* The other winner was Spain, which received swathes of New France – the vastness of Louisiana, much of the central-southern USA – to add their existing New Mexico, California and Texas.
* The secretary to the royal council was a young man who had left his peasant family at fourteen and risen in the royal bureaucracy: his name was Bernard-François Balssa and he later changed his name to Balzac. He was the father of the novelist.
* Potemkin led the expansion of the Russian empire around the Black Sea, long ruled by the semi-nomadic khans of the Giray family, descended from Genghis, and the Ottomans. Catherine had abolished the hetmanate in 1764. Now Potemkin annexed the old Cossack republic, the Zaporozhian Sech, assuming the title grand hetman and making the Cossacks into a Russian national legion. He directed the conquest of what is now south Ukraine. Calling it New Russia, he founded a series of new cities, starting with Kherson. In 1783, he annexed Crimea, where he built a new naval base, Sebastopol, and Russia’s first Black Sea fleet. Kherson was followed by Mariupol, Ekaterinoslav (Dnipro) and Nikolaev (Mykolaiv). Then he conquered Ottoman lands, where he founded Odessa. The Russians had now conquered a vast territory sparsely populated. Russian viceroys, Potemkin and his successor the French aristocrat the duc de Richelieu, attracted Greeks, Italians, Ukrainians, Poles and Russians to settle in the new cities, and many Jews who were unable to live in the big cities but settled in huge numbers in Odessa. When Ukraine became the breadbasket of Russia, Odessa became its entrepôt. But there was a dark side to Russian settlement and conquest: Muslim Tatars, Turks and other peoples such as the Circassians and Chechens were ethnically cleansed or massacred if they resisted.
* Clive again returned home on the verge of nervous breakdown. Both Munro and Clive had sons who joined the EIC and served in India. Munro’s sons became famous because one was killed by a tiger, the other by a shark.
* On 22 November 1774, Clive, in agony from gallstones and depressed by his critics, overdosed on opium then cut his throat with a penknife. He was forty-nine. Samuel Johnson noted that the conquistador ‘had acquired his fortune by such crimes that his consciousness of them impelled him to cut his own throat’. His son Edward was given the earldom of Powis, allowing him to keep his father’s treasures in Powis Castle, where many remain today. Returning to India, he governed Madras for five years.
* The
* The Danes negotiated Caroline’s exile. George settled her at Celle Castle, Hanover: she never saw her children again, dying at the age of twenty-three. As for the daughter of the English princess and the Enlightened doctor, Louise Augusta, cultured and beautiful, was brought up as a royal daughter, married within the royal family and saw her daughter married to a future king. But she had inherited one thing from her parents: among many lovers, she had a romance with the royal doctor who solved her infertility (it was actually her husband’s) by fathering her children himself. She lived into another age, dying in 1843.
* British insouciance was personified by the fourth Proprietor of Maryland, Frederick, Lord Baltimore, a psychopathic predator who in 1751 inherited the family’s fortune and American estates, and almost provoked an early revolution by ordering taxes to be raised in Maryland – but not on his own estates. Baltimore killed his first wife (sister of the duke of Bridgewater, the future canal magnate) by pushing her out of a speeding carriage, then set off to live in Constantinople like a Turkish pasha with a harem, stoned on opium and aphrodisiacs (observed by James Boswell, who described him as ‘living a strange, wild, life’). He returned to London where in 1768 he kidnapped and raped a beautiful milliner, Sarah Woodcock, leading to his arrest and trial, at which he was acquitted, the victim blamed for not escaping more efficiently. Baltimore then travelled in Europe accompanied by ‘eight women, a physician, and two negroes, which he called his
