Dahomeans, Stuarts and Villiers, Tamerlanians and Ottomans
KING OF WITCHES – JAMES IN LOVE, SHAKESPEARE AT COURT
The play the court was watching was King Lear, a dark drama of senescent power, paternal folly, political division and filial ingratitude, ending in mayhem and tragedy. But it scarcely seemed out of place in the unstable and unsettling new union of England and Scotland, where the last six years had seen abortive coups against the old Queen Elizabeth and the new James, as well as a Catholic conspiracy to murder the entire royal family and ruling class.
James had been a king since he was one year old; both his parents died violently and he was raised within a court of murderous grandees and religious zealots in a kingdom dominated by a Protestant sect, the Presbyterians, who rejected priests and bishops. The king was a boozy and blowsy pedant who moistly lectured courtiers on witchcraft and theology from sap-dripping lips: some English observers claimed he had an oversized tongue, but this was just a slur on his thick Scottish accent. Brought up as a Presbyterian, he emerged intelligent and curious, but unsurprisingly hungry for love – and a believer in the maleficent power of witches.
The need to explain the streak of disasters – religious wars, pandemics and bad harvests – along with a fear of unconventional women and the popularity of printed works on witchcraft, had unleashed a spate of witchcraft trials. At Trier in the 1580s an archbishop orchestrated attacks on Protestants, Jews and witches that led to the burning of 386 people. In 1589, at the height of this lurid hysteria, James married Anne of Denmark by proxy, but her voyage to Scotland was abandoned due to storms. James set off to collect her – a rare moment of heterosexual romance – but he was sure the storms were the work of witches and on his return encouraged a case in North Berwick that led to many being tortured and burned. James would be Britain’s only intellectual monarch: he wrote first on witchcraft, Daemonologie, then a tract extolling the divine right of kings.
As Elizabeth aged, James had secretly negotiated with her courtiers: Essex was in a rush to accelerate James’s succession. But Elizabeth had lost patience with Essex’s tantrums. In February 1601, the narcissistic jackanapes launched a coup, hiring Shakespeare’s theatrical company to perform his play Richard II as a signal to destroy the tyrant and deliver England to James. ‘I am Richard II,’ said Elizabeth ruefully afterwards. Essex was beheaded. Shakespeare was probably interrogated; it was a close call, but he survived. On her death in 1603, Elizabeth’s trusted minister Robert Cecil facilitated the succession of the king of Scots.*
In one of his first decisions, James appointed the lord chamberlain’s troupe of actors, part-owned by Shakespeare, as the King’s Players, performing for the king ten times a season. James’s two sons, the attractive Henry and the meagre, shy Charles, promised stability, and in London Anne survived three more pregnancies, the babies delivered by a French doctor with secret equipment that enabled safer births.* Yet the atmosphere was tense as a new wave of the bubonic plague hit London, deaths rising from twenty a week to a thousand, prompting James to order a lockdown of theatre and bear-baiting. The king started to negotiate peace with Spain, but he did not cancel restrictions on Catholics, sparking the conspiracy of Robert Catesby to blow up the State Opening of Parliament. The plot is now regarded as a jape, but this terrorist spectacular would have killed not just most of the royal family but the entire elite, thousands of people. On 4 November 1605, an anonymous letter tipped off Cecil, and thirty-six barrels of gunpowder were discovered under Parliament. The conspirators were hunted down.
The paranoia and equivocation, plagues and lockdowns, the twists of power and the importance of character inspired Shakespeare, who had himself come close to destruction. As England watched the trial of the terrorists and celebrated the survival of their Scottish king and his young sons, Shakespeare wrote a Scottish story, Macbeth, based vaguely on history, about the unholy crime of killing a king and the fascinations of witchcraft. Now forty-two, Shakespeare, balding with a small moustache and beard, was the son of an impecunious glovemaker from Warwickshire born in the year Michelangelo died. He may have started as a schoolmaster, and switched to acting in the 1580s. Shakespeare made his name with two epic poems, a series of sonnets and, even though waves of plague led to periodic closures of theatres, a mix of comic and historical plays. But he made his fortune as actor-manager, part-owner of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men that enabled him to buy the largest house in his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. There he had married young, having two daughters and a son Hamnet, who aged eleven had died ten years earlier. When he was in London, he moved between the raffish taverns of Southwark, where he stayed in lodgings, and the rotten gleam of court, where he was a groom of the chamber. Discreet and private, his passionate sonnets of love and betrayal, describing affairs with women and men in a London of bawdy houses and venereal diseases, suggest worldly experience: ‘When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her though I know she lies.’
