The World полностью

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.