Titans of History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  NEWTON

  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.”

  Back in Cambridge, Newton was swiftly appointed Lucasian professor of mathematics. He was free to pursue his own course of studies, and as he worked he corresponded with other leading scientists and mathematicians, including Boyle, Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley. During the 1670s he spent much time on theology, exploiting his formidable knowledge of the Bible and developing original and radical views on the Holy Trinity. He also became interested in alchemy—the science of turning base metals into gold—and began to build up a huge library of books on the subject. But it was the appearance of the so-called Great Comet of 1680–1 that lay at the root of Newton’s finest work.

  In 1684 Newton began work on the project that would eventually become his ground-breaking Principia Mathematica. It was a work that would change both his life and the entire face of science. At its core lie Newton’s three fundamental laws of motion:

  • an object in a state of rest or moving in a straight line will continue in such a state unless it is acted upon by an external force;

  • the acceleration of a moving object is proportionate to and in the same direction as the force acting on it;

  • for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

  From these relatively straightforward laws Newton produced an astonishingly comprehensive analysis of the operation of the natural world. He explained everything from the behavior of small bodies and particles to the orbits of comets, planets and the moon. He put mathematics at the heart of the physical explanation of the world, where it remains to this day.

  Newton’s brilliance rapidly made him one of the most eminent scientists in Europe. But he felt unable to continue working in the strictly conventional religious environment at Cambridge and was relieved to be appointed to a key role at the Royal Mint, which gave him a secure financial position for life. In 1703 he became president of the Royal Society, London’s most prestigious scientific community, and in 1704 he published Opticks, which dealt with the behavior of light and the forces that attract and repel particles and bodies. The following year he was knighted by Queen Anne, the first scientist ever to receive such an honor.

  Amid all this achievement, Newton spent long periods of his later life engaged in furious debates and personal feuds with other European scientists. Yet for all his personal foibles, there was no one then or since who could disagree with the epitaph on his monument in Westminster Abbey: “Let Mortals rejoice That there has existed such and so great an Ornament to the Human Race.”

  MARLBOROUGH

  1650–1722

  If I were young and handsome as I was, instead of old and faded as I am, and you could lay the empire of the world at my feet, you should never share the heart and hand that once belonged to John, Duke of Marlborough.

  Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, quoted in W.S. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times (1938)

  John Churchill, 1st duke of Marlborough, was Britain’s most brilliant soldier-statesman. He won a string of glorious victories against the French and their allies in the War of the Spanish Succession that prevented Louis XIV and his Catholic absolutism from dominating Europe in the opening years of the 18th century.

  From early in his life, Churchill was a protégé of James, the Catholic duke of York, who later became the ill-starred James II. Churchill traveled with James when his brother, Charles II, sent the unpopular duke into exile in the 1670s. At this time James used Churchill as his skilled lobbyist at the royal court. Handsome, charming and clever, young Churchill was seduced by Charles II’s voracious mistress Barbara, duchess of Castlemaine, and once had to leap from her window when the king arrived. He was already showing himself to be a particularly talented soldier; he fought under the legendary musketeer d’Artagnan in 1673 and performed with the utmost bravery, earning himself personal praise from his future enemy, the French king, Louis XIV.

  In 1677 Churchill married Sarah Jennings, a strong-willed woman who proved politically astute. As his military career progressed, the couple spent long periods apart, but the marriage was nevertheless an enormously successful one. From 1683 Sarah was the best friend of, and favorite adviser to, Princess Anne—later Queen Anne, a connection vital to Marlborough’s future favor and fortune.

  Although he had been a close confidant of James II, Marlborough was at heart a Protestant. When his patron James II ascended the throne in 1685, Churchill was promoted in the army and raised to the peerage. But James proved a disastrous king, alienating the Protestant nobility, who rose against him to back the Dutch prince William and his wife Mary, Protestant daughter of the king himself. The defection of Churchill, now earl of Marlborough, played its part in James’ downfall. Churchill had no difficulty in shifting his allegiance to William of Orange, who became joint monarch with his wife Mary II after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He played an important role in the campaign against James’s forces in Ireland in 1690, and though he was suspected for much of the 1690s of being a closet Jacobite (a supporter of James II), William trusted him enough to appoint him commander-in-chief of British forces in the Low Countries in 1701.