On 5 January 1606, James attended an entertainment at the Banqueting House in Whitehall to celebrate the marriage of the earl of Essex, fourteen-year-old son of the executed favourite, to Frances Howard, daughter of one of the grandees who had destroyed the groom’s father. This marriage, devised by James as an act of reconciliation, would become a murderous scandal. But, for now, Shakespeare watched the young noblewomen dancing in scarlet costumes in a show written by his rival playwright Ben Jonson, a rambunctious Catholic sympathizer who had killed two men in duels yet made it from bricklayer and murderer to national poet. The joyful extravagance of the show inspired Shakespeare to write Antony and Cleopatra, in which the Egyptian queen’s arrival on a resplendent barge would demand a similarly spectacular mise en scène – very different from the unbearable anguish of his other work in progress, King Lear.
In the days after the show, James secretly observed the trial of the Catholic conspirators. On 30 January, eight of them were dragged backwards in wicker baskets to the gallows where they were half hanged, their genitals cut off and burned, their bowels and hearts cut out, before they were decapitated, a process designed to put them ‘halfway between heaven and earth as unworthy of both’.
Soon after he had attended King Lear, James watched a jousting match where a young Scottish courtier, Robert Carr, was unhorsed and broke his leg. James fell in love with him on the spot, nursed, educated and knighted him. Carr started to dominate the court, and was soon raised to earl of Somerset. Queen Anne loathed him, and Parliament despised James’s generous gifts to this upstart Caledonian. Fortunately, Carr’s rise was balanced by the charisma of Henry, prince of Wales, who was fascinated by the opening up of the world.
London in 1606 was unexpectedly cosmopolitan. The voyages of English slavers had brought a few hundred Africans to London, where Africa was on people’s minds. Elizabeth had ordered their deportation, but it had never been enforced. Londoners had been fascinated by the visit of a Moroccan ambassador. Shakespeare had written love sonnets to a ‘dark lady’: she may simply have been a brunette, but she may well have been African,* while his play Othello, premiered in 1604, starred a Moorish general. On Twelfth Night the next year, Anne presided over Jonson’s Masque of Blackness in which the queen and her ladies, wearing blackface and costumes by Inigo Jones, played the daughters of the god Niger who wished to have their skins whitened by the god Oceanus.
Self-confident, scholarly and a jouster, tennis player and early golfer, Prince Henry asked his father to let him study with the imprisoned Raleigh. The swashbuckler, locked in the Tower, was happy to receive Henry, for whom he probably started writing his History of the World. Henry was so inspired by Raleigh’s tales of a gold-rich kingdom in South America, Eldorado, that he funded his own adventurer, Thomas Roe, on an expedition to Guiana. Raleigh was the authority since it was his Roanoke colony in America and his capture in 1592 of a majestic Portuguese carrack, stacked with east Asian delicacies – gold, ambergris, cloves, cinnamon and cochineal – that inspired the founding of two companies: an East India Company (EIC), set up in 1600 to trade Asian spices and backed by James, who knighted the captain of its first voyage, and a Virginia Company, chartered in 1606 to found a colony on the American coast.* The latter company’s expedition hit land which they named Cape Henry and founded a settlement, Jamestown. Even though the Native American peoples around the site, the Powhatan confederacy, were initially friendly, the settlers died in droves of disease and starvation. These disastrous voyages inspired Shakespeare’s last single-authored play, The Tempest.
