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De Witt and the Dutch believed that God would punish English depravity. Sure enough, in 1665, a wave of plague sent the country into a lockdown: thousands left London; universities closed. Even as 7,000 Londoners died a week, Pepys was on a professional and sexual roll – ‘I’ve never lived so merrily’ – while one Oxford student who had no interest in girls or parties benefited from being locked down for two years at his parents’ Lincolnshire home: Isaac Newton experimented on himself. ‘I took a bodkin [needle] and put it betwixt my eye and bone as near to the backside of my eye as I could,’ he wrote, drawing his eyeball. It was a revelatory moment: Newton, experimenting in gravity and mathematics, was one of the new European polymaths who believed above all else that science demanded proof – even if it meant a bodkin alongside his own eyeball.

The epidemic was followed by a fire that demolished much of London; it was Pepys who rushed to warn the king at Whitehall and advised him to blow up houses to stop its spread.^* Then de Witt orchestrated a killer blow. He visited the Dutch fleet and hanged three captains as encouragement, then, placing his brother Cornelis de Witt on board, he unleashed his plan. On 19 June 1667, the Dutch broke into the Medway and raided the naval base at Chatham, burning or capturing fourteen ships-of-the-line as London descended into panic. ‘The whole kingdom is undone,’ thought Pepys, who now found himself missing Cromwell: ‘strange how … everybody doth nowadays reflect upon Oliver and commend him’. Charles mocked ‘those pure angelical times’, sacrificed his chancellor Clarendon and sued for peace, marrying James’s daughter Mary to the young William of Orange.

Charles turned to his best friend in the world to deliver vengeance against the Dutch and money to stave off Parliament: his twenty-six-year-old sister, Henrietta.

MINETTE, BARBARA AND THE EATING OF DE WITT

The princess, whom Charles called Minette, was married to Louis XIV’s vicious brother, Philippe d’Orléans, known as Monsieur. Clever, cultured and passionate, she had charmed Louis and endured the bullying of Monsieur and his envious male lovers. Charles adored Minette and missed her a great deal: ‘I’m sure I’ll be very impatient till I have the happiness to see my chere Minette againe.’ And nothing pleased her like pleasing Charles. ‘Everyone has his private fancy, and mine is to be very much alive to all that concerns you!’ she wrote, adding, ‘There’s no one who loves you as well as I do.’ Now she proved it by shuttling between the kings, negotiating a secret treaty under which Louis XIV promised payments that offered Charles independence from Parliament in return for Charles’s secret promise to convert to Catholicism – none of which was contained in the associated public treaty. Minette’s performance showed how dynasty could empower women. But on her return to France she died in agony of a punctured ulcer. ‘Monsieur’s a villain!’ shouted a heartbroken Charles, sure Minette had been poisoned.

Now committed to a Catholic alliance, backed by a ‘cabal’ of ministers^* led by George, duke of Buckingham, slippery, graceful and vicious, who had negotiated the public treaty with Louis, Charles was already in bed with the Catholics.

Charles’s favourite for over a decade was the exuberant Barbara Villiers, great-niece of the first Buckingham, a curvaceous, tempestuous libertine, promoted to countess of Castlemaine^* and giving birth to five children, all ennobled. But she was brazenly Catholic.

While the king encouraged tolerance of Catholics, Parliament banned Catholics from office. Buckingham lost power when Charles’s secret treaty was in part exposed. It suited Charles, who had moved on to younger mistresses, telling Barbara he ‘cared not whom she loved’. She took new lovers, from acrobats to a young Guardsman called John Churchill, whose father was Winston Churchill, a royalist officer, and whose mother was another great-niece of Buckingham. Churchill’s ‘figure was beautiful, his manner irresistible, either by man or woman’; the phrase ‘as slender as Churchill’ became a court saying. His sister Arabella fell off her horse while out hunting with the duke of York, revealing her fine legs and more. She became James’s mistress.

Barbara Villiers used Churchill to discredit a rival royal mistress; he claimed he had had to jump out of the window without his trousers when the king arrived. Charles confined him to barracks, and Barbara compensated him with an annuity. Such was the start of the career of the future duke of Marlborough. Soon afterwards, Churchill married the beautiful, masterful Sarah Jennings. At court he became friends with the courtier Sidney Godolphin, whom the king praised as ‘never in the way, and never out of the way’; Sarah befriended the duke of York’s daughter, Princess Anne. The quartet who would one day rule Britain became inseparable.