  It was under Queen Anne, who came to the throne in 1702, that Marlborough’s career really took off. He was elevated to a dukedom and appointed captain general of the armed forces, taking command of the first campaign of the War of the Spanish Succession. Fro
m the very beginning, Marlborough was able to out-think, out-march and outmaneuver the French. During his first campaigning season he succeeded in pushing the French into a highly disadvantageous position. But it was the campaign of 1704 that saw Britain’s greatest success.

  Thanks to the complex European dynastic politics of the early 18th century, in 1704 Marlborough found himself commanding a multinational coalition, a combined army of British, Dutch, Hanoverian, Hessian, Danish and Prussian soldiers, which he coordinated with his Austrian ally, Prince Eugene of Savoy, and the difficult, thin-skinned leaders of the Dutch Republic. Near the village of Blindheim (anglicized as Blenheim) on the River Danube in Bavaria, he came up against a force of French and Bavarian troops under the French commander Marshal Tallard. Tallard had more men and a stronger natural position on the battlefield, but he was no match for Marlborough. Throughout the battle of Blenheim, fought on August 13, 1704, Marlborough completely outmaneuvered the Franco-Bavarian army, personally intervening at crucial points of the battle and ensuring that his enemies were never allowed to exploit any small advantage. More than 20,000 of Tallard’s men were killed or wounded, and Tallard himself was captured.

  It was a resounding victory for Marlborough. After the battle was over, he scrawled a note to his wife on a tavern bill: “I have not time to say more, but to beg you will give my duty to the Queen and let her know her army has had a glorious victory.” From that moment, Marlborough’s fame spread throughout Europe. In England, as a reward for his success, Marlborough was granted funds to build the magnificent Blenheim Palace, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire.

  At home, Marlborough was also the political partner of the chief minister Earl Godolphin, making him a unique force in politics, in war and at court.

  Other famous victories followed: Ramillies in 1706, Oudenarde in 1708 and Malplaquet in 1709. These were notably bloody affairs, but Marlborough’s reputation soared. Throughout all of the campaigns between 1702 and 1710, Marlborough showed himself to be a shrewd tactician and a daring and confident commander, able to unify the forces of the disparate states of the Grand Alliance against the aggressively expansionist Louis XIV.

  After 1710, royal intrigues and domestic politics started to undermine Marlborough. He and his wife lost favor at court when Sarah Marlborough haughtily argued with her former best friend, Queen Anne. Sarah Marlborough became a vicious and embittered enemy of the queen, whom she accused of lesbianism and whose reputation she ruined. The satirist Jonathan Swift aimed repeated barbs at the duke, accusing him of corruption. But, with the foresight of natural courtiers, the Marlboroughs simply aligned themselves with the elector of Hanover, who in 1714 became King George I and reappointed the duke as captain general.

  However, by now Marlborough’s powers were fading. He suffered two strokes in 1716 and was thereafter largely confined to Blenheim. In 1722 a final stroke killed him, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey. A century later the duke of Wellington declared, “I can conceive of nothing greater than Marlborough at the head of an English army,” and since then military historians have largely agreed that Marlborough was the finest general England has ever produced.

  Over three hundred years later, the Churchill family again produced an outstanding statesman who dominated his age: Winston Churchill.

  PETER THE GREAT

  1672–1725

  I have conquered an empire but I have not been able to conquer myself.

  Peter I of Russia was a physical giant—6 feet 8 inches tall—and dynamic ruler whose astonishing political acumen, colossal ambitions, ruthless methods and eccentric energy, transformed Russia into a European great power, vastly expanded his empire and founded the city of St. Petersburg. He is often described as a pro-Western reformer but that is simplistic: he was certainly a reformer and advocate of Western technology but at heart he was a brutal autocrat, the ultimate personification of the hero-monster.

