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* President Jefferson immediately faced a challenge from the slaving dynasties of Tripoli, Algiers and Tunis, the ‘Barbary States’ that benefited from the trans-Saharan slavery and the seizure of western cargoes and ‘white slaves’. Britain and Spain, even Sweden and Denmark, were perennially at war with these predators or paying them tribute. Tripoli had been ruled since 1711 by a dynasty founded by an Ottoman officer Ahmed Karamanli. In May 1801 his descendant Yusuf Pasha demanded tribute from the US and declared war. Jefferson sent a naval squadron into Tripoli harbour and in April 1805, while Europe was distracted by Bonaparte’s campaigns, the former US consul, William Eaton, led eight Americans and 500 Berber, Arab and Greek mercenaries from Alexandria to take Yusuf’s town of Derna. Yusuf backed down and freed his white slaves. It was America’s first Islamic war.

* ‘An end should be put to the hopes of the Bourbons,’ Napoleon said, ordering the kidnap and execution of a Bourbon prince, the duc d’Enghien, who had no connection to the plots. He later claimed it had been Talleyrand’s idea, but the foreign minister denounced it acutely as ‘Worse than a crime, it was a mistake.’ Much of Europe was disgusted by the murder and by the coronation, which intensified the hostility of the European dynasties: the Russian emperor Alexander called him ‘the Corsican Ogre’.

* Beethoven, grandson of a wine merchant and musician, son of an alcoholic court singer for the elector of Cologne, settled in Vienna in 1794, writing pieces for aristocratic patrons, but he targeted an altogether grander audience – the people, his times and posterity. He was singular, sociable with friends, but never married and was, said Goethe, ‘completely intractable’. Now he was alone in another way: he was going deaf: ‘Ah how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than others,’ he wrote to his brother. ‘I must live almost alone like an exile.’ He contemplated death: ‘It’s only my art that held me back. Oh it seemed impossible for me to leave this world before I had produced all I felt capable of producing and so I prolonged this wretched existence.’ He wrote tortured letters to an unknown woman, his ‘Immortal Beloved’: ‘No one else can ever possess my heart never never … Vienna is now a wretched life.’ He consoled himself with visits to ‘fortresses’ (brothels). Beethoven personified the suffering genius, hero of the Romantic movement.

* Grenville was also forced to preside over the Delicate Investigation into the scandalous conduct of Princess Caroline, wife of the prince of Wales, which ruled that while, as a footman testified, ‘The princess was very fond of fucking,’ none of it was provable nor was the rumour that a boy she had adopted was her own illegitimate child. Caroline was as popular as George was hated, remaining a lightning rod of radical opposition until her death in 1824.

* The only enduring Bonapartist crown is the one he did not initiate: his marshal Bernadotte, once a fanatical republican with ‘Death to kings’ tattooed on his chest, was competent, haughty and unimpressed by Napoleon, who in turn was unimpressed by him: ‘Very mediocre; I’ve no faith in him.’ But he was semi-family, married to Désirée Clary, Napoleon’s first love, and sister of Joseph’s wife, Julie. When in May 1810 the heir of the last Vasa king of Sweden died, the Swedes offered the throne to Bernadotte. Clever enough to betray Napoleon at the right moment, in 1812, he ruled Sweden as King Carl Johan until 1844. The Bernadottes still reign.

* Juggling the attention of a wife, an armada of girlfriends and the queen, Godoy commissioned the court painter, Francisco Goya, to paint his paramour Pepita, the contessa di Castillo Fiel, in La maja vestida but also naked in the sensuous La maja desnuda, which he kept in an alcove behind a curtain alongside Velázquez’s Venus.

Zulus and Saudis, Christophes, Kamehamehas and Astors

TROPICAL MONARCHIES: KINGS OF HAITI AND BRAZIL

João had long ruled in place of his insane mother Queen Maria, a religious hysteric haunted by the devil and treated vainly by George III’s ‘mad-doctor’ Willis. João’s real enemy was his Spanish wife, Carlota Joaquina, skinny, sharp-faced, warty, moustachioed and lame, who, while fiercely riding horses, learning to fire cannon and relishing love affairs, tried to overthrow her husband and rule in Spain’s interest. This did not enhance marital harmony.