As for the EIC, it dispatched only three ships annually in its first decade. The real dynamos were the Dutch, way ahead of the English. When Philip II closed his ports to Dutch seamen in 1598, he unconsciously opened the world to Dutch ambition. Between 1595 and 1602, the Dutch sent fifty ships to attack Habsburg shipping. In 1602, the Heeren XVII – the Seventeen Gentlemen, many of them members of the interrelated merchant dynasties of Bickers and de Graeffs that dominated Dutch politics – founded their own East India Company (VOC), chartered by the ruling States-General with military and government powers to conquer and maintain trading posts in Asia. The Amsterdam stock exchange – the first – was founded to trade in its stocks. The VOC fitted easily into the pluralistic structure of the Netherlands with its seven provinces, powerful cities and guilds, but it became the first multinational company, the first publicly owned, the first war corporation. Its ruling families reflected the changes in society, fostering modern organization, industrious values and artistic patronage, as well as technical innovation and vicious competition.
The VOC based its trading on violence. ‘We can’t conduct trade without war,’ Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the VOC director-general, told the Seventeen, ‘nor war without trade.’ The profits were bounteous, the rivalries with Portuguese, English and Chinese merchants brutally pursued.* In 1607, Coen joined an expedition to the Banda Islands – richest of the Moluccas – where the local Indonesians massacred most of the Dutch. Coen, a severe conquistador and fanatical Calvinist, deployed eyewatering violence to establish VOC factories (trading posts), playing local rulers against one another and striking at Portuguese and English rivals. Convinced he was doing God’s work, his style – ‘Don’t despair, don’t spare your enemies, God is with us!’ – was harsh even with his own men. When he found a Dutch officer in bed with a girl, he had him beheaded. The VOC competed with the English, Spanish–Portuguese and Chinese to control the Moluccas, seizing Ambon from the Portuguese. One of its earliest successes was penetrating Japan.
Tokugawa Ieyasu, that master of patient force, had no problem dealing with these traders. In 1598, the would-be conqueror of China, Hideyoshi, died of fever at forty-seven, leaving a council of regents led by Ieyasu to govern for his five-year-old son. Ieyasu soon slaughtered Hideyoshi’s faction, emerging as shogun of a new government at Edo that later became Tokyo and founding a dynasty that ruled Japan until 1868. The Spanish–Portuguese were already trading through Nagasaki; now the Protestants arrived too. The Dutch and English were initially welcomed by the shogun. In 1600 an adventurous Kentish sailor named Will Adams, a veteran of Drake’s raids, was one of the few survivors of the first VOC flotilla to the east. While the Spanish–Portuguese demanded his execution as a pirate, Adams was taken to Osaka Castle. After winning the favour of Ieyasu himself in an all-night interview, Adams joined his court, learned Japanese, trained as a samurai and advised the shogun on European technology, building him his first European warship. Adams worked against the Spanish and Dutch while advancing the interests of the EIC. The Dutch and English were allowed to keep a trading presence, but in 1628 Ieyasu’s son Hidetada, now shogun, turned against Christianity, expelling Catholic priests and burning fifty-five Catholics. For two centuries, under the Tokugawa shoguns, European access to Japan was limited.
Elsewhere, the VOC campaigns continued with maximum force. In 1618, Coen secured Jakarta (renamed Batavia) on Java, rewarded by the Seventeen with the governor-generalship. The Seventeen demanded the seizure of the spice-rich Banda Islands. ‘To adequately deal with this matter,’ wrote Coen, ‘it’s necessary to once again subjugate Banda, and populate it with other people.’ Over 10,000 indigenous people were killed and others were deported, as the VOC secured a monopoly of cloves and nutmeg. They were equally cut-throat with European competitors, waterboarding and beheading twenty-one English merchants at Ambon.
