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Victoria’s chief job was to marry and provide an heir. The small principalities of Germany had long acted as the matchmaking service for European dynasties, but her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, had made his family, the Saxe-Coburgs, into what Bismarck called the ‘stud farm of Europe’. Leopold was overbearing and sophisticated, avidly developing the newly invented Belgium, aided by his Rothschild friends, into a wealthy modern economy, but he was also the arch-matchmaker. In 1840, he guided his solemn, cerebral and breezy nephew Albert towards the world’s most eligible girl. Albert had reacted against his unbuttoned parents, the duke and duchess of Saxe-Coburg. The duke had taken young Albert and his brother Ernst to sample the courtesans of the Parisian Babylon: Ernst became a sex addict, Albert a prig. Their mother repaid the whoremongering duke by taking her Jewish-born chamberlain as lover, supposedly Albert’s natural father, and was divorced; she was never allowed to see her children again. Albert dazzled Victoria: ‘full of goodness and sweetness,’ she wrote, ‘very clever and intelligent … extremely handsome; his hair is about the same colour as mine; his eyes large and blue, a beautiful nose, very sweet mouth … but the charm of his countenance is his expression, which is most delightful’. Victoria thanked Leopold ‘for the prospect of great happiness you have contributed to give me’. She was pregnant for much of their marriage, starting with a daughter, Vicky, followed by a boy, Bertie, prince of Wales, and a further seven children.^*

Victoria and Albert regarded Palmerston and Napoleon as disgraceful fornicators. Now happily married to his long-time mistress, Countess Cowper, Palmerston had never retired from the arena: his venturing into the bedroom of a lady-in-waiting at Windsor shocked the queen, who disliked ‘that strong, determined man with so much worldly ambition’. Albert called him ‘unscrupulous’.

On 16 April 1855, Napoleon and Eugénie arrived at Windsor. Surprisingly, the incorrigible emperor and his parvenu empress charmed the prim Saxe-Coburgs. ‘There is something fascinating, melancholy and engaging, which draws you to him,’ thought Victoria. Soft-spoken, urbane, inscrutable, Napoleon flirted with Victoria, who was, noted foreign secretary Clarendon (a descendant of James I’s favourite Buckingham who happened, in the tiny world of European society, to be the lover of Eugénie’s mother), ‘mightily tickled by it, for she had never been made love to in her life and his love-making was of a character to flatter her vanity without alarming her virtue; she enjoyed the novelty’. Napoleon spoke German to Albert, indulging his pedantic lectures on his worthy plans for museums and charities.

In Crimea, artillery and disease killed 450,000 Russians, 120,000 Ottomans, 100,000 Frenchmen and 40,000 Britons, but the westerners proved marginally less inept, defeating the Russians and finally taking Sebastopol. Tsar Nicholas died miserably, Russian backwardness exposed; his attractive son Alexander II was forced to negotiate the Paris treaty that temporarily extinguished Russian power in the Black Sea.^*

As for the Ottomans, Palmerston had again saved their empire: Palmerston and Napoleon encouraged reformers around Sultan Abdülmecid to modernize their state and promise equal legal rights for non-Muslims, thus protecting Jews and Christians, and the abolition of black slavery – though not of white slavery: brutal Russian operations against the Circassian minority in the Caucasus would now lead to a boom in the sale of Circassian slaves to Istanbul. Ottoman Tanzimat – reorganization – fostered a new ‘Ottomanism’, in a bid to create a multi-ethnic identity to hold the empire together. Palmerston established a special British protection of Ottoman Jews, while the French protected the Maronites of Lebanon. European influence had guided Ottoman tolerance, but this age of cosmopolitanism lasted just three decades.

On 18 August 1855, Napoleon met Victoria and Albert at Dunkirk and escorted them to Paris to visit his Exposition Universelle, his version of their Great Exhibition.^* The first British sovereign to visit Paris since Henry VI, Victoria brought her thirteen-year-old son Bertie, who was enraptured by the pleasure city. ‘I wish,’ the prince of Wales told Napoleon, ‘I were your son.’ Plump, ginger-haired Bertie both craved his father’s approval and loved to shock him: he would return to the Parisian Babylon as soon as he got the chance. Crimea was not the only Anglo-French project – both nations were suddenly drawn into conflicts against the dynasties of the east.

On 11 May 1857, the Mughal monarch Bahadur Shah Zafar, eighty-one-year-old descendant of Tamerlane, Babur and Alamgir, received alarming news: a revolt had started against the British and now the first rebel sepoys were arriving in Delhi to acclaim him as ruler and kill any Christian they could find.