Titans of History (32 page)

Now the Marathas, a Hindu warrior caste from the Deccan area of western India, rebelled. Throughout his reign, Aurangzeb was obsessed with conquering the Deccan plateau, regardless of the cost (financial or human) or the practical impediments—such as the unwillingness of the Hindu peoples of the area to be subjugated. For a period in the late 1660s Mughal forces had appeared to bring much of the Deccan under control, and there was an opportunity for a peace deal with the Maratha overlord, Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. However, Aurangzeb proceeded to double-cross
Shivaji, who then led an insurrection that successfully drove the Mughal armies out of the Deccan in the early 1670s. After Shivaji's death in 1680, his son and successor, Chatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, continued to lead the resistance to Aurangzeb. At this time the emperor's own son, Akbar, left the Mughal court to fight alongside the Marathas against his father.

In 1689 Sambhaji was finally captured, publicly tortured and executed. Yet far from pacifying the area, this merely inflamed opposition. When the emperor died in 1707, the Mughal empire was convulsed by internal unrest.

By his death the empire was financially crippled, its people exhausted and restless. Aurangzeb's imposition of Islamic fundamentalism had obliterated the tolerant genius of his heroic forebears.

1633–1703

The greatness of his life was open, yet he longed to communicate its smallness also
.

Robert Louis Stevenson,
Familiar Studies of Men and Books
(1882)

Samuel Pepys was the author of one of the most vivid diaries ever written. For almost a decade Pepys—who held a senior position at the Admiralty—recorded his life and his world in engrossing detail, providing an extraordinary insight into what it was like to be alive in 17th-century London. Pepys himself comes over as a
man of great curiosity, at once open-minded and skeptical, sensitive to both the comedy and the pathos of the human condition. He delights in the high life and the low and is unstintingly honest in depicting himself as a man with all-too-human needs and desires, yet beset by moral scruples and regrets.

Pepys's diaries are all the more remarkable because during his lifetime no one knew anything about them. To the world at large, Samuel Pepys, secretary to the Admiralty, Member of Parliament and president of the Royal Society, was a highly successful naval official who had risen from humble beginnings as a tailor's son. When he died in 1703 his contemporaries saw Pepys's legacy as the great library he bequeathed to his alma mater, Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was also admired for a lifetime of philanthropy toward educational establishments such as Christ's Hospital School, and for his achievements as a naval administrator who had tirelessly promoted meritocracy and efficiency. Pepys's most priceless legacy was only discovered over a century after his death, when the authorities at Magdalene employed an impoverished undergraduate to crack the diaries' seemingly impenetrable shorthand.

Pepys's descriptions of the disasters that befell England in the 1660s are some of the richest historical sources in existence. He charts day-to-day life during the Great Plague of 1665–6 and, from his perspective as an Admiralty insider, gives an invaluable insight into the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1667. His almost hour-by-hour record of the Great Fire of London of 1666 is one of the finest pieces of reportage ever written.

Although Pepys largely owed his advancement at the Admiralty to royal favor, he never lets his diarist's eye be dazzled by the court. He can be as exasperated with the king as he is with his own servants, and more than once he vents his frustration that Charles II seems incapable of taking the duties of kingship seriously.

While most contemporary diarists were exclusively preoccupied with the spiritual or political sphere, Pepys's overwhelming interest is in more earthy matters. The diaries illuminate Pepys's fascination with the way humans behave, their greed, rivalries, ambitions, jealousies, and their fascination with scandal. The people he depicts might well be alive today, so vividly does he bring them to life.

