the advice of his Virginian deputy, Colonel Washington, expert in colonial warfare, and was routed by French–Iroquois forces. Braddock was killed; Washington had two horses shot from under him. It was decisive in a different way: Washington noted British insouciance and resented his superiors’ refusal to recognize or promote him and his colonial troops. But that was a rare setback.^*

In India, a new game was opening: a voracious and brutal foreign invader was about to ravage the land.

INDIAN WARLORDS: DURRANI AND CLIVE

His name was Ahmed Durrani, the extraordinary Afghan shah, former bodyguard of Nader. In January 1757, just as Pitt was orchestrating his world offensive, Durrani marched into Delhi. It was far from his first invasion of India, and altogether he would invade India eight times and loot Delhi twice.

The Afghan predation of India had started ten years earlier, in December 1747, when Durrani attacked the opium-addled Mughal emperor Rangila, who got lucky when the invaders’ gunpowder magazine exploded. A year later, Durrani seized Sindh and Punjab (Pakistan), then conquered Kashmir, drawn into the vortex of India by the advance of the Marathas under the peshwa Balaji Rao, who after Shahu’s death ruled through a puppet chhatrapati. In 1749, the seventy-six-year-old Nizam of Hyderabad, a legend having survived eight emperors, one shah and eight battles, died, sparking a struggle between his heirs that drew yet more players into the vacuum. These princelings manipulated – and were manipulated in turn by – British and French soldier-merchants, aggressive adventurers attracted to a region that was politically chaotic but still commercially rich. Both the Nizam dynasts drew in rival Europeans: one was backed by a flashy French governor-general, Joseph, Marquis Dupleix, a veteran of the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, who was married to a part-Indian beauty known as Joanna Begum, a useful intermediary with the Indian potentates. Dupleix led his army of Indian sepoys dressed as an Indian nawab. The rival dynast hired a redoubtable EIC major, Stringer Lawrence. Then Balaji Rao and his Marathas joined the carve-up – and Durrani had to defend his new empire. None of the players in this mayhem – Indian, Afghan, French or British, Muslim, Hindu or Christian, white or brown – were scrupulous or peace-loving, and all were greedy and merciless.

Shah Durrani marched into Delhi, looting its treasures and collecting its concubines, but he did not seize the throne, telling the helpless Emperor Alamgir II, ‘I bestow on you the crown of Hindustan: come see me tomorrow morning in royal dignity.’ Afterwards he expressed his restraint in poetry:

I forget the throne of Delhi

When I remember the mountain tops of my beautiful Pashtunkhwa.

Holding court with his harem in the imperial apartments in Delhi, Durrani married his son Timur to the emperor’s daughter while he himself married Rangila’s daughter. Returning through Punjab, he and his son dealt with a new challenge: the Sikhs had been repressed by generations of Mughals, their gurus executed, but they had reacted by becoming a military-religious order, divided into armies and divisions, commanded by elected commanders, the sirdars. Durrani and Timur destroyed the Sikh holy cities of Kartarpur and Amritsar, razing the temples of the Chak Guru, desecrating them with cow blood, and soiling the sacred lakes. Sikh insurgents harassed the Afghans, who slaughtered Sikh civilians en masse.

As Durrani held court in the Mughal capital, a young British warlord was manoeuvring to destroy French power and dominate a distant but rich province: at nineteen, Robert Clive, a Shropshire vicar’s son, had joined the EIC as a bookkeeper. Gifted with manic energy interspersed with bouts of mental illness, Clive was a fighting accountant who craved action – ‘a man not born for a desk’ in Pitt’s phrase – and joined the EIC army, where he rose fast. At the time, 90 per cent of EIC profits came not from India but from China.^* Yet the chaos in India was an opportunity none of the players could resist. Just as in the west Durrani and Balaji Rao converged on Delhi, so in the east, during the 1740s, Dupleix and the French Compagnie des Indes Orientales launched an offensive against the passive British. Inspired in part by Dupleix, Clive won his first command. In 1751, he had made his name – and announced a new British dynamism – by seizing a fortress, holding it and then defeating an Indian potentate backed by the French. Pitt praised him. He married an eighteen-year-old girl who had come to Madras on her brother’s advice specifically to marry Clive, and they had nine children. When Clive suffered a nervous collapse, they returned rich to London, where he was elected an MP and bought a baronetcy. But he returned to India just in time for Pitt’s war.

‘A scene of anarchy, confusion, bribery, corruption and extortion,’ said Clive, ‘was never seen or heard of in any country except Bengal.’ He was not the only predator tempted by Bengal: Balaji Rao saw it too, raiding Bengal six times, killing 40,000 people. But Clive’s temperament was ideal for fighting the French and Indian warlords of the time, his aggressive spirit best summed up by a note to a subordinate facing a superior force: ‘Dear Forde, fight them immediately; I will send you the order of council to-morrow.’ Now a series of disasters befell British interests. The young nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daula, grandson of Alivardi Khan who had grabbed the province from the Mughals, seized the profitable British fort of Calcutta, where his sixty-four British prisoners were locked in a dungeon in the heat. Forty-three of them died.

On 5 February 1757, Clive marched his tiny army through the vast Indian camp – running the so-called Calcutta Gauntlet – to retake the fort. On 23 June, his decisive ‘battle’ of Plassey was a pantomime. The safest way to win a battle is to negotiate the outcome. His army – 1,100 Europeans, 2,000 sepoys – was minute; the nawab’s ministers and army mostly changed sides thanks to Clive’s negotiations; the rain soaked the gunpowder; and he lost only twenty-two sepoys (and no Europeans). Having undermined the French, he also defeated the Dutch, reporting to Pitt, ‘I’ve made it pretty clear to you that there will be little or no difficulty in obtaining the absolute possession of these rich kingdoms; and that with the Mughal’s own consent.’ He secured Bengal for the EIC. In Parliament, Pitt praised ‘Clive … that heaven-born general’ who fought with ‘an execution that would charm the king of Prussia’. Enjoying their nabobian fortune of £300,000 (a billion pounds today) the new Lord and Lady Clive of Plassey bought the duke of Newcastle’s estate and shocked London with their ostentation: her pet ferret wore a £2,500 diamond necklace and her pet prodigy – Mozart – performed in their salon. Clive remained fragile: addicted to opium, he suffered another breakdown.

Yet Bengal was just one province. Back in Kandahar, Durrani, now rich from his looting of Delhi and the revenues of Punjab and Khorasan, was happy to leave the Mughals alone, provided the Marathas did the same. But a Maratha general, accompanied by Balaji Rao’s teenaged son Vishwas, marched into Delhi and placed his own emperor on the throne, provoking Durrani. On 14 January 1761, the two armies met at Panipat, where Babur had won India in 1526. Durrani killed the general, Vishwas, and 28,000 Marathas, enslaving 22,000 women and children. The battle confirmed the end of Mughal India – which, following occupations by the Persians, Marathas and Afghans, was now no more than a symbolic entity.

Durrani celebrated with a triumphant entry into Delhi then looted the city for the second time in five years. But in his absence the Sikhs had rebelled – their guerrilla tactics and aggressive impetuosity made them hard to defeat. The Afghans launched a campaign of annihilation against Sikh civilians since they could not catch the warriors. On 5 February 1762, Durrani slaughtered around 20,000 Sikhs, mainly women and children. The Sikhs still call this Vadda Ghalughara – the Great Massacre – an imperialist atrocity unparalleled in modern Indian history. Travelling with fifty carts of Sikh heads, Durrani again blew up the Harmandir Sahib shrine in Amritsar, desecrating the sacred lake with the bodies of men and cows. But as the temple exploded, a fragment hit him on the nose – a wound that would eventually kill him – but it looked as if the new hegemon of India would be Durrani or the Hindu peshawas.^*

Back in London, Pitt’s annus mirabilis had delivered the first British empire but Frederick seemed finished – until he got lucky. Empress Elizaveta left the Russian throne to a poxy Germanic coxcomb, Peter III, who worshipped Frederick and immediately recalled Russian armies. Frederick was amazed: ‘What dependence may be placed on human affairs if the veriest trifles can change the fate of empires? Such are the sports of fortune.’ Frederick privately mocked the ‘divine idiocy’ of Peter III, who swiftly offended the Russian army, the nobility and, most unwisely, his clever, charismatic wife Catherine. Maria Theresa’s monarchy was exhausted; the French were near bankrupt and grieving over their losses at the expense of a sated Britain, which had cleaned up on the continent where the war began – America. Fort Duquesne, taken by Colonel Washington and his Virginia Regiment, was renamed Pittsburgh. By 1763, Britain’s American empire was won^* – but it would last scarcely a decade.