  He grew up in a rough school: like other practitioners of political autocracy such as Tsar Ivan the Terrible and King Louis XIV, his early years were dangerous and uncertain, overshadowed by terrifying coups and intrigues. Peter was the son of the second tsar of a new dynasty—the Romanovs—and when his father Alexei died, his weak and sickly eldest brother Fyodor succeeded to the throne for a few years, but powerful boyar (noble) families effectively ruled in his stead. On Fyodor’s death in 1682, the next two brothers in the family, Ivan V and Peter I succeeded jointly—Ivan too was unfit to rule and both were very young so Russia was ruled by their mother as regent. The revolt of Moscow’s old court guardsmen, the streltsy, enabled Peter’s formidable sister Sophia to seize power and rule in the boys’ name.

  Peter developed into an extraordinary figure—amazingly tall though with a somewhat small head, highly intelligent and indefatigable though sometimes affected by twitches and strange illnesses—he may have been epileptic. From an early age he was fascinated with all matters military, naval and technological, creating his own mini-army with regiments made up of his friends and cronies.

  In 1689, Peter removed his sister and started to rule in his own right. He also married and had children. One of his first actions was attack the Ottomans and the Crimean Tartars to the south, hoping to capture Azov, but this enterprise failed and it was not until 1696 that he managed to take the city.

  In 1697, he set off on his fact-finding adventure—the Grand Embassy—around western Europe, where he visited Holland and England amongst many other places and studied shipbuilding. The trip was bizarre—part technological research, part political investigation, part road trip and part hooliganish stag party.

  Peter was already a law unto himself: such was his supremacy as tsar in Russia that he often dressed as an ordinary sailor or soldier and liked in his inner circle to appoint other courtiers as “mock-tsar” so that he could relax while his henchmen indulged in the wild orgies of drunkenness and debauch that literally killed some less energetic participants.

  After eighteen months away in western Europe, the streltsy, the overmighty Kremlin guards, rebelled and Peter rushed home to organize their destruction—here was an opportunity to create his own army. Never shy of shedding blood with his own hands, he personally executed and tortured many in a public orgy of violence. But he also embarked on the famous reforms that were designed to update and empower Russia to take its place amongst the great powers of Europe: beards were banned, new army regiments trained, government reorganized and Peter probed northwards toward the Baltic, controlled by Sweden, southwards toward the Black Sea, under Ottoman rule, to find a port for Russia.

  His Great Northern War, designed to win an outlet on the Baltic, and fought all around that sea and in Ukraine and Poland, was a mammoth, destructive and long struggle with the Swedish empire, in particular its brilliant warrior-king Charles XII. It began with a defeat at Narva, but Peter went ahead anyway and founded St. Petersburg. Ultimately his sheer will and vision would make it Russia’s capital city. The war raged for many years and culminated in Charles XII’s invasion of Russia—a project that ranks with the invasions of Napoleon and Hitler in its scale, ambition and hubris. In one of the decisive battles of European history, Peter defeated the Swedes at Poltava in 1709. St. Petersburg was safe but the war continued for another decade even after the death of Charles XII.

  In 1710, Peter, always impatient and overambitious, attacked the Ottoman empire in the south, but his campaign very nearly ended in disaster when he and his army were surrounded by the Ottoman grand vizier and his army: he was lucky to escape.

  Nonetheless his armies had conquered much of the Baltic shores and he concentrated on his reforms and new capital. His allies in these enterprises were often his own creations whom he raised to the highest wealth and aristocracy, such as his crony and friend, a former soldier and pie seller, Alexander Menshikov, whom he made into a prince and field marshal.

  His great love was one of Menshikov’s former mistresses, a young Livonian girl named Martha Scavronskaya—renamed Catherine by the
tsar—who became Peter’s most trusted ally, consolation and mother of more children including his daughter, the future empress Elizaveta. Much earlier, he had divorced his first wife Eudoxia with whom he had fathered his heir, Tsarevich Alexei. The boy represented the old Muscovite interests that Peter loathed and tensions between them represented political as well as personal rifts. Terrified, the prince took refuge with the Habsburg emperor in Vienna.

  Furious, humiliated and threatened, Peter had him hunted down and lured home with promises of safety. Meanwhile, in Russia, anyone implicated in Alexei’s escape was impaled, tortured and executed, often by the tsar himself. When Alexei arrived home, he was instantly arrested and tortured to death by his own father. Peter remained a dangerous and paranoid tyrant: when the brother of one of his former mistresses Anna Mons became too close to his wife Catherine, he was beheaded and his pickled head presented to her.