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Peter, a twitching giant of six foot seven, was a soldier-reformer, obsessed with technical novelties in ships and cannon, determined to transform and rearm his kingdom. He was gifted with the three essentials that every politician requires to achieve anything: VAR – vision, acumen and resources – as well an invincible constitution and a taste for wild wassailing that involved lethal alcoholic consumption, dwarves jumping out of cakes and naked girls, and fistfights. Yet he had visited the Netherlands and London to procure military technology. After enforcing his power, massacring and personally torturing rivals, this terrifying and capable autocrat reformed his nobility, making them wear German clothes and shave their beards. He founded a new capital, St Petersburg, on captured Swedish territory, but also modernized his army, funded with peasant taxes, and created a Baltic navy. His conscription of peasants to serve for life in his army alongside the enforced service of nobles militarized society to create a huge standing army of 300,000. Its scale allowed the tsars to use its men as cannon fodder to compensate for Russian backwardness.

On 8 July 1709, at Poltava (Ukraine), Peter routed Charles, making Poland a Russian satellite and mopping up the Swedish lands of the southern Baltic.^* The Romanov tsar became Peter the Great, first imperator (emperor) of Russia (Rossiiya, a Hellenization of Rus), a new European power and Eurasian empire, forged with European technology, embellished with European art, manners and luxuries. But the very state itself was an empire inspired by an exceptional national and religious mission of rapacious expansion and ruled by an autocrat who personified the state without the restraint of representative assemblies, noble rights or civil institutions found in other European kingdoms.

Mission accomplished in the east, Marlborough faced a challenge at home. He had earned himself a dukedom, a principality of the Holy Roman Empire, a palace, Blenheim near Oxford, and a fortune, but, less steady than Godolphin, he was highly strung and mercurial, swinging between elated energy and cyclothymic collapses at times of crisis. ‘I really am so weary of the business of the world,’ he told Godolphin. ‘I’ve no pleasure but the expectation I have of being with you and Lady Marlborough.’

Yet Anne and Sarah’s relationship soured. Anne, overweight, blotchy and sickly, worshipped the beautiful Sarah, but her royal grandeur and emotional neediness were matched by Sarah’s termagant unkindness. ‘I am very sorry to find Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman can’t yet bring things quite right,’ wrote Mr Montgomery to Mr Freeman. ‘I’m sure they will at last.’ But they did not. The jealousy and suspicion of Marlborough’s opponents engendered the fear that the paladin could become a Cromwell: they used Anne’s Stuart pride and Sarah’s malice to promote a more affectionate royal friend, Abigail Masham, who, prompted by their rival Robert Harley, turned the queen against her three friends.

In 1708, Harley persuaded Anne to dismiss Godolphin, but Marlborough’s threat to resign forced his reinstatement, now backed by a young protégé, a coarse, ruddy-cheeked Norfolk MP, Robert Walpole, secretary at war. By now, Anne and Sarah were having altercations of blistering malice. Sensing Anne’s dislike, Marlborough requested the captain-generalship for life, alarming the Stuart monarch who feared a Cromwellian dictatorship. ‘I have reason to be convinced’, Marlborough told Sarah in one of their coded letters, that ‘42 [Anne] has been jealous of the power of 39 [himself]’.

Anne unsurprisingly had come to hate Sarah: ‘I don’t love complaining but it’s impossible to help saying nobody was ever so used by a friend as I have been by her ever since my coming to the Crown,’ she told Marlborough. ‘I desire nothing but that she should leave off teasing and tormenting me.’ Few monarchs have ever written such a letter, but Sarah was now ‘saying many shocking things’ – even accusing Anne of lesbianism. Marlborough and Godolphin must have despaired, while Walpole called Sarah the ‘Damned Bitch’. Marlborough’s peace negotiations with Louis XIV collapsed and Anne finally dismissed Godolphin, his character now blackened as the insinuating Volpone (in Ben Jonson’s play), and appointed Harley, who went on to win a parliamentary majority. Marlborough was dismissed, and Godolphin died the following year. Harley, now earl of Oxford and prime minister, orchestrated the impeachment of Marlborough, who was devotedly defended by Walpole but nonetheless forced into exile. The queen, realizing she had been manipulated and regretting her treatment of the duumvirs, sacked Oxford just before she died in 1714.