EMPIRE BUILDERS: COMANCHE WARLORDS AND PITT THE SNAKE

Yet the American vastness had scarcely been penetrated by British-Americans, French or Spanish. Europeans just occupied the Thirteen Colonies on the east coast. Elsewhere, tiny posses of European adventurers sheltered in wooden palisades and traded in furs, negotiating with the Native Americans who controlled the interior. While snuff-snorting bewigged aristocrats in European capitals traded these lands on maps, this made little difference on the ground. That expanse was ruled by an ever-changing map of indigenous nations who did not measure power in terms of boundaries and kingdoms. Yet they were not at peace with each other; they too were empire builders.

The greatest of them were the Comanche, an offshoot of the Shoshane, distant relatives of the Mexica, speaking a similar language and also worshipping the sun. Decisions of war and peace were made by assemblies at which the older men were the most influential, but younger bloods and women sat in an outer circle and could voice their views. They elected a paraibo, a warlord, to lead confederacies of warbands.

Their world had been changed by the arrival of the Spanish, who brought guns and horses that had never existed in the Americas: after an uprising by the peoples of the south-east, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the Spanish lost control of thousands of horses. The Comanche, using guns, bows and spears and wearing leather armour, mastered equestrianism, breeding as many as 80,000 of the small Arab horses, trained for heat and dust. The traditional narrative of indigenous peoples inevitably defeated by triumphant Europeans is belied by the rise of the Comanche, who over 150 years thrived in the south/south-west by adapting skilfully. The horses and guns allowed them to slaughter the bison herds, over 200,000 annually, and also to smash their rivals, the Apache, who were vulnerable because they farmed as well as raided, and to raid into Spanish territory, often on the night of the full moon – the Comanche Moon.

The Spanish controlled these territories on European maps, but their governors called this Comanchería, and negotiated deals with Comanche paraibos to desist from raids and instead trade: the Comanche traded in enslaved captives, fellow natives and Europeans. At the Taos fairs, the Spanish governors exchanged horses and guns for bison, beaver pelts and slaves, especially girls. Once sold, the Comanche ‘deflower and corrupt [the girls] in the sight of innumerable assemblies of barbarians and Catholics … saying to those who buy them, “Now you can take her – now she’s good.”’ On Comanche raids, men were usually killed, eyes gouged out, scalped, penises often stuffed in their mouths; if they were kept alive, they were taken back to the villages where the women tortured them. Girls were raped, but they and their children were kept as slaves.

There was another side to this ferocity: the Comanche and other Native Americans often adopted the European prisoners who survived these early torments. Once these prisoners had learned how to live and ride like them, their captors were colour-blind, incorporating Europeans and captured black slaves into their families. One of their greatest warlords would be half-European.

By the 1760s, the Comanche numbered around 40,000, each family owning around eight horses, and ruled much of New Mexico and Texas, which was virtually purged of European settlers. The nominal rule of Comanchería changed when the Europeans negotiated the end of the war, but it made little difference to the Comanche.

On 25 October 1760, the twenty-two-year-old George III, the first of his family to speak English without a guttural Germanic accent, inherited the throne. He was determined to be a ‘patriot king’, reinvigorating royal power by removing the venal Whig oligarchs who had ruled since 1688: the sovereign was still the head of government, appointing ministers who, although led by a premier, responsible for managing royal business in parliament, were accountable to the crown. Democracy was still far away. Full-lipped, small-headed with bulbous watery-blue eyes, industrious and sincere, George called Newcastle ‘a knave’ and Pitt ‘the snake’, while his views on slavery were radical. Slavery, he wrote in an essay for his mentor, the earl of Bute, was ‘as repugnant to the civil law as to the law of nature’.

The serpentine Pitt was mobbed by fans at George III’s coronation, but in the row over the peace he resigned, bursting into tears. Instead George appointed his unworldly mentor Bute, who so mismanaged parliamentary and diplomatic business that the king realized that he had to compromise. He and his new prime minister, George Grenville – brother-in-law of Pitt – agreed that the American colonists, 2.5 million of them (of whom a quarter were enslaved African-Americans), must contribute to the cost of the war. In 1765 they therefore imposed new taxes – a stamp tax – on colonial goods which provoked American resistance under the slogan ‘no taxation without representation’. George and his ministers blinked and after only a year repealed the Stamp Act, encouraged by Pitt, who declared, ‘I rejoice that America has resisted.’ But London also honoured promises to Native American allies by banning American expansion over the Alleghenies, which Washington and Jefferson, typical land-hungry magnates and members of the Virginian House of Burgesses, regarded as their right.

The crisis brought Pitt, now fifty-eight, back to power, raised to earl of Chatham, but he was suffering from agonizing gout and a nervous breakdown, for which his doctor appallingly prescribed alcohol. At a vital moment in the American crisis, Britain was run by an alcoholic manic depressive hiding in a dark room who was too unstable to govern but too prestigious to fire.

Unlike Britain, Maria Theresa had failed to make gains from her victories. Frederick kept Silesia, and two years later she was heartbroken by the sudden death of the Little Mouse, Franz, which meant she had to involve Joseph, now emperor, in government. The two clashed continually, Joseph pushing for power, advocating radical, Enlightened reform and aggressive expansion, travelling and inspecting peripatetically, while the queen-empress, now overweight, sometimes despondent and always in mourning black, tried to improve and restrain him through a mix of sharp reprimands and abdication threats.

Joseph himself suffered, desperately missing Isabella and then losing his adored daughter too: ‘I miss her in everything.’ Embittered but filled with reforming energy, he grumbled about the longueurs of his mother’s priggish court, ‘an assemblage of a dozen married old ladies, three or four old maids … Yet no society at all … the intelligent bored to death with stupid women.’ Joseph himself was not one for extravagance or debauchery, falling in love with his daughter’s older governess, then with a grand princess, and finally consoling himself with random pickups on his travels, whores (one visit to a Viennese brothel ended badly with Joseph hitting a girl and being thrown out) and regular visits to his gardener’s daughter. His greatest pleasure was music.

Yet Maria Theresa had not lost her exuberance. When Leopold gave her a grandson – a future emperor – she ran through the Hofburg on to the stage of its theatre and, stopping the actors in mid-sentence by clapping for silence, cried, ‘Our Leopold has had a son!’ More urgent was the problem of her youngest, Marie Antoinette.

THE RULE OF COCK AND CUNT: CATHERINE THE GREAT AND POTEMKIN

The queen-empress had, like a prim headmistress, carefully managed the education of her children, but she could never control Antoinette. In 1770, Maria Theresa saw off the sobbing fourteen-year-old, blue-eyed, oval-faced, porcelain-skinned, auburn-haired, leaving mama for the last time, to marry Louis, the fifteen-year-old French dauphin, an obstinate plodder and enthusiastic hunter, obsessed with the navy, who was happiest tinkering with locks in his workshop and torturing cats. The old king Louis XV, an incorrigible sex addict with paedophile tendencies, was dismayed by Louis’s oafishness and his unBourbon lack of interest in sex, while Antoinette immediately made a fool of herself by refusing to greet the royal mistress, Madame du Barry.

Soon Antoinette’s politics and sex life were worrying her anxious mother. She reported on her regular periods to Maria Theresa, who soon learned that the marriage had not been consummated on the wedding night – nor for eight years thereafter. ‘As for the dauphine,’ Maria Theresa grumbled, ‘nothing!’