Wherever the Portuguese had a presence, the VOC attacked these Habsburg outposts: in Taiwan, its troops stormed a Portuguese fort in order to develop its China trade. At the same time, it turned to India. In 1608, the VOC attacked the Portuguese in Coromandel, seized Pulicat and negotiated a concession with the maharajas of Vijayanagara, before approaching the greatest monarch of the east, the new Mughal emperor, Jahangir. Here too they were swiftly followed by the English.*
When the VOC and the EIC approached Jahangir, scion of Tamerlane and Babur, they were courting the ruler of the greatest power on earth. Jahangir, then known as Salim, was the opium-addicted son of Akbar the Great: his father at one point locked him up and made him go cold turkey in a bid to cure the addiction. While Salim remained an addict all his life, it did not restrain his ambitions. In the Tamerlane family, sons and grandsons competed for the crown, and those who lost died: ‘Throne or tomb!’ As Akbar aged, the prince had bid for power, assassinating the vizier Abul-Fazl. Akbar struck back by threatening to leave the empire to Jahangir’s own son, Khusrau.
On 3 November 1605, when the great padishah died (the week of the Catholic plot to blow up Parliament in London), Salim took the name World Seizer – Jahangir – as his son Khusrau rebelled and seized Punjab. Jahangir crushed his son, telling his general, ‘Do whatever you must. Kings don’t have families.’ * Khusrau was paraded on an elephant down an avenue of pikes; his supporters were forced to make obeisance before being anally impaled, ‘the most excruciating punishment’, noted Jahangir. Amazingly, after this the boy plotted again and was blinded.
Jahangir displayed flashes of the Tamerlanian temperament, in both expanding the empire and possessing a streak of cruelty, once killing a waiter for dropping a plate and a huntsman for interrupting his aim. But he was fascinated by art, science and architecture, was influenced by European Renaissance art which he regarded as a scientific instrument – a means to study the world. His painter Abu al-Hasan perfected the flamboyant, exquisite Mughal style for an imperial drug addict who increasingly depended on his wife, Nurjahan.
THE EMPRESSES OF AGRA AND CONSTANTINOPLE: LIGHT OF THE PALACE AND BEAUTIFUL MOON
Nurjahan was born Mihr al-Nisa, daughter of one of Akbar’s ministers, an Iranian who had taken service in India. Jahangir had first met her when she was still married to a reckless paladin who had saved Jahangir from a charging tiger. He gave him the name Sher Afgan – Tiger Tosser. Years later, after Tiger Tosser was dead, Jahangir saw her again.
At court in Agra, the meena bazaar for the Nowruz festival was the ideal occasion for flirtations. Mihr al-Nisa was thirty-four, a widow with a daughter; Jahangir was already fifty-one with fifteen wives and a packed harem, but ‘I didn’t think anyone was fonder of me.’ This astute Persian, raised in Kandahar, was not only tempestuous, lithe and beautiful, fluent in Persian and Arabic, but also fun. She loved to paint with a drink in her hand, and she was a crack markswoman who once shot four tigers from an elephant, using only six bullets, without a miss. ‘Such shooting had never been seen,’ wrote Jahangir; ‘the four tigers never got a chance to spring.’ An English merchant once saw the couple riding gaily into a hunting camp together on a cart, alone, with the emperor driving.
In 1612, after their wedding – at which he gave her the name Nurmahal, Light of the Palace, later promoted to Nurjahan, Light of the World – they arranged the match of his disciplined, abstemious third son Khurram (later Emperor Shahjahan) to her niece Arjumand Banu, who was as erudite and charming as her aunt. Khurram had been the favourite grandson of Akbar, who named him Joyful then took him from his Rajput mother and had him raised by his childless senior wife Ruqaiya, who ‘always promoted him’, and told Jahangir ‘there was no comparison between him and my other children’. Akbar ‘regarded him as his real child’, while Ruqaiya loved him ‘a thousand times more than if he’d been her own’. Raised by these two titans, Khurram was unimpressed by the feckless Jahangir but he fell in love with his new wife at once, renaming her Mumtaz Mahal (Exalted of the Palace). But Nurjahan then married her own daughter to another of Jahangir’s sons, the footling youngest Shahryar, sparking Khurram’s suspicion that she was planning to destroy him.
