The World полностью

* 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.