In April 1774, Louis XV died of smallpox, his passing followed by a ‘thunderous roar’ – the stamp of courtiers’ feet as they ran from the death chamber towards the new king. Louis XVI appointed a veteran navy minister, the comte de Maurepas, as his principal ministre d’état, whose advice he generally took. In economic matters he often said, ‘It seems to me to be the general wish and I want to be loved,’ but despite his passive image he was clear what he wanted: to build the navy until he found an opportunity to overturn British gains.^*

Antoinette craved masques and spent exorbitantly on gambling at faro, magnificent towering hairstyles, jewels and new palaces. ‘I am apprehensive about my daughter’s youth,’ wrote Maria Theresa, ‘her susceptibility to flattery, idleness, disinclination for any serious activity,’ and arranged for spies to watch her in Paris. She expected Antoinette to look after Austrian interests: her state chancellor Prince Kaunitz called Antoinette a ‘bad payer’ when she did not deliver. Louis himself warned her that ‘The ambition of your relatives is going to upset everything’ and boasted ‘I’ve no intention of letting women [for example, his Habsburg wife] have any influence.’ He was referring to foreign policy. At court, Antoinette first sought revenge on the courtiers who had humiliated her as dauphine. Promoting her best friend Yolande de Polignac and her family, Antoinette tried to diminish the high nobility by bringing in her own coterie, behaviour that alienated the grandees.

Early in her father-in-law’s reign, Antoinette boasted that she had had a minister sacked. ‘I asked the king to send him away,’ she told a close friend, mocking Louis as that ‘poor man’. This outraged her mother. ‘Where is the good and generous heart of Archduchess Antoinette?’ she asked her. ‘I see only intrigue, vulgar spite, delight in mockery and persecution.’ She added, ‘All the winter long I have trembled at the thought of your too easy success and the flatterers surrounding you while you have thrown yourself into a life of pleasure and preposterous display.’

It was unfortunate that this couple faced the challenges of a monarchy on the verge of bankruptcy. France had never been as absolute as Louis XIV claimed, always undercut by the medieval rights of the parlements and by a creaking taxation system that did not tax the aristocracy. Even as crisis threatened the regime, courtiers greedily grabbed every franc they could. Ruled by ravening factions and sclerotic formality, even a Mazarin would have struggled to navigate the problems faced by the royal locksmith.

‘Your luck can all too easily change,’ Maria Theresa warned Antoinette. ‘One day you will recognize the truth of this and then it will be too late. I hope I shall not live until misfortune overtakes you …’

Antoinette was chastened: ‘I love the empress but I’m afraid of her.’ While worrying about Antoinette, Maria Theresa had to cope with an ebullient and ambitious upstart to the east: Catherine the Great. It is ironic that this chauvinistic era boasted more female potentates than the twenty-first century.

In 1762, the man who had saved Frederick, Tsar Peter III, had paid for this folly with his life when his long-suffering German-born wife Catherine organized a coup with the help of her lover and his friends in the Guards. Peter was arrested then strangled by her lover, a regicide that horrified Maria Theresa, who was also appalled by Catherine’s lack of sexual inhibitions: she advanced her lovers to official court positions, like a king with his mistresses. Worse, Catherine turned out to be politically brilliant, adeptly expanding Russian power. She was a passionate enthusiast for the Enlightenment and even wrote a reforming plan, convening a commission to debate the abolition of serfdom.

‘A woman is always a woman,’ Frederick told his brother Heinrich, ‘and in feminine government, cunt has more influence than sound reason.’ In fact, reason of state was paramount for Catherine. Blue-eyed, auburn-haired, curvaceous, radiantly charming and politically rapacious, Catherine was a master of publicity, corresponding with Voltaire, who acclaimed her the Great (as he had Frederick), and hosting Diderot in St Petersburg. But she was too shrewd to impose their ideas, turning instead to empire building, dominating first Poland, where she orchestrated the election of an ex-lover, Stanisław Poniatowski, as king, then fighting the Ottomans and Girays in the south, where she gained new territories.

In 1772, Catherine manoeuvred Frederick into a carve-up of Poland–Lithuania, and together they offered Maria Theresa a bite. Maria Theresa hated any collusion with the monstrous Frederick and the lascivious Catherine but could not resist. ‘One must know,’ she sighed, ‘when to sacrifice oneself.’ After Joseph had travelled to meet Frederick (‘That man is a genius,’ he said), she joined the partition that would demolish the Polish kingdom. ‘Catherine and I are simply brigands, but I wonder how the queen-empress managed to square her confessor,’ sneered Frederick. ‘She wept as she took; the more she wept, the more she took.’

This was only the beginning for Catherine, but faced with a long Ottoman war and a dangerous peasant revolt, she promoted an irrepressible, flamboyant and larger-than-life visionary, her lover Grigori Potemkin, who became her secret husband and political partner – the greatest minister of the Romanov dynasty. ‘This is what happens’, reflected Frederick, ‘when cock and cunt rule.’^*

The unusually wholesome George III, happily married to a German princess, sought a very different approach. In 1770, he appointed a genial, competent childhood friend untainted by faction to lead the government who proved the most successful manager of parliament since Walpole, though he was less proficient in America. Lord North, thirty-eight years old, was so modest he refused to call himself prime minister. But he could not escape the truth that British parliamentary government was badly designed to conduct wars in faraway places. Frederick the Great, master of united command, scoffed that ‘The King of England changes his ministers as often as he changes his shirts.’

The British now ruled an extensive empire from Canada to Bengal in eastern India. Durrani, shah of the Afghan empire, installed a Mughal puppet, Alam II, in Delhi, writing to the British conquistador, Lord Clive, ordering him to recognize his poodle emperor. In 1765, Clive returned as the first governor-general of Bengal. Clive had left General Hector Munro in command as Alam and an anti-British coalition challenged EIC power in Bengal. In October 1764, Munro crushed a sepoy mutiny. The British had early on adopted the Mughal punishment of firing rebels from cannon. ‘The upper part of the back is resting against the muzzle,’ observed a shocked officer. ‘When the gun is fired, the head is seen to go straight into the air forty feet, the arms fly off right and left, high up in the air, the legs drop to the ground … and the body is literally blown away.’ Munro executed twenty rebels in this way. Then he routed the Mughal army, killing 2,000 to his own losses of 289.

When Clive returned, he was happy to support the powerless emperor in return for Bengal. On 12 August 1765, he received a firman from Alam giving Bengal to the EIC as well as granting some powers in the Carnatic and Deccan. The transaction, marking the start of British hegemony in east India, was a contrast to what Durrani was doing in Punjab in the west.^*

DURRANI’S MAGGOTS: EMPIRE IN INDIA

‘Let’s destroy these people,’ ordered Durrani, ‘and enslave their women and children!’ The Afghans killed Sikh and non-Sikh in a frenzy before Durrani departed and galloped westwards to receive the tribute of the emir of Bukhara – his empire extended into today’s Uzbekistan. But the fifty-year-old Durrani was now sick, the Amritsar fragment having infected his face. In summer 1772, maggots infested his nose and nasopharynx, dropping into his mouth, until he could no longer speak or eat. The epigraph on his octagonal tomb in Kandahar claims that ‘the lion lay with the lamb’, such was the peace won by his greatness. Yet he spread little peace: he was a ferocious, peripatetic, poetry-writing conqueror who perpetrated atrocities in Punjab but also laid out the modern cities of Kabul and Kandahar and created a new country, where he is still known as Baba-i-Afghan – the Father of Afghans. Although he lost Punjab to an independent Sikh kingdom, his son Timur held Durrani’s empire together, but seventy years later Durrani’s grandson would contribute to Britain’s first Afghan fiasco.

Back in London, Lord North now faced a crisis in Bengal where the EIC was going bankrupt, thanks to soaring military expenditure, as Bengals starved, thanks to EIC taxes. Clive and his fellow nabobs were already notorious for their fortunes. There had been talk of appointing Clive to command British troops in America, but all factions were uneasy about his methods and wealth. In 1772, he was attacked by political enemies in Parliament for his rapacity. ‘A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy … I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled … with gold and jewels!’ he retorted. ‘Mr Chairman, I stand astonished at my own moderation.’ No one else was astonished by it. But when the nabob was exonerated by a parliamentary vote, George told North that even though ‘no one thinks his services greater than I do’ he was ‘amazed’ that the MPs’ judgement ‘seems to approve of Lord Clive’s rapine’.^*

In 1773, North took government control of the EIC, appointing a governor-general and council: the effective rule of Bengal by the armed company had lasted little more than ten years. But he also faced a crisis in his other colonies, in America, and his solution linked the two. To help the EIC, he abolished duties on Indian tea exported to America, where the colonists objected to undercutting their own merchants. In November that year, Americans – wearing blackface and Mohawk headdresses – raided tea-bearing ships in Boston harbour. North overreacted by passing the so-called Coercive Acts and dispatching troops.

