Early in her father-in-law’s reign, Antoinette boasted that she had had a minister sacked. ‘I asked the king to send him away,’ she told a close friend, mocking Louis as that ‘poor man’. This outraged her mother. ‘Where is the good and generous heart of Archduchess Antoinette?’ she asked her. ‘I see only intrigue, vulgar spite, delight in mockery and persecution.’ She added, ‘All the winter long I have trembled at the thought of your too easy success and the flatterers surrounding you while you have thrown yourself into a life of pleasure and preposterous display.’
It was unfortunate that this couple faced the challenges of a monarchy on the verge of bankruptcy. France had never been as absolute as Louis XIV claimed, always undercut by the medieval rights of the parlements and by a creaking taxation system that did not tax the aristocracy. Even as crisis threatened the regime, courtiers greedily grabbed every franc they could. Ruled by ravening factions and sclerotic formality, even a Mazarin would have struggled to navigate the problems faced by the royal locksmith.
‘Your luck can all too easily change,’ Maria Theresa warned Antoinette. ‘One day you will recognize the truth of this and then it will be too late. I hope I shall not live until misfortune overtakes you …’
Antoinette was chastened: ‘I love the empress but I’m afraid of her.’ While worrying about Antoinette, Maria Theresa had to cope with an ebullient and ambitious upstart to the east: Catherine the Great. It is ironic that this chauvinistic era boasted more female potentates than the twenty-first century.
In 1762, the man who had saved Frederick, Tsar Peter III, had paid for this folly with his life when his long-suffering German-born wife Catherine organized a coup with the help of her lover and his friends in the Guards. Peter was arrested then strangled by her lover, a regicide that horrified Maria Theresa, who was also appalled by Catherine’s lack of sexual inhibitions: she advanced her lovers to official court positions, like a king with his mistresses. Worse, Catherine turned out to be politically brilliant, adeptly expanding Russian power. She was a passionate enthusiast for the Enlightenment and even wrote a reforming plan, convening a commission to debate the abolition of serfdom.
‘A woman is always a woman,’ Frederick told his brother Heinrich, ‘and in feminine government, cunt has more influence than sound reason.’ In fact, reason of state was paramount for Catherine. Blue-eyed, auburn-haired, curvaceous, radiantly charming and politically rapacious, Catherine was a master of publicity, corresponding with Voltaire, who acclaimed her the Great (as he had Frederick), and hosting Diderot in St Petersburg. But she was too shrewd to impose their ideas, turning instead to empire building, dominating first Poland, where she orchestrated the election of an ex-lover, Stanisław Poniatowski, as king, then fighting the Ottomans and Girays in the south, where she gained new territories.
In 1772, Catherine manoeuvred Frederick into a carve-up of Poland–Lithuania, and together they offered Maria Theresa a bite. Maria Theresa hated any collusion with the monstrous Frederick and the lascivious Catherine but could not resist. ‘One must know,’ she sighed, ‘when to sacrifice oneself.’ After Joseph had travelled to meet Frederick (‘That man is a genius,’ he said), she joined the partition that would demolish the Polish kingdom. ‘Catherine and I are simply brigands, but I wonder how the queen-empress managed to square her confessor,’ sneered Frederick. ‘She wept as she took; the more she wept, the more she took.’
This was only the beginning for Catherine, but faced with a long Ottoman war and a dangerous peasant revolt, she promoted an irrepressible, flamboyant and larger-than-life visionary, her lover Grigori Potemkin, who became her secret husband and political partner – the greatest minister of the Romanov dynasty. ‘This is what happens’, reflected Frederick, ‘when cock and cunt rule.’*
The unusually wholesome George III, happily married to a German princess, sought a very different approach. In 1770, he appointed a genial, competent childhood friend untainted by faction to lead the government who proved the most successful manager of parliament since Walpole, though he was less proficient in America. Lord North, thirty-eight years old, was so modest he refused to call himself prime minister. But he could not escape the truth that British parliamentary government was badly designed to conduct wars in faraway places. Frederick the Great, master of united command, scoffed that ‘The King of England changes his ministers as often as he changes his shirts.’