It was now that the Dutch and English companies arrived in Agra to request trading concessions. Jahangir’s empire was the richest power on earth, approaching the height of its economic power: it is estimated that its share of world GDP was climbing fast, from 22.7 per cent in 1600 to 24.4 per cent in 1700, bigger than China’s. Its population – 110 million – was larger than all Europe combined. Its textiles, manufactured in thousands of small cottage-scale craft shops, were exported to Europe, where they were becoming fashionable, along with jewels, ivory and spices supplied by Portuguese and Arab traders. But in 1616, Jahangir granted the Dutch trading factories first in Surat, then in Bengal. At the same time, the EIC sent their flashy plenipotentiary, Thomas Roe, veteran of the hunt for the Guyanese Eldorado, to charm Jahangir. The two boozed together and Jahangir granted Roe a factory at Surat. But these Europeans were very small fry for the World Seizer.*
Jahangir ruled northern India but not the south. Keen to expand, he ordered Khurram to advance southwards into Deccan (from Dakhin meaning south), earning his father’s promotion to the highest mansab (the rank system created by Akbar) and the title Shahjahan – World King. ‘With an impulse of unabashed paternal affection I took him in my arms,’ wrote Jahangir. ‘The more he expressed his reverence for me, the more my tenderness increased.’
Yet their southern advance was blocked by the sultanate of Ahmadnagar, ruled at the time by a gifted African paladin, Malik Ambar, one of the Habashi, usually pagans from the African interior who were captured by Christians or Arabs then sold to Gujaratis to serve as soldiers for the sultans of east and south India.* Sold by his parents, converted to Islam by his first master in Baghdad, Ambar was eventually manumitted. ‘A black kafir [an Arabic word for infidel which became a European racist epithet for Africans] with a stern Roman face,’ according to a Dutch merchant, he commanded 10,000 Habashi, taking over Ahmadnagar as peshwa (chief minister), marrying its sultan to his daughter. Repeatedly defeating Jahangir, Ambar was almost eighty by the time Shahjahan humbled him, a triumph celebrated by Jahangir in a painting of him shooting a bow at Ambar, an allegory of wish fulfilment, showing how powerful the Habashi had become. Only after Ambar’s death did the Mughals swallow Ahmadnagar.
Yet relations between father and son were frosty. The warmer Jahangir was, the colder was Shahjahan. Even in this bout of familial love, there was bloodletting too: Shahjahan asked for the custody of his blinded brother Khusrau, whom he then killed. His affection was reserved for Mumtaz Mahal. ‘Don’t father children on any other woman,’ she told him, ‘lest hers and mine fight for the succession.’ He ordered other women to abort their pregnancies. Now he observed his father’s decline.
‘Nurjahan Begum, whose skill and experience are greater than those of the physicians, tried to diminish the number of my cups and carry out remedies,’ recalled Jahangir. ‘Gradually she reduced my wine.’ Nurjahan’s power depended on the life of one Tamerlanian junkie, but her contemporary in Constantinople was an even more remarkable woman who would dominate the Ottoman empire for forty years.
When the Ottoman sultan, Ahmed, first saw her, she was Anastasia, a newly enslaved Greek odalisque in the harem. Both of them were thirteen and he renamed her Mahpeyker – Beautiful Moon. But when he fell in love with her, he renamed her Kösem – Leader. ‘Beautiful and shrewd,’ noted the Venetian envoy, ‘with many talents, she sings beautifully, is extremely well loved by the king,’ who even ‘listened to her in some matters’. Together they had nine children, of whom five were sons, one of brilliant gifts, one of homicidal insanity. Kösem faced competition: Ahmed’s eldest son, Osman, was by another odalisque, yet she became close to him, though her priority would always be her own children.