On a mountain top in rustic Virginia, Jefferson moved his wife Martha Jefferson into the Honeymoon Cottage, the small but finished wing of Monticello. Three years earlier, just after his election to the House of Burgesses, Thomas Jefferson had come to call on Martha Wayles Skelton, twenty-three years old and a widow. In January 1772, they married and, when her father died the next year, they inherited 11,000 acres heavily encumbered with debts, as well as 135 slaves, including Betty Hemings and her six children by Wayles. The youngest was a newborn baby, a daughter named Sally, who would play a special role in Jefferson’s life.

RADICALS: JEFFERSON AND THE HEMINGSES; THE ENGLISH QUEEN OF DENMARK AND THE DOCTOR’S FALL

Jefferson was already obsessed with two difficult missions – building his new mansion, Monticello, atop a hill, and ‘a city on a hill’, his vision of Enlightenment in America. ‘Architecture is my delight,’ he said, ‘and putting up, and pulling down, one of my favorite amusements.’ Monticello would be his lifelong obsession. Hired slaves levelled the mountain; the house itself was built by enslaved (his own and hired) and free labour, white and black, over the years. He designed it himself, filling it with novelties and charms, and having his study built around his bedroom. His ideas of liberty clashed with the reality of a lifestyle based on chattel slavery: as a lawyer, he represented the sons of slaves seeking freedom and proposed that masters should free their slaves, yet he did not free his own and did not believe black and white could live together. However liberal the slave master, the institution only worked because it was based on violence. He allowed his overseers to beat his slaves, but he was considerably less strict than, say, his contemporary and fellow grandee Colonel Washington. It was one thing to talk enlightenment and another to practise it.

Domestic slaves who lived close to the planter’s mansion were in some ways privileged over those who toiled in the plantations, but they were more likely to be raped by the masters. The Hemingses were treated differently – they were three-quarters white and half-siblings to Mrs Jefferson.

As Martha had two daughters with Jefferson, the Hemingses played the traditional role of house slaves in helping her raise the children, who grew up with their contemporary enslaved cousins. The youngest, Sally Hemings, was thriving at Monticello as Jefferson wrote his Summary View of the Rights of British America. ‘Kings are the servants,’ he wrote, ‘not the proprietors of the people … Let not the name of George III be a blot in the page of history.’ In this tract, he toyed with a definition of the rights of man and proposed the abolition of slavery – just not yet.

Not everyone was as measured in their reforms as those pillars of the Enlightenment, Catherine, Frederick – and Jefferson. At almost the same moment, in Denmark, a scandalous ménage à trois of a radical doctor, his lover the queen and her husband the king launched the most Enlightened reform anywhere in the world.

The experiment had started in in November 1766, when George III sent his fifteen-year-old sister, Caroline Matilda, to marry her first cousin, Christian VII, king of Denmark, Norway and Iceland. The groom, a gawky, pinheaded and unstable seventeen-year-old, a public masturbator, self-harmer and denizen of Copenhagen brothels, treated his wife coldly. The isolated teenaged queen, modest, passionate and intelligent, was desperate. She was bewildered and frightened by Christian’s sexual eccentricities, yet she charmed the Danes: ‘her appearance allowed her to avoid criticism of women, but still captivate the male eye’.

When she gave birth to a son, Frederick, her husband showed no interest. He was sometimes manic, often enervated. His veteran ministers enquired about treatment and were recommended to a young German doctor, Johann Friedrich Struensee, aged thirty-one, dashing, worldly, the scholarly son of a Pietist minister. Struensee had met the philosophes in Paris and embraced the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, their most radical thinker. Rousseau had just published The Social Contract, in which he argued that man was born pure and became corrupted by society, and Émile, or Treatise on Education, in which he declared, ‘Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.’ So he proposed that children should be ‘denatured’ to prepare them for citizenship. Struensee, who wrote his own Rousseauesque treatises, blew into the disturbed court like a breath of fresh air, calming the king, reassuring the queen. Christian came to trust him passionately as did the queen, especially after the inoculation of their son. Struensee reconciled the teenagers, encouraging the king to return to the queen’s bed, while supervising the upbringing of Prince Frederick according to Rousseau’s rules.

Still only nineteen, Caroline fell in love with Struensee, starting a wild affair right in front of the king. In September 1770, infected with the vision and authority of the doctor, Christian sacked the chancellor and promoted Struensee to count and Privy Cabinet Minister with the power to sign royal orders: Enlightened dictator. When the queen mother confronted her, Caroline retorted, ‘Pray, madam, allow me to govern my own kingdom as I please.’ Her mother-in-law bribed the servants to chronicle Caroline’s adultery with Struensee, scattering flour outside her bedroom to record male footprints. They also found her garters in Struensee’s bed.

In July 1771, the queen gave birth to a daughter, Louise Augusta, who resembled Struensee. The king became suspicious and unsettled. Meanwhile the count-doctor signed over a thousand decrees that abolished torture, noble privileges, censorship and the slave trade.^* He created foundling hospitals funded by a gambling tax and increased peasant land ownership. Denmark was now the most progressive kingdom in Europe.

On 16 January 1772, in Copenhagen, Struensee danced with his mistress the queen, watched by her husband, at a masquerade ball at the Court Theatre in the Christiansborg Palace. In the early hours after the ball, he was arrested by royal guards, in a coup organized by a cabal backed by the queen mother. While the queen was interrogated in Kronborg Castle, Struensee himself denied a sexual relationship, convinced that the king would back him and the queen defend him. But both lovers were tricked into confessing the relationship, she hoping to draw the guilt on to herself, he in response to being offered his life if he admitted the truth. She recanted her confession but too late. Condemned to the amputation of his right hand – signer of treasonous decrees – and then to losing his head, Struensee was convinced he would be spared until almost the last minute when he saw his closest associate beheaded before him. ‘I would have liked to have saved them both,’ said the king, but he did not. After three clumsy blows, Struensee was beheaded with an axe – now on display in Copenhagen – then quartered. Struensee’s decrees were abolished, the slavery of the Danish East Indies Company restored.

Although he was embarrassed by his sister’s ‘criminal conduct’, George III warned the Danes not to punish her and dispatched the Royal Navy to threaten Copenhagen.^* But the king was now facing revolution in America.

George and North might have devised any number of solutions to the crisis. George could have declared himself king of America (his father had considered moving his younger brother to the colonies as duke of Virginia) and announced that he was protecting American rights – as he now did with his Canadian subjects; he could have called the Americans’ bluff by giving them seats in Parliament (as had happened with Scottish and Irish union). Instead, North decided to crack down,^* provoking the American Patriots to hold their first Continental Congress in Philadelphia, attended by Washington. The delegates founded a Continental Association that linked the colonies in one organization. While Jefferson watched from Monticello, the lofty, taciturn Washington decided ‘to devote my life and fortune in the cause’, taking command of a Virginia militia.

George and North believed that the colonists were incapable of political coordination and would back down. ‘The die is now cast,’ George wrote to North; ‘the colonies must either submit or triumph … we must not retreat.’

In April 1775, at Lexington, British redcoats were defied by a posse of colonials – an escalation that led to a second Congress at which Washington was elected commander-in-chief – his appointment owing as much to ‘his tall stature’, noted John Adams bitchily, as to his ‘gift of silence’. Washington was toasted by Jefferson and the most famous colonial, the sixty-nine-year-old Benjamin Franklin, polymathic luminary of the Enlightenment, but so far the general was the only soldier in the Continental Army. Jefferson was elected to a Committee of Five to draft a Declaration of Independence, approved in July 1776: ‘all men are created equal’, this asserted, ‘with certain unalienable Rights’, among which ‘are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ – though not for everyone. The aspirations of the American founders – all males, writing about ‘men’ being equal – set high moral standards for democracy, but they did not live up to them. Jefferson wanted to abolish the slave trade but other slave masters resisted, so they compromised and agreed to revisit this after twenty years. In London, Samuel Johnson mocked American humbug: ‘How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’

Rushing to New England, Washington drove the British out of Boston but then had to defend New York with his small army of 8,000, which soon buckled under British attack. In the retreat, Washington unusually lost his composure, shouting, ‘Are these the men with which I’m to defend America?’ But they were and he did, withdrawing to New Jersey as the British took Philadelphia.

