The World полностью

* At a time when doctors had prescribed port for both Pitt and his father, turning both into alcoholics, George’s massive doses of emetic tartar contained as much as 5 per cent arsenic: when his hair was recently tested, it contained seventeen times the level that counts as arsenic poisoning, enough to aggravate his stomach aches, delirium and psychosis.

* This sleazy cast would not be complete without ‘Count Cagliostro’, a charlatan who, claiming to be several thousand years old (born in ancient Egypt) and to have met Jesus personally, thrived in this time of self-invention, social mobility and mystical credulity. Born Joseph Balsamo in Palermo, this mountebank conned a rich gold dealer, then, adopting his exotic title, travelled through Europe with a lissom teenaged wife Serafina, whom he lent to his patrons. Rohan was one of them, but you cannot trick a trickster: he showed Cagliostro the contract faked by Motte: ‘A forgery!’ said Cagliostro.

* Saint-Georges had become a sensation twenty years earlier by winning a duel against a racist fellow pupil. He won a place in the royal guard of honour but made his name as a musician, rising to direct Paris’s Concert des Amateurs. He had been in line to direct the Opéra when its sopranos complained to Queen Antoinette, ‘assuring Her Majesty that their honour and delicate conscience could never allow them to submit to the orders of a mulatto’. But Antoinette favoured Saint-Georges, summoning him to Versailles, where he was ‘invited to play with the queen’ – she liked to play piano, he no doubt played violin. Saint-Georges started to write opera with a literary artillery officer, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, but their Ernestine, attended by Antoinette, was not a hit. This ‘mulatto man’, wrote the American John Adams when he visited Paris in 1779, ‘is the most accomplished man in Europe in riding, shooting, fencing, dancing and music.’

* Mansfield had more experience of this world than he let on for he had adopted Dido Belle, the daughter of his sailor nephew and an enslaved woman, bringing her up with his children (painted with Lady Elizabeth Murray by David Martin) and leaving her an annuity in his will. She later married a Frenchman and had two sons – both of whom worked for the EIC – dying in 1805.

* Wedgwood designed an anti-slavery medallion that showed a kneeling black man, hands raised to heaven, inscribed ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’

* Yet even Wilberforce did not believe the slaves were ready for liberation, telling Parliament in 1805 that before they ‘could be fit to receive freedom, it would madness to attempt to give it to them’. At his dinners for the African and Asiatic Society, black activists ate behind a screen. Opponents of slavery in both America and Britain founded new settlements of returned black slaves in west Africa. In 1787, Sharp and others involved in the Committee for the Black Poor backed a plan to settle several hundred black Londoners in a Province of Freedom in Sierra Leone not far from the slaving castles on the coast. Despite backing by Pitt, then chancellor, most of the settlers died. In 1792, a flotilla of black Loyalists from Nova Scotia, including Harry Washington, an escaped slave of the US president, founded Freetown.

* France, like Britain, oscillated between the ideal that slavery could not exist in a law-based homeland and the reality of the slave owners’ profits. After Louis XIV had freed two escaped slaves in 1691, slave owners won an edict in 1716 that allowed slave masters to bring slaves to France; this was overturned in 1738 and it became routine to free the enslaved until in 1777–8 a procurator at the Admiralty, Guillaume Poncet de La Grave, warned against racial pollution by the growing number of free people of colour, persuading Louis XVI to decree a Police des Noirs to prevent them entering France and marrying whites. Yet slaves could still appeal for freedom at the Admiralty court.

* In London, Saint-Georges endured the whims of the prince of Wales, who insisted on organizing a fencing competition between the mixed-raced composer and the French transvestite the chevalier d’Éon.

* Antoinette was already hated. Ten years before, at the Parisian Opéra, she had endured faltering applause. ‘Why was I scarcely clapped?’ she asked. Bursting into tears, she added, ‘What have I done to them?’ She could not help being a Habsburg, but in 1784 she backed payments to buy off her brother Joseph’s menaces to Holland. She was extravagant – though her extravagance hardly approached that of Catherine the Great – and she never said, ‘Let them eat cake.’ She was, writes John Hardman, ‘the scapegoat of an irrational age suffering a nervous collapse, the so-called rationality of the Enlightenment shot through with the charlatanism of Cagliostro, Mesmer [celebrity hypnotist] and Necker’.