Sultan Ahmed, prompted supposedly by Kösem, ended the tradition of strangling royal brothers: he preserved his own brother in the ‘golden cage’ of the harem. The padishahs now spent less time commanding armies, which empowered their palace staff: their African eunuchs now ranked equal to grand viziers.*
Playful, cultured and athletic, a poet and fencer, Ahmed, who always wanted Kösem beside him, worked hard on his Blue Mosque, designed with Mehmed Agha, who had been trained by the great Sinan. With its breathtaking five domes, eight smaller domes and six minarets, and its aquamarine tiles, a cascade of Byzantine–Ottoman styles, it remains one of the joys of Istanbul. The Ottomans had recently won victories in Hungary and had seized the Caucasus from Persia which led Ahmed to take his eyes off his main duty: war. Suddenly in 1605, he was attacked by a terrifying new shah.
Great-grandson of the messianic boy-king Ismail, Abbas had been formed by the murderous purges of the Safavi shahs and the overmighty swagger of their Turkman generals, who had blinded his father and sliced up his mother. When he was seventeen, one of the generals deposed his father and crowned him.
Stocky, agile and swarthy with green eyes and droopy moustaches, Abbas was pleasure-loving but with a will to power, focused and unpredictable, always wearing a sword, frequently beheading prisoners in front of the court. In battle he was strong enough to wrestle an Ottoman assassin to death. Once in a towering rage at the clumsy blunder of troops in a mock battle, he ran among them slicing four men in half. Yet he was informal, cooking his own food and exercising his horse in the square at Isfahan, chatting to passers-by. He checked food prices by wearing disguise in the bazaar: when tradesmen tricked him, he had a baker baked in his oven, a butcher roasted alive.
Abbas was an enthusiast for girls and boys, both usually enslaved Georgians. In the harem, the girls sometimes ‘swept him off his feet, whirled around the rooms, threw him down on the carpet as he called out, “You strumpets, ah you crazy things!”’ As in Constantinople it was run by African and Georgian eunuchs. Abbas sometimes performed the orchiectomies himself with such precision that fewer died than usual. His new army was mainly manned by ghilman slaves from the Caucasus. In 1605 he attacked the Ottomans and retook Tabriz and the Caucasus where he enslaved 160,000 people.
After his initial successes against the Ottomans, Rudolf sent an envoy to Abbas, who welcomed him cheerfully while examining two swords before choosing one and beheading an Ottoman prisoner, with the advice that the emperor should treat the Turks the same way. But the real world was now catching up with the emperor of fantasy.
HIGHFALL: PRINCE OF DARKNESS AND THE COPROPHAGIAN JULIUS CAESAR
‘They say you’re an alchemist, astrologer and given to necromancy,’ Rudolf’s brother Albrecht wrote to him. ‘If this be true and Your Majesty has fallen into the habits of using the services of the dead, pity the House of Austria.’ The pope, Clement VIII, was now leading a militant Catholic revival, a reaction to the passion of Protestantism, and planned regime change in Prague, spying on Rudolf and encouraging his brothers, led by Archduke Matthias, to depose him. ‘It is generally agreed among Catholics in Prague,’ reported Clement’s envoy, ‘that the emperor has been bewitched and is in league with the devil. I’ve been shown the chair in which His Majesty sits holding conversations with the Prince of Darkness … and the little bell HM uses to summon spirits of the departed.’
In 1606, the Habsburg brothers and their nephew Ferdinand of Styria met secretly in Vienna. ‘His Majesty has now reached the stage of abandoning God entirely,’ said Matthias, and was devoting himself to ‘wizards, alchemists, Kabbalists’. Matthias forced Rudolf to make peace with the Ottomans. In Prague, Rudolf, distrusting everyone and convinced his brothers wanted to kill him, stabbed his chamberlain in the middle of the night, then attempted suicide. In search of a loyal servant, he promoted a Tyrolean converted Jew, Philip Lang, to chamberlain – they may also have been lovers – allowing him control of the government, while this epigone sold paintings and betrayed him to his brothers. ‘I know I am dead and damned,’ Rudolf told Lang, ‘possessed by the devil.’*
Both brothers were now bidding for Protestant support. In July 1609, Rudolf signed a Letter of Majesty that promised religious tolerance for the Protestants, but when they threatened his power he brought in a detachment of mercenaries who alienated all sides. Matthias’s troops advanced into Bohemia, forcing him to cede Hungary and Austria. In March 1611, as Rudolf ranted in the castle corridors, ‘He’s snatched my crowns one by one,’ Matthias marched on Prague, which welcomed him. ‘Prague, Prague,’ Rudolf cursed, ‘I made you famous but now you drive me out … Vengeance upon you!’
