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One of the first members of Charles II’s Royal Society for scientists, he was a touchy loner, awkward friend and vindictive feuder, who never married and was probably asexual. His passionate friendship with a Swiss scientist Nicolas Fatio could have been a typical male affinity of the time – or his only love affair; its end sparked an emotional breakdown. He fell out badly with his friend John Locke, who ‘endeavoured to embroil me with women’. His new job was just his latest service to a new spirit of rational scientific inquiry. ‘I do not feign hypotheses,’ he wrote in his Principia Mathematica:^* knowledge must be based on the need for evidence, not on superstition – a conviction shared by a constellation of thinkers across Europe at this time who were increasingly in contact with each other – the start of an intellectual candescence that would illuminate the next century.

Leaving Cambridge, Newton moved to London to mastermind the modern currency and prosecute counterfeiters, a capital crime. He hunted down counterfeiters with all the relish and ingenuity of a detective and prosecuted twenty-eight coiners, many of them hanged, drawn and quartered – though there is no evidence that Newton penetrated the underworld in disguise. Now rich from the Mint, he increased his wealth by shrewd investments.

William commandeered England in his tireless campaign against the Sun King. James, backed by Louis, tried to have William assassinated, incited a Scottish revolt which was defeated at Dunkeld, sparking a massacre of Jacobite clans at Glencoe, then invaded Ireland. William routed his father-in-law at the Boyne and Aughrim, then fought Louis to a standstill – the start of England’s 127-year war to prevent French dominion in Europe. But both were focused on the imminent death of the Habsburg king of Spain, El Hechizado – Carlos the Hexed.^*

Everyone had been amazed that the ensorcelled Carlos, brother-in-law of Louis, was still alive. Son of the long-dead Planet King and his niece Mariana, he had been implacably visited by the curse of Habsburg intermarriage – born with a brain swelling, one kidney, one testicle and a jaw so deformed he could barely chew yet a throat so wide he could swallow chunks of meat. He was never fully literate, he limped and he suffered a multimorbidity of diseases, including measles, smallpox, rubella. Carlos had, writes Martyn Rady, ‘an intersexual state with ambiguous genitalia’: his urethra drained from the underside of an undeveloped penis, a detail on which peace in Europe was founded: could he father a child? If not, who would inherit his empire?

His mother had married him to a pretty French princess with whom he fell in love, but understandably their sex life, which must have caused them unbearable stress, failed. After years of cosy marriage, the confused girl mused that she ‘was really not a virgin any longer, but that as far as she could work things out, she believed she would never have children’, confiding to Louis’s ambassador that ‘despite too much vivacity’ on his part, ‘the coction, as the doctors call it, was not perfect’. Those doctors prescribed an unhelpful aphrodisiac: sleeping with the embalmed body of his father would help Carlos achieve an erection. When Carlos’s first wife died, he married a German princess who pilfered from his palaces and forced him to undergo exorcisms against witchcraft. His mother had El Hechizado borne on a chair to save his energy; he was sane enough to reject making her all-powerful regent, pious enough to sit through an auto-da-fé for fourteen hours, strong enough to hunt and clever enough to invite his court painter Giordano to view Velázquez’s Las Meninas. ‘What do you think of it?’ asked Carlos.

‘Sire,’ replied Giordano, ‘this is the theology of painting.’

As Carlos declined, he visited the pantheon at Escorial to gaze upon the bodies of his family. Meanwhile the Habsburgs of Austria and the Bourbons of France bid for the succession.

Four deathbeds – those universal setpieces of family life, those lethal transfers of power that could destroy an empire – now destabilized Europe and Asia. ‘In a twinkle, in a minute, in a breath,’ said the greatest monarch of his time, Alamgir, ‘the condition of the world changes.’

TITANIC DEATHBEDS: CARLOS, ALAMGIR, LOUIS, KANGXI

In late October 1700, in Madrid, Carlos suffered explosive dysentery with ‘250 motions in nineteen days’, enduring Spanish fly painted on his feet as a blistering agent, dead pigeons on his head and draughts of milk of pearls. At last, on 1 November, he murmured, ‘Now I am nothing,’ and left the monarchy to Louis’s grandson, Philippe.^*

Louis could not resist accepting, but his Spanish gambit, vigorously resisted by the Austrian Habsburgs and England, launched a fifteen-year war that would bring his dreams to the edge of catastrophe. Far to the east, the crabbed old emperor Alamgir continued his twenty-year war to destroy the Shivaji kingdom.