What makes Pepys stand out above the average gossip monger is that he also turns his unflinchingly honest gaze upon himself. He never tries to show himself in the best light, nor does he conceal his flaws. This is no exercise in self-mortification or pious humility, however; rather, it reflects an all-consuming absorption in humanity, of which he is just the most familiar specimen. He records his own behavior with almost scientific curiosity, including all the embarrassing, even mortifying, details that most diarists would leave out—for example, the occasion when his wife Elizabeth discovers him with his hand up her companion's skirt, or the combination of grief and guilty relief he feels at the death of a maverick brother. The diaries seethe with not just glimpses of the gorgeous underwear of Charles II's latest mistresses but of Pepy's sexual adventures too. Pepys's record of his tempestuous relationship with his wife, whom he married for love, remains one of literature's most candid portraits of the Gordian knot of marriage. He writes of the blazing rows, the tearful confrontations, the nose pulling and the insults. Then there are the reconciliations, the long lie-ins spent chatting, and the sympathy for each other when sick. Pepys omits nothing: the presents he buys Elizabeth to try to assuage his guilt after yet another episode of philandering; even the details of their sexual relations, rendered problematic by a “pain in the lip of her chose.”

After almost ten years, fearing his eyesight was failing, Pepys stopped writing his diary. It was, he wrote, “almost as much to see myself go into my grave.” Although his eyes recovered, he never
kept another diary like it, and none of his subsequent writings ever equaled his diaries for brilliance. Pepys lived out the rest of his life as a worthy man, who, despite his personal misgivings, remained unceasingly loyal to his royal masters through the Revolution of 1688. Much in Pepys's public life was admirable—but it was his private, intimate work of outstanding literature and reportage, writing diaries of such immediacy, originality and searing honesty, that demands the admiration of posterity.

1638–1715

The only King of France worthy of the name
.

Napoleon I

Louis XIV was the greatest ruler of Europe in his day, the paragon of magnificence and absolutism, but his ambitions to dominate Europe with his vision of French monarchy plunged the continent into long and vicious wars that cost the lives of many. Yet he remains the Sun King, the very definition of royal glory and probably, with Napoleon Bonaparte, the greatest of French monarchs. He ruled for seventy-two years.

Louis was the son of King Louis XIII and his wife Anne of Austria: his birth came so late in their marriage that he was celebrated as a miraculous gift—Louis Godgiven. His father, who had ruled through his gifted chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, had pursued a policy of strengthening the crown against the over-mighty interests of the old feudal aristocracy. However
Louis XIII died leaving a child heir and his wife Anne of Austria as Regent. Richelieu was already dead but his chosen successor as chief royal adviser was another fascinating and able character, Jules Mazarin, born Mazarini, an Italian diplomatist and priest, later cardinal, whose political genius, vast fortune, art collecting and pursuit of pleasure impressed the boy king and alienated the aristocracy.

The result was the Frondes, a series of aristocratic rebellions supposedly in the name of Louis XIV and against Anne and Mazarin. The rebellions left the boy with a hatred of noble power and confirmed his faith in the divine right of Catholic monarchy that he believed he personified. This conviction was encouraged by Mazarin his tutor in all matters political. When Mazarin died in 1661, Louis started to govern in his own right and proved a formidably talented politician, and a man of astonishing, indeed prolific, energy whether in the council or the bed chambers, the battle or the hunting fields.

Controlled, disciplined, sensuous haughty, mysterious, magisterial and visionary, pious and debauched, Louis created the new Palace of Versailles and with it a complex court hierarchy and ritual designed to remove the nobles from their feudal ambitions and regional power centers and concentrate their interests in the person of the king. Versailles itself was designed not only to house the king, court and entire nobility, but also to represent Louis himself: “I am Versailles,” he said, just as ‘
Lӎtat, c'est moi
.' The nobility competed for a glance, a word with the king: once when the king asked a noble when his baby was due, the nobleman answered, “Whenever Your Majesty wishes it.”

The next twenty years were the height of the king's reign—he tamed the nobility, reformed his administration, improved his armies and France had become the dominant power on the continent.

