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
Antoinette craved masques and spent exorbitantly on gambling at
