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Napoleon was so keen on the empress, he retired his favourite mistress and spent every night with Marie Louise, though he reflected, ‘I loved Marie Louise … I loved Josephine better; that was natural; we’d risen together; she was full of grace.’ Marie fell in love with him, telling her father, ‘I assure you, dear papa … the better one knows him, the better one appreciates and loves him.’

‘Ought princesses to fall in love?’ Napoleon wondered later. ‘They are political chattels.’

In March 1811, as Napoleon advised his obstetrician to ‘Pretend you’re not delivering the empress but a bourgeois from the rue Saint-Denis,’ Marie gave birth to a king of Rome, Napoleon François, after an agonizing labour. ‘I’m not soft-hearted, yet I was much moved how she suffered,’ he said, boasting tactlessly to Josephine, ‘My son is big and healthy.’ He was ecstatic: ‘My family’s allied to all the sovereigns of Europe.’ That was true, but all of his new relatives were conspiring to bring about his downfall. Designed to destroy Britain, his blockade known as the Continental System was neither continental nor systematic. Britain was defiant under a ‘friend of Mister Pitt’, Spencer Perceval, an evangelical who regarded Napoleon as ‘the woman who rides upon the beast’ in the Book of Revelations. Marquess Wellesley had fancied his chances at becoming prime minister, but a vicious feud with his ex-actress wife and a sex addiction that embarrassed even his brother Arthur meant that he had to settle for foreign secretary. Perceval and Wellesley, seeking a way to attack the French–Spanish alliance, were persuaded by a south American adventurer to send an army to Venezuela.^* Arthur Wellesley, tempered by his Marathan victories, was designated commander, but the army was redirected to support the Spanish insurgency. After quickly defeating the French at Talavera, the general, raised to Viscount Wellington, became loved by his soldiers, who called him Beau; he called them ‘the scum of the earth’ as well as ‘fine fellows’: ‘I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.’ Despising vainglory, he said, ‘There’s only one thing worse than a battle won and that’s a battle lost’ – though he never discovered what losing was like.

Wellington was constantly short of funds. Nathan Mayer Rothschild, trading in bullion with the continent and lending it to the government, now offered to smuggle it to Wellington to pay his army. The ‘government didn’t know how to get it to Portugal’, he explained. ‘I undertook all that and I sent it to France.’ This vast and secret work laid the foundation for the family fortune – ‘the best business I ever did’. The youngest Rothschild brother, James, handled the delivery across the Channel and on to Wellington. ‘Mister Rothschild’, said Lord Liverpool, the war secretary who appointed him Wellington’s supplier, was ‘a special friend … I don’t know what we should have done without him.’ NM, using his own secret couriers and informants, communicating with his brothers using codes for gold such as ‘fatman’, ‘fish’, ‘beer’ and ‘children’, was soon delivering not only British gold to Wellington but the subsidies to Russia, Prussia and Austria – £42 million between 1810 and 1815. Constantly in and out of Downing Street to see Liverpool, the prime minister, he raised the money on the markets that made Britain a world power.^*

As Wellington bled the French in Spain, Napoleon’s relations with Alexander were so strained that both were massing new armies. ‘But for my marriage with Marie, I never should have made war on Russia but I felt certain of the support of Austria …’ claimed Napoleon who decided to invade Russia.

ARABIAN CONQUESTS: MEHMED ALI AND THE SAUDIS

In Cairo, in 1811, at the height of Napoleon’s power in Europe, the pasha of Egypt, Mehmed Ali, invited 450 Mamluk amirs dressed in their yellow turbans, robes and chainmail, red pantaloons and red pointed slippers, to a ceremony at his divan in Saladin’s Citadel. He received them respectfully, but as they left through a passageway, its gates slammed shut and his troops slaughtered every one of them. As their heads were gathered, their households were raided, their women raped and a thousand more hunted down. He was master of Egypt.