* The father, a super-rich procurator, illustrated the sexual predations of the white elite, the
* All remembered the 1781 rebellion against Spanish oppression in Peru by Tupac Amaru II, an educated Amerindian descended from the Incas. He led an army of 70,000, including female fighters led by his wife, against Cuzco, massacring Spaniards. When it was crushed, 100,000 Amerindians were killed and the Inca himself had his tongue cut out, before being pulled apart by four horses and displayed on the same square in Cuzco where his great-great-great-grandfather Inca Tupac Amaru I had been executed.
* Boyer was kind to Queen Marie Louise, granting her some property. But, as she came to fear for her life, she was rescued by the Royal Navy and conveyed to London. She and her daughters Améthyste and Athénaïre stayed with Clarkson: a black queen and princesses in Regency London..
* Francia never married and loved no one but recorded his sexual partners in a book, fathering seven children. When he discovered his own illegitimate daughter Ubalda was having sex for money, he declared the nobility of prostitution, which he regulated by ordering prostitutes to wear the gold comb, sign of a respectable Spanish lady. Only in Francia’s Paraguay were sex workers honoured.
* When Jefferson retired to Monticello in 1809, the grand Virginian returned to his courtly lifestyle, cared for by his paramour Sally Hemings, who was bringing up their four children. Although one of her sisters, Thenia, had been sold to James Monroe, Jefferson had freed two of her brothers, one of whom, his French-trained chef James, he had invited to be his White House chef; James refused; later he committed suicide. As for his own enslaved children, Jefferson had the boys trained as carpenters, and Harriet as a weaver, though they also learned violin. Their training as artisans was very different from the education of white Virginians.
* In its biggest slum, Angel Meadow, families lived amid heaps of garbage and clouds of smoke. In Liverpool, home to 80,000 and Britain’s second largest city by 1800, some 60 per cent of children died before the age of five, and life expectancy was twenty-six. Even as food improved, pushing up the population (the average height of an Englishman increased by two inches between 1750 and 1900), the industrial cities – seething with TB, cholera and typhoid – were killing the new working class in vast numbers. These new industries also widened the gap between classes, and changed the shape of families. The factories required managers and clerks, a new caste, mainly male, though aided by literate female assistants, who all worked in a new location: the office. While the workers sweated on the factory floor, these managers signed papers and enforced the new timetable – the working schedule that set the pace of western urban life until the Covid pandemic of 2020. Office workers wished to show their seniority to the foreman and their proximity to the proprietor. To promote the cult of industry, now associated with virtue and status, office workers wore dark shortened jackets and trousers, a costume that became the suit. Starting as Beau Brummell’s cravats, ties – the most futile item of clothing ever invented – developed as part of the uniform of working sobriety.
* The rebellion placed Tsar Alexander in an awkward position: his entourage was filled with Greeks, and his foreign minister was the Corfiote aristocrat Ioannis Kapodistrias, who left Russian service to become the first governor of independent Greece. Not only Greeks joined the Orthodox revolt: the Serbian warlord Đorđe Petrović, known as Black George (
* When the foreign secretary, Viscount Castlereagh, a manic depressive, committed suicide, Byron was elated:
Posterity will ne’er survey
A Nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss!