North believed victory was assured, and hired 18,000 Hessian mercenaries, a traditional measure since British armies were small. Catherine the Great and Potemkin, who had just crushed a massive serf rebellion on the Volga, offered George a Russian army to destroy the Americans, an intriguing possibility. Had George and North really been ‘tyrants’, as the Patriots alleged, they would have launched a total war like Catherine’s against her rebels with massive forces, or they would have retaliated with the brutality used by the king’s uncle the duke of Cumberland against Scottish rebels in 1745. Instead they hoped to win over the Americans, never sent enough troops, underestimated the rebel resolve, skills and numbers and exaggerated Loyalist sentiment. North barely interfered with his colonial secretary, Lord George Germain, who divided British forces into three under rival commanders which ultimately allowed the Americans to defeat them one by one. It was difficult enough to run a war five weeks away. North, depressed, begged to resign, but George, having secretly paid his massive debts, forced him to stay. In May 1778, a cadaverous Pitt (Chatham) hobbled into the Lords, aided by his son, to advocate American conciliation, only to collapse. He died in the arms of his eighteen-year-old son William, who would be the greatest premier of the century.

Louis XVI watched Britain’s American fiasco with satisfaction, though he agonized over whether or not to intervene. But he had bigger problems: failing debts in his kingdom and sexual failure in his boudoir, both of which were the talk of Europe.

ANTOINETTE AND LOUIS: IMPERIAL SEX THERAPY AT VERSAILLES

In November 1776, Antoinette, unhappy and bewildered, appealed to her brother Emperor Joseph, a most unlikely sex therapist, whose latest marriage and personal relationships were disastrous. In June 1777, Joseph visited his sister in Paris where he investigated the astonishing situation at the most sexually unbuttoned court in Europe: no one had explained to either the king or queen how to make love. But the emperor was perhaps the only man the king of France could confide in. Joseph took the king – ‘rather weak but not an imbecile’ – on a walk. ‘Imagine! In his marriage bed. He has strong perfectly satisfactory erection … introduces the member, stays there for two minutes without moving, withdraws without ever discharging but still erect and bids goodnight,’ Joseph wrote to his brother Leopold. ‘Ah! If I could have been present once, I should have arranged it properly. He needs to be whipped to make him discharge in a passion like donkeys. Furthermore my sister is pretty placid and they’re two incompetents together.’

Somehow Joseph arranged it, saving the alliance and the marriage. As Louis made love to Antoinette, she thought of Maria Theresa: ‘My dear mother … it has already been more than eight days since my marriage was perfectly consummated; the proof has been repeated and yesterday even more completely. At first I thought of sending my dear mama a courier …’

The first birth – a daughter – was nightmarish: at the words ‘The queen is about to give birth,’ courtiers filled the hot chamber; she haemorrhaged and passed out as Louis tried to open the window. When later he did not make love to her, Maria Theresa presumed he had a mistress: ‘My rule is the woman must just patiently endure her husband’s lapses. No point making an issue of it.’ Yet their marriage was much better: Louis told her he loved her and would never take a mistress. Two sons followed quickly. Joseph boasted: ‘They both [king and queen] have written to thank me.’ The kaiser adored his sister, reflecting that he could be happily married to her himself, but she worried him, for ‘the vortex of dissipation around her prevents her from seeing and thinking about anything but going from one pleasure to another’. Joseph predicted, ‘The revolution will be cruel.’

The American revolution too had become cruel, with a racial undercurrent. The British governor of Virginia, the earl of Dunmore, immediately appealed to enslaved African-Americans: ‘all servants, negroes and others’ were to be freed ‘if able and willing to bear arms’ they joined ‘His Majesty’s troops’. Three hundred freedmen in Dunmore’s Royal Ethiopian Regiment fought under the banner ‘Liberty to Slaves’, while a Black Brigade under a remorseless guerrilla commander, Titus Cornelius, known as Colonel Tye, harassed American forces. Fifty thousand slaves escaped to the British. The Iroquois and other Native Americans planned to back the British against the colonials.

Washington tried to hold the army together at Valley Forge as he intimidated Iroquois leaders and trained his ‘exceedingly dirty and nasty’ troops whose naivety he blamed on ‘an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people’. He hoped that an extended war with overlong supply lines would undermine British resolve.

The ideals of the American revolution marked a new epoch – the fruition of both the English civil war and the Enlightenment.

Yet without a game changer, the Americans seemed unlikely to win.

SHOOT OFF YOUR ARROW: KAMEHAMEHA AND COOK

At Valley Forge, Washington was joined by a young French aristocrat, Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, who had fitted out a ship with his own money and, in June 1777, arrived in America to fight for freedom aged only nineteen. The Americans quickly understood Lafayette’s potential influence in Paris, elevating him to major-general. Washington offered to be his ‘friend and father’. His skirmishes with the British, recounted in his excited letters home, were closely followed by Louis and Antoinette.

Many a ruler has dreamed of that ultimate panacea: a short victorious war. Louis XVI was no exception. He knew he could not afford a war, but his new finance minister, the Swiss banker Jacques Necker,^* advised that if he won the war in a single year loans without higher taxes would fund it. Lafayette returned to advocate for America and, after a victory at Saratoga had shown that Americans could beat British–Hessian troops, Louis agreed to intervene, backed by his Spanish cousins. A short victorious war would restore royal fortunes. On 6 February 1778, the octogenarian American envoy Benjamin Franklin negotiated the alliance. Antoinette supported the war, and her first lover would play a role in the American revolution.

Soon after her arrival in Paris, Antoinette had met this special friend at a masque ball, a very eighteenth-century event that allowed incognito monarchs to meet masked strangers – and everyone to meet new lovers. She encountered a flaxen-haired Swedish count, Axel von Fersen, the same age as her, who had talked to her without realizing who she was. Now in 1778 Ferson returned to Paris. ‘Ah, here’s an old acquaintance,’ she said; an equerry noticed that ‘her hand trembled with visible emotion’.

After her disappointing marriage, she fell in love. Fersen thought the heavily pregnant queen ‘the prettiest and most amiable princess’. Asking him to wear his smart Swedish uniform, she welcomed him at her informal villa, Petit Trianon, on the Versailles estate, where ‘The queen couldn’t take her eyes off him … eyes full of tears.’ It was the beginning of a loving liaison that endured for the rest of her life, but they were not yet physical lovers. ‘I love you and will love you madly all my life,’ he wrote later, while she called him ‘the most loved and loving of men’, affirming ‘My heart is all yours.’

In America, Washington was now becalmed for another anxious winter at Middlebrook, New Jersey. Yet, while the Atlantic world focused on the rebellion, a Polynesian potentate – whose island would form another part of America, was encountering his first European.

On 26 January 1779, at Kealakekua Bay, Kaleiopuu, alii-nui (king) of Hawaii island, one of the last lands outside European knowledge, made a visit to the captain of one of two British ships, accompanied by his son Kiwalao. Also among his entourage of young nobles, towering over both of them, was the third man of the kingdom, his nephew Kamehameha, a hefty giant of seven foot, with low brows, penetrating, heavy-lidded eyes and an air of menacing power who would soon unite the Hawaiian islands.

The old alii-nui, wizened from his addiction to the narcotic awa but still an enthusiastic lover of his young boyfriends, arrived wearing a gorgeous scarlet, black and yellow ahuala cloak, made from 400,000 feathers taken from 80,000 birds, and a feathered mahiole helmet. While the regalia was impressive, the Hawaiian leaders were weakened by the ferocity of their political struggles.

Around 1735, an ambitious prince of the ruling clan, Alapai the Great, had overthrown and killed rivals, sacrificing them to gain their spiritual power, mola, uniting several islands into a single kingdom, which he ruled for twenty years.

When his niece, the noblewoman Kekuiapoiwa, became pregnant, she asked for the eyeball of a shark, a signal that the baby would be a king slayer, at which Alapai ordered the baby to be killed. Unsure what to do, the baby boy’s mother placed him on Naha, the sacred stone: if he cried, he would be killed – but he did not. The warrior king sent assassins, but Kekuiapoiwa hid the baby. Finally Alapai, confident in his power, lifted the death sentence and recalled the baby Kamehameha to court. When Alapai died around 1754, his kinsman Kaleiopuu seized power.

