After inspecting the ax, he said:
I go from a corruptible, to an incorruptible Crown; where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the World.
Having given the executioner his final instructions, the king knelt down, and his head was severed from his body with a single blow. That night, Cromwell reputedly gazed at the royal body and murmured “cruel necessity.”
Cromwell was now the most powerful man in England—head of the army and chairman of the council of state that ruled the new Commonwealth. But pro-Stuart Scotland and Ireland remained to be tamed.
Cromwell arrived in Ireland fearing that Charles I’s son and heir, Charles, Prince of Wales, would attempt to launch an invasion of England from Ireland, whose Catholic population was sympathetic to the Royalist cause. He determined to conquer the country as soon as possible, fearful of running out of funds and alarmed by the prospect of further political instability back in England.
One of Cromwell’s first targets in his campaign was the garrison town of Drogheda, to the north of Dublin. Commanding the garrison of just over 3000 English Royalist and Catholic Irish troops was an English Royalist, Sir Arthur Ashton. On September 10, 1649 Cromwell ordered Ashton to surrender, or the town would face the consequences.
After some negotiations Ashton rejected the terms offered to him. Cromwell, at the head of a 12,000-strong army and impatient for a quick success, launched his attack on September 11. Speaking to his soldiers, he “forbade them to spare any that were at arms in the town.” As his men broke into Drogheda, all of the defenders were put to the sword—even those who quickly surrendered. Hundreds of civilians were also murdered. Catholic priests were systematically targeted, and those who had sought refuge from the fighting in St. Peter’s Church were burned alive when the besiegers torched the building. Of the Royalist troops, Cromwell stated, “I do not think thirty of their number escaped with their lives.” Those who did were promptly sold into slavery in Barbados. One estimate put the total death toll at 3500, of whom 2800 were soldiers and the rest clergy and civilians.
Modern research shows that the massacres have been exaggerated but, nonetheless, there is no doubt they were war crimes. Cromwell later accounted for himself before the English Parliament. “I am persuaded,” he said, “that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbued their hands in so much innocent blood and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are satisfactory grounds for such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.”
In 1650–1 Cromwell led his armies to victory over the Scots at Dunbar and over Prince Charles’s Anglo-Scottish adventure at Worcester (1651). The prince famously escaped to France, helped by disguise and a convenient oak tree, but his subsequent nine years of exile left Cromwell as king in all but name. In 1653, he chose to assume the traditional title of Lord Protector rather than seeking to become Oliver I.
The 1650s were remarkable for their diversity of opinions, religious and political, and it fell to Cromwell to try to rein in the forces that might split the country apart. To his enemies, then and now, he was a military dictator, the former upholder of parliamentary rights who himself happily dismissed parliaments when they became inconvenient. But Cromwell had to bridge the radical, almost socialist, views among the army ranks and the deeply held traditions of 17th-century middle England, at core Royalist and conservative.
It could have all gone disastrously wrong, and it is to Cromwell’s credit that he produced serious achievements. He ensured political representation from Scotland and Ireland. In wars with the Dutch and Spanish, the navy, under Admiral Blake, achieved notable success. Cromwell negotiated for the Jews to be allowed back into England, a historic decision. And he remained devoted to social justice for the poor.
In 1657 Parliament offered Cromwell the crown—his chance, had he so wished, to revert to a type of government everyone understood and to beget a dynasty. He declined the crown, but on his death in 1658 his son Richard succeeded him as lord protector. The resulting power vacuum under Richard showed just how dependent Cromwellian England was on the talents, force and personality of the man himself.
Richard’s rule was short: Tumbledown Dick lacked any of his father’s acumen. General Monck—one of Cromwell’s commanders—marched south and presided over the restoration of Charles II, receiving the dukedom of Albermarle as his reward. So ended the republican experiment, but not without marking Oliver Cromwell’s place in history as a man of conscience, fearless leadership, military brilliance, piety and severity.
AURANGZEB
1618–1707
I have sinned terribly, and I do not know what punishment awaits me.
Aurangzeb’s alleged death-bed confession
Aurangzeb, known as Alamgir (world-seizer), was the last of the great Mughal emperors of India, expanding his empire and ruling for almost half a century, but his cruelty to his father was shameful even by the standards of dynastic rivalries and his intolerant repression and imposition of Muslim orthodoxy undermined the admirably tolerant tradition of his great predecessors, the emperors Babur and Akbar the Great. He thus alienated his millions of Hindu subjects, weakened his empire and started the rot that led to the British conquest.
The third son of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, in the dynasty descended from Tamerlane, the Mongol conqueror, Aurangzeb was a pious Muslim from an early age. As a young man he proved himself a capable administrator and proficient soldier in his father’s service, but resented the fact that Shah Jahan nominated his eldest and favorite son, Dara Shikoh, his heir, leaving Aurangzeb out of the line of succession. This led to a rift between father and son, and a growing rivalry between Aurangzeb and Dara Shikoh.
The rivalry between the two brothers became increasingly bitter after their father fell ill in 1657. Shah Jahan’s second son, Shah Shuja, also claimed the imperial throne, as did a fourth brother, Murad Baksh. Yet the real struggle remained that between Aurangzeb and the original heir apparent. To this end, Aurangzeb allied himself with Murad against Dara Shikoh, whom he defeated in 1658. As Dara Shikoh fled, Aurangzeb had their father placed under house arrest. In a stunning act of betrayal, he then attacked and defeated Murad, and had him executed. Even as he did so, he attempted to buy off Shah Shuja by offering him a governorship. But it was not long before Aurangzeb made a move against the ill-prepared Shah Shuja, who was defeated, forced into exile and later disappeared—presumed murdered at the hands of Aurangzeb’s agents. After once more defeating Dara Shikoh, Aurangzeb had his last surviving brother brought back to Delhi in chains. In 1659, against the backdrop of Aurangzeb’s own coronation, Dara Shikoh was publicly executed and the head delivered to his grieving and shocked father in an act of grievous filial cruelty rarely matched in history.
With his brothers mercilessly disposed of, Aurangzeb set about expanding his dominions by means of military might, culminating three decades later with victories over the rulers of Bijapur and Golconda, which brought the Mughal empire to its greatest extent. But the problems that would in the end fatally weaken this great empire began to emerge as soon as Aurangzeb assumed the throne. Immediately life at court became markedly more austere, in line with the more rigid and puritanical interpretation of Islam followed by the new emperor. Music was banned, while works of art—such as portraits and statues—that could be considered idolatrous were proscribed. Of greater consequence, the jizya tax on non-Muslims, which had been allowed to lapse under his predecessors, was now reinstituted, while non-Muslim worship was actively discouraged, and a large number of Hindu temples were destroyed.
Unsurprisingly, such measures provoked violent resistance. A Pashtun revolt erupted in 1672 and was only suppressed with difficulty. In 1675 Aurangzeb provoked a major Sikh rebellion after having the Sikh leader, Guru Tegh Bahadur, executed for refusing to convert to Islam. The guru’s three closest aides had been executed with him: one was sawed in half, another was burned alive and the third plunged into boil
ing water. As with the Pashtun revolt, this rebellion too was eventually contained.
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.
PEPYS
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.
LOUIS XIV
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 an
d 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 ‘L”état, 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.