The World полностью

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

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

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

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

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