Matthias let Rudolf keep the castle. When Rudolf’s favourite lion died, he knew it was the end. Now emperor, Matthias confirmed Rudolf’s promise of tolerance, but the Protestants claimed the right to build new churches on Catholic land. As Matthias lay dying, his successor Ferdinand II promised a Catholic crackdown, aided by Catholic officials Jaroslav Borˇita and Vilém Slavata. Bohemian nobles raided the castle, telling the officials, ‘You’re enemies of us and our religion,’ before they hurled the two of them and their secretary Philip Fabricius out of the window, defenestration being something of a tradition in Prague: a messy death. But all three survived the seventy-foot drop, with Catholics claiming that their fall had been eased by the Virgin Mary, and Protestants citing a heap of garbage. Fabricius galloped to inform Vienna, where he was ennobled by Emperor Ferdinand with the epithet von Hohenfall (Highfall). Ferdinand cracked down on the Bohemian rebels, who then deposed the Habsburgs and elected the Protestant prince, Frederick, elector Palatine, married to James I’s daughter, Elizabeth.
James was under pressure to support his son-in-law, but he was much diminished by the death of his beloved son, Henry, in 1612, leaving as heir the unglamorous Charles, not yet twelve. James paid more attention to his favourite, the earl of Somerset.
Then on 14 September 1613, a courtier, Sir Thomas Overbury, died in the Tower of London after an injection into his rectum.
MURDER BY ENEMA: THE FAVOURITES OF JAMES
James was now shocked to learn that Overbury had been murdered on the orders of his darling Somerset and his new wife. Overbury had been Somerset’s political adviser, until the earl fell in love with the married Frances, countess of Essex, whose wedding theatricals had been attended by Shakespeare. Overbury did not approve, warning his patron of her ‘injury and iniquity’, penning an entire poem The Wife against her. Instead her powerful pro-Spanish family, the Howards, framed Overbury and persuaded James, jealous of Overbury’s relationship with Somerset, to imprison him in the Tower – and allow her marriage to Somerset on the basis that her husband Essex was impotent. The couple decided to eliminate Overbury, first sacking the Tower governor and replacing him with a corrupt placeman, then inserting a thuggish jailer. They recruited a witchy whoremonger, Anne Turner, to procure poison from a pharmacist’s wife. The poison was delivered by Overbury’s suborned doctor, who fed him cakes painted with arsenic. Overbury fell ill but did not die, so the Somersets ordered the doctor to deliver a glister (enema) of mercury chloride into Sir Thomas’s rectum. Overbury died in agony just before Somerset married Frances Howard. Somerset was constantly promoted by James, who was nonetheless becoming weary of his greed and grandiosity. Just then the king spotted a gorgeous young man at a hunt: George Villiers became the means to overthrow Somerset, whose enemies raised money to buy the Adonis a new bejewelled suit. Villiers was then dangled before the king, lithely dancing in court masques, his famous legs on show. Now that Somerset was no longer invulnerable, the governor of the Tower denounced him for killing Overbury.
The murderers were arrested and under torture confirmed that their patrons were indeed the Somersets, who were imprisoned in the Tower. In November 1615 Anne Turner, described at her trial as ‘whore, bawd, sorcerer, witch, papist, felon and murderer’, was hanged with three others. James was distraught, begging Somerset not to lay ‘an aspersion upon me of being, in some sort, accessory to his crime’. At the most famous trial of the reign, watched nervously by the king, the Somersets were found guilty and sentenced to hang. The forty-eight-year-old James pardoned them, consoled by George Villiers, aged twenty-one, described by a slavering bishop as ‘the handsomest-bodied man in all of England’: James fell in love with him, installing him as master of horse, then elevating him to the rare title of marquess of Buckingham. He called him ‘my sweet wife’, while Buckingham later remembered how the king loved him ‘at the time which I shall never forget at Farnham, where the bed’s head could not be found between the master and his dog’. Buckingham called him ‘dere Dad and Gossope’.