Now boarding the European ship with his king, Kamehameha sized up the ships and their cannon along with the European chieftain who combined the scientific pursuits of an Englishman of the Enlightenment with the imperial mission of a British conquistador: James Cook.

As a boy, Cook had been miserable, working on his father’s Yorkshire farm and in a grocery store, until he joined the Royal Navy, distinguishing himself as a pilot in time to guide General Wolfe up the St Lawrence River to capture Quebec. In August 1768, Cook, now thirty-nine, shy, impatient and quick-witted, tall and handsome, self-taught and self-driven, had been chosen by the Royal Society to command HMS Endeavour and observe the transit of Venus across the sun in Tahiti, transporting an astronomer, along with a rich young botanist called Joseph Banks, round Tierra del Fuego to the Pacific. In Tahiti he met a Polynesian navigator and priest Tupaia, a haughty refugee from Raiatea, who taught him how Polynesians had navigated the ocean, helped him map the islands, and accompanied him across the Pacific in 1770 to land on Aotearoa – which the Dutch had called New Zealand – where they encountered Maori people.

Sailing to Australia, Cook landed at what he called Stingray Bay on the eastern coast, renaming it Botany Bay in honour of Banks, who collected 30,000 samples on the trip and spotted an extraordinary animal – a kangaroo – the first sign that this continent had been isolated for many millennia. Claiming eastern Australia – New South Wales – for Britain, Cook encountered Gweagal aboriginals of the Botany Bay area, sailing ‘so near the shore as to distinguish several people upon the sea beach; they appear’d to be of a very dark or black Colour’. Unfortunately the Gweagal resisted Cook’s landing, throwing spears until they were shot at and one man injured. They did not wish to communicate. Tupaia died at Batavia on Cook’s voyage home.

On their return to London, Cook and Banks became celebrities flaunting their exploits, their 1,400 new plants including eucalyptus and acacia, and their Tahitian passenger, Omai, who was introduced to George III and painted by Joshua Reynolds. But Cook was bored at home. His thoughts roaming boundlessly, he claimed that he had travelled ‘farther than any man has been before me, but as far as I think it is possible for a man to go’ – true at the time.

In July 1776, Cook’s patron the earl of Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, commissioned a voyage on HMS Resolution and Discovery to take Omai home but really to find a north-west passage to the Pacific – and beat France.

Cook returned Omai to Tahiti, then sailed on to ‘discover’ Maui and Hawaii, which he named the Sandwich Islands. Unbeknown to the British, it was the Makahiki season, the festivities to celebrate harvest and the god Lono, one of the four primal deities, and boatloads of Hawaiians canoed out to visit the Europeans. The men wished to trade and offered pigs and fruit; the girls danced on deck singing a hula:

Where oh where

Is the hollow stemmed stick, where is it,

To make an arrow for the hawk?

Come and shoot …

A penis, a penis to be enjoyed:

Don’t stand still, come gently …

Shoot off your arrow.

The Protestant British were amazed by their sexual generosity. Never himself partaking of the Hawaiian girls (loyal to his wife at home with their six children), Cook wrote that he allowed sexual contact ‘because he could not prevent it’. But he tried to limit the spread of venereal disease from his men to the Polynesians, inspecting them and allowing only healthy ones loose on the islands. It was not understood at the time that men with STDs might be asymptomatic but still infect others, and he was agonized to see Hawaiian women with syphilitic sores.

On the Discovery, the alii-nui Kaleiopuu took off his cloak and helmet and presented them to the Englishman, who could not have known how valuable they were. But both sides were quickly disillusioned with each other: Britons had sex with women on what to the Hawaiians was holy ground, while prudish sailors were shocked to learn that Kaleiopuu kept a string of teenaged boys as his aikane (lover of the same gender) whom he liked to ejaculate on to him. When one of Cook’s officers, William Bligh,^* ordered Hawaiians to perform some tasks and tried to beat them when they refused, Cook wisely sailed away – to explore the coast of California.

On Cook’s return, his men infuriated the Hawaiians by mistakenly purloining idols for firewood. Sensing peril, he decided to emulate Cortés and kidnap King Kaleiopuu at gunpoint, but he was foiled when his wife Kanekapolei raised the alarm. In the melee, Cook shot a Hawaiian and his marines killed several more before a nobleman smashed Cook on the head with a shark-tooth mace. The Hawaiians then stabbed Cook and four marines.

While the king hid, his nephew Prince Kamehameha sent a pig as a gesture of reconciliation to the Discovery. After the British had bombarded a village, Kaleiopuu delivered Cook’s skull, scalp, feet and hands.^* The remains were buried at sea.

In 1782, when Kaleiopuu died, his son Kiwalao succeeded him, with Kamehameha as keeper of the war god: offering humans to the war god was the royal prerogative, but Kamehameha sacrificed a rebellious nobleman to the god himself. When Kiwalao tried to stop him, Kamehameha captured and sacrificed him, and then made himself alii-nui of the main island. To conquer the other islands, he needed cannon – and soon afterwards two Americans blundered murderously if providentially to deliver them. Similarly Washington needed the French fleet if the Patriots were to win, but Louis moved with glacial slowness.

THE INTERVENTION: ANTOINETTE AND FERSEN

Louis sent a contingent under the comte de Rochambeau to America in 1780; and to stop the gossip and seek adventure, Fersen joined him. Yet this intervention in America was too little, too slow. Louis had also dispatched a Franco-Spanish armada of sixty-five ships-of-the-line bearing 30,000 troops to invade Britain, an enterprise that narrowly failed thanks mainly to the weather. Necker had borrowed massively to pay for it. It was the murkiness of the royal finances that made French borrowing so expensive: British finances were much more transparent, allowing the British government to borrow at a full 2 per cent less than France. Necker produced a false budget that concealed the desperate financial crisis now exacerbated by war, then resigned in a sulk.

Not until two years into the war did Louis order his full fleet under Admiral de Grasse to back the Americans. In September 1780, Washington and Lafayette met Rochambeau and Fersen to coordinate. As the toughest British general, Charles Cornwallis, marched his 9,000 troops into Virginia, Washington and the French, supported now by the formidable fleet under Grasse, gave chase.

In early 1781, Cornwallis dispatched units to hunt down Governor Jefferson of Virginia. Jefferson abandoned the capital, Richmond, to British predations, and fled to his western plantation. Twenty-three of his slaves escaped – as Jefferson put it, ‘joined the enemy’ – as did fourteen of Washington’s.

Jefferson was no warlord. His delicate wife Martha gave birth to six children, though only two daughters survived their childhood; each time her health had declined.^* Now he devotedly nursed her.

Suddenly the war accelerated. Washington, Rochambeau and Grasse converged on Virginia, where Cornwallis confidently fortified his camp at Yorktown.

In November 1780, as Antoinette awaited news from America, her mother Maria Theresa, aged sixty-three, lay dying at the Hofburg in Joseph’s arms.

‘Is Your Majesty uncomfortable?’ asked Joseph.

‘Yes,’ replied the queen-empress, ‘but in a good enough position to die.’ Now Joseph could patronize his beloved musicians, Salieri and Mozart, and reform the monarchy with ideas that even Jefferson would approve of. ‘All men,’ Joseph declared, ‘are equal at birth.’

MOZART, JOSEPH AND HIS CONTINUAL ERECTIONS

Joseph, now forty, far from being a long-jawed, slathering Joseph Habsburg, was slim, handsome, informal, witty and self-deprecating, the most extraordinary of his family – a radical visionary: ‘We inherit from our parents no more than animal life, hence there’s not the slightest difference between king, count, bourgeois and peasant.’ He embarked on endless tours and inspections, with a tiny entourage, eschewing ceremony, enjoying his incognito as Count von Falkenstein, dressed plainly in military coat and boots, and indulging in sexual adventures which he complained were a ‘choice between ugly peasants and falconers’ wives’. Visiting Paris, he was randomly recruited to stand godfather at a christening where the priest asked his name:

‘Joseph.’

‘Surname?’

‘Second.’

‘Occupation?’