Louis married Maria Theresa of Spain, with whom he had six children, only one of whom survived to adulthood. But the king, dark-skinned with full and sensual lips, was also an enthusiastic womanizer who enjoyed many mistresses, though there was usually a ruling
maitresse en titre
such as the famous Madame de Montespan, who often enjoyed considerable power. After the death of his queen, he quietly married his last mistress, Madame de Maintenon, the pious and capable nanny of his children.

Meanwhile his vision of himself as the supreme Catholic monarch led to his revocation of the Edict of Nantes, increasing the persecution of Protestants in France. Abroad, his ambitions meant that he was constantly at war, whether with the Dutch, the Habsburg emperor, the Spanish or Swedes. His payment of vast bribes to King Charles II of England often neutralized English power. His military successes led to the creation of the League of Augsburg against him, but superb French commanders and armies delivered him continued success.

In 1700, the Spanish King Carlos II died, leaving the Spanish empire to Louis XIV's grandson Philippe of Anjou, a succession that, if accepted, would give the Sun King virtual dominion over not only much of Europe but of the Americas too. It was a step too far for Louis who—after decades of triumph and magnificence—was old, arrogant and perhaps exhausted. Certainly France was over-extended. Louis was faced with a difficult choice but ultimately he accepted the inheritance and his grandson became king of Spain. In 1702 William III of England along with his native Holland, the Habsburg emperor and others put together another Grand Alliance against Louis. His ambitions and absolutist Catholic vision cost France dear. As Louis aged, as his heirs died, as France suffered poverty and hunger, his armies were humiliated by the outstanding commanders the duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy in a trans-European conflict
known as the War of the Spanish Succession. Louis lived too long: he saw France defeated and the deaths of his sons and grandsons. French invincibility was broken. In 1715, just as he had dined and dressed in public, so Louis died in public after telling his child-heir, “I have delighted too much in war.” He was seventy-seven. His successor was his great-grandson, Louis XV, age five.

1642–1727

Nature, and Nature's laws lay hid in night.
God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light
.

Alexander Pope's famous “Epitaph: Intended for Sir Isaac Newton” (1730)

Sir Isaac Newton is arguably the greatest scientist of all time. Along with such figures as Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, he is one of the giants of the scientific revolution. His most influential work,
Principia Mathematica
, fundamentally altered the way in which scientists observed and explained the natural world.

Newton's main legacy was the fusion of mathematics and natural science, but he was a polymath who made significant contributions to philosophy, astronomy, theology, history, alchemy and economics. Without Newton, our understanding of the world would be unimaginably different.

Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642. From an early age he seems to have taken firmly against the company of others. He formed a few close friendships in his life, but his general tendency
to vacillate between shunning other people and picking fights with them appears to have been a peculiar part of his genius. It allowed him to focus his mind entirely on the scientific puzzles of the day.

As an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton paid little attention to the syllabus set for him, largely ignoring the study of Aristotle in favor of the bright new scientists of his own day. The works of men such as René Descartes, Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes gripped him, and as he made notes on his reading, he began to question the world around him in ever greater detail.

It was at the age of twenty-three that Newton's intellectual star really began to burn bright. He called 1665–6 his
annus mirabilis
—his wonder year. He focused on various mathematical problems concerning the orbits of the moon and planets, developing in the process the theorem of calculus—a powerful mathematical tool vital to modern physics and engineering. The name calculus was coined by the German scientist Gottfried Leibniz, who developed the theory independently; Newton called it the “science of fluxions.” In later life the two men argued bitterly over who could lay claim to the discovery. In any case, it is clear that even as a young man in the 1660s Newton was already a mathematical pioneer.

Leaving Cambridge to escape the plague in 1666, Newton started to study natural mechanics. In old age he claimed to have first understood that it was gravity that controlled the orbit of the moon when he sat in his orchard and watched an apple fall from a tree. Apocryphal or not, the story soon became part of Newtonian folklore; perhaps its most felicitous appearance is in Byron's
Don Juan
, where Newton is recorded as “the sole mortal who could grapple, Since Adam, with a fall, or with an apple.”