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The oligarchs of 1688 ensured a Protestant succession, ushering in the new king, George I, the fifty-four-year-old elector of Hanover,^* who, since many Tories favoured a Stuart restoration, sensibly promoted the Whigs and reappointed Marlborough as captain-general. Backed by Louis, James Stuart, James II’s heir, landed in Scotland, holding court in Edinburgh, but Marlborough’s last service was to coordinate the defeat of the rebellion.

Marlborough’s victories had marked the rise of Britain, increasingly a global force, as a European power for the first time since the loss of its French territories in 1453. The peace of Utrecht was a stroke of luck for the ageing Louis XIV, whose grandson Philippe remained king of Spain while the Habsburgs were compensated by Naples, Milan and Belgium; Britain only got Gibraltar – and the asiento de negros, the Spanish licence to supply slaves which was vested in the specially founded South Sea Company. Investors – from the king and his mistresses to Walpole and Newton – traded the shares, which went up and up.

The peace was some consolation to Louis, but ‘France had expanded too far and perhaps unjustly,’ wrote Louis’s wife, Maintenon. ‘Our court is still very sad. We talk only of wheat, oats, barley and straw. He’s very occupied with the relief of the people.’ In April 1711, smallpox killed Louis’s eldest son – and then his eldest son too, followed by his eldest son.^* Louis was heartbroken. ‘I’ve never,’ noted Maintenon, ‘seen such sorrow … at court.’

On 1 September 1715, after the longest reign in European history, seventy-two years, Louis, riddled with gangrene, his left leg completely blackened, managed his deathbed with faultless style. ‘My dear child,’ he told his five-year-old great-grandson, soon to be Louis XV, ‘you’re going to be the greatest king in the world,’ but ‘Don’t imitate me in my wars.’ Then he addressed his ministers: ‘Adieu, messieurs … I’m leaving but the state will always remain.’ Lastly he turned to Maintenon: ‘What will become of you, madame?’

‘I’m nothing,’ she replied. ‘Think only of God.’ The servants wept loudly.

‘Why are you crying?’ asked Louis. ‘Did you think I was immortal?’ Reciting a prayer, he passed ‘like a candle going out’.

In China, the other titan of the age, Kangxi, faced his own agony of succession.

‘If I can die without there being an outbreak of trouble,’ he wrote in his late sixties, ‘my desires will be fulfilled.’ His son Yinreng, whose mother had died in 1674 giving birth to him, grew into a vicious paedophile who bought children for sexual abuse and tried to overthrow his father – he may have been insane. As his own decline encouraged conspiracy among his twenty-four sons, Kangxi ordered Yinreng’s perpetual imprisonment for ‘inhumanity and devilry’. The emperor started to show favour to his eleventh son, Yinzhen, who introduced him to his own son, the eleven-year-old Hongli, whom Kiangxi soon doted on. When the old emperor met the boy’s mother he called her a ‘lucky woman’ for bearing a child who would bring her ‘great honour’ – an unmissable hint.

Dying on 20 December 1722, he left the throne to Yinzhen, who became the Yongzheng Emperor. France was in recovery; Mughal India was dissolving into chaos; but Kiangxi left China as the greatest power on earth: his grandson Hongli became the Qianlong Emperor, who ruled into another age.

The resurgent Habsburgs on the other hand were haunted by an issue of gender. In Vienna, Karl VI, son of Hogmouth, had failed to take Spain but had been consoled by his succession as emperor-archduke. Yet his young daughter was his heir – and a predator stalked the empire.

COCK ROBIN, PRUSSIAN MONSTER, POLISH HERCULES

Karl had married a German princess, Elizabeth, blonde, delicate and spirited: he called her White Liezl. In 1716, Liezl gave birth to a daughter Maria Theresa, but to help her conceive a son doctors had prescribed a calorific diet lubricated with liquor that so bloated her she ultimately had to be conveyed in a mechanical chair.

Maria Theresa, blonde, blue-eyed, devout and intelligent, was educated by Jesuits, sang in family operas and enjoyed riding. At nineteen she married a genial prince, Franz Stefan, duke of Lorraine, whom she adored, giving birth to sixteen children in twenty years. She showed no special talents, but they were not looked for in her either. Only extreme jeopardy would reveal them. Karl frittered away his resources, just as a second-rank power, Prussia, was saving every pfennig and collecting giants.