North believed victory was assured, and hired 18,000 Hessian mercenaries, a traditional measure since British armies were small. Catherine the Great and Potemkin, who had just crushed a massive serf rebellion on the Volga, offered George a Russian army to destroy the Americans, an intriguing possibility. Had George and North really been ‘tyrants’, as the Patriots alleged, they would have launched a total war like Catherine’s against her rebels with massive forces, or they would have retaliated with the brutality used by the king’s uncle the duke of Cumberland against Scottish rebels in 1745. Instead they hoped to win over the Americans, never sent enough troops, underestimated the rebel resolve, skills and numbers and exaggerated Loyalist sentiment. North barely interfered with his colonial secretary, Lord George Germain, who divided British forces into three under rival commanders which ultimately allowed the Americans to defeat them one by one. It was difficult enough to run a war five weeks away. North, depressed, begged to resign, but George, having secretly paid his massive debts, forced him to stay. In May 1778, a cadaverous Pitt (Chatham) hobbled into the Lords, aided by his son, to advocate American conciliation, only to collapse. He died in the arms of his eighteen-year-old son William, who would be the greatest premier of the century.
Louis XVI watched Britain’s American fiasco with satisfaction, though he agonized over whether or not to intervene. But he had bigger problems: failing debts in his kingdom and sexual failure in his boudoir, both of which were the talk of Europe.
ANTOINETTE AND LOUIS: IMPERIAL SEX THERAPY AT VERSAILLES
In November 1776, Antoinette, unhappy and bewildered, appealed to her brother Emperor Joseph, a most unlikely sex therapist, whose latest marriage and personal relationships were disastrous. In June 1777, Joseph visited his sister in Paris where he investigated the astonishing situation at the most sexually unbuttoned court in Europe: no one had explained to either the king or queen how to make love. But the emperor was perhaps the only man the king of France could confide in. Joseph took the king – ‘rather weak but not an imbecile’ – on a walk. ‘Imagine! In his marriage bed. He has strong perfectly satisfactory erection … introduces the member, stays there for two minutes without moving, withdraws without ever discharging but still erect and bids goodnight,’ Joseph wrote to his brother Leopold. ‘Ah! If I could have been present once, I should have arranged it properly. He needs to be whipped to make him discharge in a passion like donkeys. Furthermore my sister is pretty placid and they’re two incompetents together.’
Somehow Joseph arranged it, saving the alliance and the marriage. As Louis made love to Antoinette, she thought of Maria Theresa: ‘My dear mother … it has already been more than eight days since my marriage was perfectly consummated; the proof has been repeated and yesterday even more completely. At first I thought of sending my dear mama a courier …’
The first birth – a daughter – was nightmarish: at the words ‘The queen is about to give birth,’ courtiers filled the hot chamber; she haemorrhaged and passed out as Louis tried to open the window. When later he did not make love to her, Maria Theresa presumed he had a mistress: ‘My rule is the woman must just patiently endure her husband’s lapses. No point making an issue of it.’ Yet their marriage was much better: Louis told her he loved her and would never take a mistress. Two sons followed quickly. Joseph boasted: ‘They both [king and queen] have written to thank me.’ The kaiser adored his sister, reflecting that he could be happily married to her himself, but she worried him, for ‘the vortex of dissipation around her prevents her from seeing and thinking about anything but going from one pleasure to another’. Joseph predicted, ‘The revolution will be cruel.’
The American revolution too had become cruel, with a racial undercurrent. The British governor of Virginia, the earl of Dunmore, immediately appealed to enslaved African-Americans: ‘all servants, negroes and others’ were to be freed ‘if able and willing to bear arms’ they joined ‘His Majesty’s troops’. Three hundred freedmen in Dunmore’s Royal Ethiopian Regiment fought under the banner ‘Liberty to Slaves’, while a Black Brigade under a remorseless guerrilla commander, Titus Cornelius, known as Colonel Tye, harassed American forces. Fifty thousand slaves escaped to the British. The Iroquois and other Native Americans planned to back the British against the colonials.
Washington tried to hold the army together at Valley Forge as he intimidated Iroquois leaders and trained his ‘exceedingly dirty and nasty’ troops whose naivety he blamed on ‘an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people’. He hoped that an extended war with overlong supply lines would undermine British resolve.
