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Deciding he needed to marry again, Ivan held a bride-show at which the German doctor helped him select the final twelve girls. His role was to ‘inspect their urine in a glass and define and explain its nature’, after which the tsar chose one for himself, but she died soon after the wedding. He married for a fifth time just before Khan Devlet raided northwards again. On this occasion Ivan’s generals used his artillery, manned by German mercenaries, to hold off the Tatars. Ivan now reunited the kingdom, terminating the division between oprichnina and zemshchina. Dismissing or killing his fifth wife, Ivan wanted a sixth royal wife from England or Poland. Dr Bomelius proposed Elizabeth of England, who had already agreed to grant Ivan asylum if he lost his throne. Ivan criticized Elizabeth for not being ‘sovereign-born’ and for remaining single. Now Poland offered an opportunity.

In July 1572, its king died, leaving his sister Anna, half Italian, well educated and unmarried at forty, as heir. But the Polish nobles – the szlachta – rejected a female queen and their Sejm (parliament) gathered to select a new king who would marry Anna. Ivan, supported by some Lithuanians, proposed, as did a Habsburg, but a surprising outsider proved irresistibly flexible. Henri of Anjou, Catherine de’ Medici’s effete, vicious son who had failed to become king of England or Holland and was keen for his own crown, charmed Anna, whom he promised to marry, and agreed to terms that created the most free and democratic state in Europe.^* Henri won the election, but when he arrived, amazing the Poles with his heavy make-up and flamboyant entourage, he delayed marrying Anna and then suddenly received news that his brother Charles was dead. Henri was king of France and Poland. Abandoning Anna, infanta of Poland, who now sought a husband to fight on against Muscovy, Henri flounced away in the night like a scented, rouged thief, pursued by outraged Polish horsemen, to re-emerge in Paris as Henri III. ‘France and you,’ he told his mother, ‘are worth more than Poland.’

MURDER OF THE SONS: KING OF THE HERMAPHRODITES AND TSAR OF SIBERIA

Dressed in coral bracelets, earrings, doublets pleated and slashed in scarlet, and violet ribbons, his hair scented and curled, King Henri was nicknamed King of the Isle of Hermaphrodites or King of Sodom, but he was unable to stop the religious war, again banning Protestantism. Margot’s marriage to Navarre, sanctified amid the red wedding, was cursed: she had so many love affairs that the king had her arrested for promiscuity. Incensed, Margot remembered how he and his brother Charles had seduced her. Their mother Catherine hinted to her son-in-law Navarre that they should perhaps liquidate Margot.^*

Henri III recognized that Navarre, who had returned to Protestantism, was his heir but he was determined to be master. Forming his own hit squad, the Forty-Five, he had his Catholic rivals, the surviving Guise brothers, assassinated: one was killed in front of him as he sneered ‘King of Paris, eh? Not so big now’ – and the other was diced and cooked in a fireplace like an aristocratic kebab. Furious Parisians drove Henri out of Paris. Catherine was horrified: ‘Wretched man, what’s he done? Pray for him. He’s headed towards ruin.’ In August 1589, just after his mother died at sixty-nine, Henri received a visitor, a friar, while sitting on his commode. The friar drew a dagger and stabbed the defecating king. ‘Ah my God,’ cried Henri, holding his guts in, ‘the wretch!’ Before dying, he gave Navarre some final advice: ‘You’ll experience many calamities until you change your religion.’ With the passing of the last of the Valois branch, Navarre, now Henri IV, first of the Bourbons, fought for his kingdom – ‘I rule with my arse in the saddle and my gun in my fist’ – until he realized that his predecessor was right. Henri converted for the fifth and last time to Catholicism with the sentiment if not the words: ‘Paris is worth a mass.’^*

Henri’s second marriage did not bring him close to the record of Europe’s most uxorious monarch. In Muscovy, Ivan now married a seventh and eighth time, his last wife producing a son. In autumn 1575, Dr Bomelius cast a horoscope that predicted danger for the tsar. Ivan abdicated as grand prince of Russia and appointed in his place a scion of Genghis and nephew of Tsarina Marina, Simeon Bekbulatovich, who ‘reigned’ for a year before Ivan took back the crown. But in 1579 the war turned decisively: the Poles retook Polotsk and invaded Muscovy. Ivan blamed his disasters on Dr Bomelius, who tried to escape, jewels sewn into his clothes. He was caught and roasted on a spit.