‘Emperor.’^*

When the American revolution was discussed, Jefferson claimed Joseph joked, ‘I’m a royalist by trade.’ But he was also obsessional, tactless and in a hurry. ‘As a prince he’ll have continual erections,’ his dear friend, the prince de Ligne, predicted, ‘and never be satisfied. His reign will be a continual priapism.’ Believing reform was possible only from above, Joseph was an indefatigable legislomaniac, promulgating 6,206 mostly admirable laws: his Toleranzpatent delivered religious tolerance to Protestants and Jews – while imposing measures to rationalize what he regarded as Jewish superstition. The kaiser was a great reformer but also a militaristic disciplinarian, believing that ‘Everything exists for the state.’ He abolished serfdom, reduced censorship and diminished the nobility. Nonetheless as emperor he lacked both balance and empathy.

In 1784, he banned extravagant funerals and to save space and decay ordered people to be buried in sacks in communal graves, designing a reusable coffin that opened to drop the body into the grave. The Viennese so hated this that Joseph sparked funeral riots. ‘He had no idea whatever of the art of government,’ wrote Casanova, who met him, ‘for he hadn’t the slightest knowledge of the human heart.’ But, for musicians, Joseph was a boon: he lived for music, himself playing clavier and cello, and adored Italian comic opera.

In 1781, Mozart, now twenty-five and court organist in Salzburg, was ordered by his master the prince-archbishop to meet him in Vienna for the celebrations of Joseph’s accession. Mozart could not wait to rid himself of the prince-archbishop who, jealous of his minion, screamed at him. Mozart, small, thin, with large eyes and a nimbus of blond hair, was outraged by the prince-archbishop’s arrogance: ‘my body was trembling all over, and I staggered about the street like a drunkard’. Mercifully sacked, ‘my main goal now is to meet the emperor … I’m determined he should get to know me. I would be so happy if I could whip through my opera for him and then play a fugue or two, for that’s what he likes.’ By December, Joseph had invited Mozart to play in a piano competition and was backing his career as pianist and as composer of concertos and of operas, starting with The Abduction from the Seraglio.

In a city of music, favoured by a music-crazy emperor, Mozart bubbled with ideas. ‘The music reigns supreme,’ he wrote. Just as he had once written about sex and shitting, now it was all about music as he describes how he wrote his opera: ‘Now about Bellmont’s [sic] aria in A Major. Oh how anxious, oh how passionate? Do you know how I expressed it? – even expressing the loving, throbbing heart? – with two violins playing in octaves.’ Mozart, whose amorous instincts had been restrained by a terror of venereal disease ever since seeing a childhood friend afflicted with syphilis, was boarding with a musical family, the Webers, whose nineteen-year-old daughter Constanze he fell in love with. They married happily and had six children, losing half of them. Mozart was heartbroken when their first boy died: ‘We are both very sad about our poor, bonny, fat darling little boy.’ He never stopped flirting, but as he wrote to a playboy friend, ‘Don’t you think the pleasures of unstable capricious love affairs don’t even come close to the blessing of true affection?’ Walking in the Augarten, spotting Mozart and Constanze japing around, Joseph strolled up and teased them: ‘Well, well, married three weeks and fisticuffs already.’

It was at the premiere of the opera that Joseph supposedly said, ‘Too beautiful for our [Viennese] ears, my dear Mozart, and a monstrous quantity of notes,’ but the emperor admired and supported Mozart. He was joking, as he often did, about cloddish Viennese audiences, though earlier he had said that Mozart ‘has only one fault in his pieces for stage, and his singers have often complained of it, he deafens them with his full accompaniment’.

At the premiere of his D-minor Piano Concerto, Joseph waved his hat and shouted, ‘Bravo, Mozart!’ It was mutual. ‘There’s no monarch in the world, I’d prefer to serve than the emperor,’ said Mozart, ‘but I shan’t go begging for a post.’ His real frustration was that Joseph had appointed an Italian composer, Antonio Salieri, six years older, as imperial chamber composer, blocking his way. Salieri’s operas were more successful than Mozart’s. Joseph backed both composers; when Gluck died, Joseph promoted Salieri to Kapellmeister and Mozart to imperial chamber composer.

Yet the Habsburg dreamed of conquest. Joseph outmanoeuvred old Frederick to negotiate a new alliance with Catherine the Great, planning to attack and partition the Ottoman empire. The Romanovs had always aspired to conquer Constantinople, which they called Tsargrad – Caesarcity.^* Their plan depended on Britain and France being distracted in America.

Instead of defying the rebels at Yorktown, Cornwallis was trapped there. When the Royal Navy tried to rescue him, the French defeated it in Chesapeake Bay. On 19 October 1781, Cornwallis surrendered to Washington.^* Fersen helped with the negotiations while enjoying the Americans. ‘The women are pretty, amiable and available,’ he wrote. ‘That’s all I need.’ Louis and Antoinette had much to celebrate. Three days later at Versailles, she delivered a dauphin, heir to the throne. This time only ten people were allowed to attend the birth – and Antoinette feared it was another daughter until the king said, ‘Monseiur le Dauphin requests permission to enter!’

Without informing America’s French allies, Ben Franklin started to negotiate American independence.^* Loyalists fled to Canada or back to Britain; the escaped slaves who had fought for the British were now in peril. Washington, marching on New York, ordered that his runaways be recaptured: ‘Some of my own slaves … may probably be in New York … I’ll be much obliged by your securing them so I may obtain them again.’ Seventeen were hunted down. It is not known how many of Jefferson’s slaves were recaptured. At the last moment, in scenes not unlike Saigon in 1975 and Kabul in 2021, Loyalists crowded on to British ships to escape. But, unlike the betrayals of Kabul 2021, the British, despite Washington’s demands to reclaim slaves, refused to renege on their promises to rescue all of them: 75,000 Loyalists, including many ex-slaves, were evacuated from New York, Savannah and Charleston.

‘Oh God,’ gasped Lord North, ‘it’s over!’ George III wanted to fight on, but North was broken.

Scorning those who asked him to take power or become king of America, Washington resigned his command and retired to Mount Vernon. ‘If he does that,’ said George, who had spent his whole reign seeking an honest politician, ‘he’ll be the greatest man in the world.’

Shaken by the debacle, George sought fresh leaders untainted by the loss of America, and turned to an unusual young man, William Pitt, second son of the victor of the Seven Years War. After Cambridge, where his friend William Wilberforce recalled, ‘No man ever indulged more freely or happily in playful facetiousness,’ Pitt arrived effortlessly in Parliament. He argued that America must be granted its freedom, and in 1782 became chancellor of the exchequer, still only twenty-three, in the short-lived government that negotiated US independence. The loss of America diminished royal power decisively, forcing George to accept an unholy alliance of North and the sybaritic radical Charles James Fox – one of the first times a British king was obliged by parliamentary votes and public opinion to accept a minister totally against his will. But he soon dismissed them.

Desperate to break the pattern of corrupt government, George offered Pitt the premiership thrice before at Christmas 1783 he accepted: wags believed that Pitt and his ‘mince-pie ministry’ would scarcely survive Christmas. But Honest Billy or William the Great – punctilious, eloquent, incorruptible, but also tightly wound, hard-drinking (prescribed booze for his nerves by his idiotic doctor, as his father had been) and asexual (he probably died a virgin) – was a sublime orator and efficient manager, demanding control of his ministers from the king. George agreed, marking the beginning of what became cabinet government under a powerful prime minister.

America was gone, but the death of the British empire was exaggerated. Politically divided, the transatlantic Anglo-states remained interconnected by culture, language, commerce and migration.^* Pitt was about to appoint a new warlord in India who would found a British raj there. It happened that in the home island three extraordinary entrepreneurs were driving the changes that would propel Europe to global power and remodel the very shape of the family.

* The brutality of the American colonial war is best grasped by the bounty offered by the Massachusetts governor William Shirley for native American scalps: £40 for adult males, £20 for women and children under twelve.

* Almost an exact contemporary of Frederick the Great, born in 1711, the Qianlong Emperor was the eleven-year-old prince who had been so loved by his grandfather Kangxi. After the death of his father Yongzheng, probably of an overdose of the mercury-based Taoist elixirs that killed so many Chinese monarchs, he expanded the empire westwards into Xinjiang (New Province) to the edge of the Himalayas (wiping out the Dhungars almost completely and slaughtering Uighur Muslims after a rebellion, caused by mass rapes of Uighur women by Chinese officials) and enjoyed vast revenues from selling porcelain and tea to the EIC and other European traders while writing over 40,000 poems. But at the heart of his glory was a sadness: he never stopped loving his first wife, Lady Fuca, whose her death at thirty-six from smallpox broke his heart: ‘Ah, that ill-fated third month of spring,’ he wrote, ‘seventeen years have passed yet my grief remains unappeased.’

* In modern histories, focused narrowly on the British empire, this is usually blamed on Britain and its East India Company, and Plassey is presented as momentously important – yet the British would not control Delhi or most of India for half a century. Durrani the Afghan conqueror, who does not fit the conventional narrative of ‘Afghanistan, graveyard of empires’, is much neglected. And it was the huge Maratha empire that would now dominate most of India for many decades.

* The other winner was Spain, which received swathes of New France – the vastness of Louisiana, much of the central-southern USA – to add their existing New Mexico, California and Texas.

* The secretary to the royal council was a young man who had left his peasant family at fourteen and risen in the royal bureaucracy: his name was Bernard-François Balssa and he later changed his name to Balzac. He was the father of the novelist.

* Potemkin led the expansion of the Russian empire around the Black Sea, long ruled by the semi-nomadic khans of the Giray family, descended from Genghis, and the Ottomans. Catherine had abolished the hetmanate in 1764. Now Potemkin annexed the old Cossack republic, the Zaporozhian Sech, assuming the title grand hetman and making the Cossacks into a Russian national legion. He directed the conquest of what is now south Ukraine. Calling it New Russia, he founded a series of new cities, starting with Kherson. In 1783, he annexed Crimea, where he built a new naval base, Sebastopol, and Russia’s first Black Sea fleet. Kherson was followed by Mariupol, Ekaterinoslav (Dnipro) and Nikolaev (Mykolaiv). Then he conquered Ottoman lands, where he founded Odessa. The Russians had now conquered a vast territory sparsely populated. Russian viceroys, Potemkin and his successor the French aristocrat the duc de Richelieu, attracted Greeks, Italians, Ukrainians, Poles and Russians to settle in the new cities, and many Jews who were unable to live in the big cities but settled in huge numbers in Odessa. When Ukraine became the breadbasket of Russia, Odessa became its entrepôt. But there was a dark side to Russian settlement and conquest: Muslim Tatars, Turks and other peoples such as the Circassians and Chechens were ethnically cleansed or massacred if they resisted.

* Clive again returned home on the verge of nervous breakdown. Both Munro and Clive had sons who joined the EIC and served in India. Munro’s sons became famous because one was killed by a tiger, the other by a shark.

* On 22 November 1774, Clive, in agony from gallstones and depressed by his critics, overdosed on opium then cut his throat with a penknife. He was forty-nine. Samuel Johnson noted that the conquistador ‘had acquired his fortune by such crimes that his consciousness of them impelled him to cut his own throat’. His son Edward was given the earldom of Powis, allowing him to keep his father’s treasures in Powis Castle, where many remain today. Returning to India, he governed Madras for five years.

* The Vestindisk Kompagni traded 3,000 slaves annually from Fort Christiansborg, the Castle of the Gold Coast. Denmark was the first European country to abolish the slave trade.

* The Danes negotiated Caroline’s exile. George settled her at Celle Castle, Hanover: she never saw her children again, dying at the age of twenty-three. As for the daughter of the English princess and the Enlightened doctor, Louise Augusta, cultured and beautiful, was brought up as a royal daughter, married within the royal family and saw her daughter married to a future king. But she had inherited one thing from her parents: among many lovers, she had a romance with the royal doctor who solved her infertility (it was actually her husband’s) by fathering her children himself. She lived into another age, dying in 1843.

* British insouciance was personified by the fourth Proprietor of Maryland, Frederick, Lord Baltimore, a psychopathic predator who in 1751 inherited the family’s fortune and American estates, and almost provoked an early revolution by ordering taxes to be raised in Maryland – but not on his own estates. Baltimore killed his first wife (sister of the duke of Bridgewater, the future canal magnate) by pushing her out of a speeding carriage, then set off to live in Constantinople like a Turkish pasha with a harem, stoned on opium and aphrodisiacs (observed by James Boswell, who described him as ‘living a strange, wild, life’). He returned to London where in 1768 he kidnapped and raped a beautiful milliner, Sarah Woodcock, leading to his arrest and trial, at which he was acquitted, the victim blamed for not escaping more efficiently. Baltimore then travelled in Europe accompanied by ‘eight women, a physician, and two negroes, which he called his corregidores, who were entrusted with the discipline of his little seraglio. One of his mistresses then published Memoirs of the Seraglio of the Bashaw (Pasha) of Merryland, by a Discarded Sultana who revealed that he struggled to satisfy his eight girlfriends.’ In 1771, he died in Naples, leaving Maryland to his illegitimate son, Henry Harford, the last Proprietor.

* Necker was a bold speculator who made a series of fortunes on the bourse and in the Compagnie des Indes Orientales. As he made his money during the 1760s, he paid court to a French widow, Madame de Vermenou, who had hired a young Swiss governess, Suzanne Curchod, a pastor’s daughter. Suzanne had fallen in love with a young British gentleman, Edward Gibbon, a child of the Enlightenment, on his travels and become engaged. When both families vetoed their marriage, Gibbon returned home. Not unlike one of his trades, Necker switched out of Vermenous into Curchods and married Suzanne: their daughter would be the writer and provocateur Germaine de Staël. Now, just as Necker became Louis’s finance minister, Gibbon published his elegantly written and entertaining Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, recasting history with the Enlightened idea that the superstitions of Christianity had undermined the pagan pragmatism of Rome, while implying that modern Europe was the heir of Roman civilization.

* Bligh’s career was a chronicle of naval stupidity. Ten years later, in 1789, as captain of HMS Bounty, he was ordered to Tahiti to gather breadfruit saplings which Sir Joseph Banks believed would serve as food for Caribbean slaves. There he was overcome by mutineers, who were partly dazzled by the idyllic Tahitian life, and set adrift, surviving a journey of 4,160 miles. In Tahiti the mutineers aided a chieftain named Pomare to unite the islands as a single kingdom which they ruled until a French protectorate was imposed. Sailing on, they settled on the uninhabited Pitcairn Island, named after a British officer later killed in battle with the Americans at Bunker Hill. As for Captain Bligh, he was promoted to vice-admiral and appointed governor of New South Wales. That did not go well either.

* In death, Cook was treated like a chieftain by the Hawaiians. He was scalped, his heart excised, his body eviscerated and some flesh preserved, then the rest was placed in a traditional underground oven, and the bones collected to preserve his mana, sacred charisma.

* While others were fighting, Jefferson, once his term as governor was over, worked on his Notes on Virginia on race and slavery, reflecting on the inferiority of black reasoning, which could be improved by white blood. He argued that hurried liberation of slaves would unleash a race war against whites.

* Joseph also enjoyed being mistaken for his own servant. Asked what services he provided the emperor, he said straight-faced, ‘I sometimes shave him.’ Although his brother Leopold, grand duke of Tuscany, was his heir, Joseph trained his conscientious but lumpy nephew Franz for the future, complaining that the ‘stunted’ boy was ‘backward in bodily dexterity’ and ‘a spoiled mother’s child’.

* The Ottoman carve-up was not Joseph’s only scheme. His main one was to swap the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) with Bavaria to create an even larger German monarchy. But twice the plan was foiled by Frederick, who mobilized his army, and by Joseph’s brother-in-law Louis failing to back him despite Antoinette’s lobbying. Instead, Louis settled the dispute by paying millions to Joseph, payments that would cost Antoinette dearly.

* Yorktown was the harbinger of modernity in a different way too: among the young French aristocrats fighting with Lafayette was Henri, comte de Saint-Simon, an American general at twenty, who forty years later developed the idea of socialism.

* To win leverage in negotiations, Washington ordered the kidnapping of George III’s son Prince William (the future William IV), who was still with the navy in New York, but his commander bungled the plan.

* In 1783, when the US became independent, north America contained around three million people; Spanish America fifteen million. Britain’s population was nine million; Spain’s ten million. The Spanish world was twice as large as the Anglo-world. Yet the Brits were catching up: between 1640 and 1820, 1.3 million migrants – British, French and German – settled, around 70 per cent of them British. In the next long century massive migration to north America, as well as to Australia and South Africa, completely reversed the trend: by 1930, the Anglo-world was twice the size of the Spanish.