As this jewel arrived at court, another vanished. After staging his last (and lost) play, Cardenio, Shakespeare, either ill or tainted in some scandal, retired to Stratford. On a rare visit to London, the playwright had a ‘merry meeting’ with his friend and rival Ben Jonson, and ‘it seems drank too much’ for on his return home, on 23 April 1616, he ‘died of a fever there contracted’.
In Europe, James’s dream of conciliating the two sects was drowned in blood. On 8 November 1620, at White Mountain, Kaiser Ferdinand routed the Bohemians. James’s son-in-law and daughter fled, losing Bohemia and the Palatinate. Appointing Buckingham as lord high admiral to direct policy, James negotiated with the Spanish, hoping to save his daughter’s lands in return for marrying Charles to Infanta María of Spain.
Charles was delighted. Tiny, elegant, tortuously polite, a devout High Anglican with an obsessive belief in the sacred nature of kingship, he was obsessed with the Habsburg princess he had seen only in a portrait. His romance was encouraged by Buckingham, eight years his senior, who taught the awkward prince to dance. Craving his father’s approval, he revered Buckingham, who seemed able to deliver it.
The Protestants in Parliament disliked this Catholic appeasement. In early 1623, as Parliament attacked his ministers. James confronted the growing popularity of an ever more devout Protestant sect which looked to the Word of the Bible, a more ascetic lifestyle and an immediate, intimate engagement with God and Christ, bringing a grace that made its believers regard themselves as the Elect and the Saints. ‘I’ll harry them out of the kingdom,’ warned James. But the religiosity was infectious, its intensity increased by its opposite. The more militant the Catholic resurgence, the more fanatical became the black-clad, Bible-spouting and censorious Saints – jokingly called puritans – a breed mocked by Shakespeare through his character Malvolio. They were increasingly powerful in the opposition of ascetic and self-righteous lords and gentlemen that challenged James and his messy, splashy court as the Spanish negotiations became sticky. But Charles was sure he could break the impasse, planning the most bizarre exploit ever attempted by an English prince.
In June 1622, in Prague, Ferdinand celebrated his victory with his ‘theatre of blood’, killing forty-eight Bohemian Protestants; some were hanged; those who blasphemed had their tongues cut out or nailed to the gallows; all were quartered. The Habsburgs had won.* For now.
The peace with the Ottomans had allowed the Catholic kaiser to break Protestant power. Now an energetic padishah tried to redress the balance – an intervention that helped bring the remarkable female politician Kösem to power.
ASSASSINATION BY TESTICULAR COMPRESSION: KöSEM AND HER BOYS
Family power allowed women to play very different roles. In monarchies, the powerless daughter sent to marry a distant potentate was less valued than the peasant’s wife or daughter who were essential to running a smallholding. But Kösem – and women like her – were the protectors of sons and often regent of kings, allowing them to become potentates themselves. In 1617, on the death of her husband Ahmed, Kösem negotiated the succession of his brother Mustafa. But Mustafa was too simple: his hobby was throwing coins to the fish in the Bosphoros. Kösem could no longer delay the accession of Ahmed’s eldest son, the fourteen-year-old Osman II, but she ensured that he did not immediately kill his half-brothers – her sons.
The headstrong young padishah planned to force Poland–Lithuania to back the underdog Protestants against the all-conquering Habsburgs, and to centralize power in Istanbul. Osman was friendly with Kösem but lacked a valide sultan of his own to manage the Topkapı Palace. He ceded Georgia to Shah Abbas, and then (after having his brother strangled) led his army into Poland. But across Eurasia a change in climate, dubbed the little ice age, destabilized societies, contributing to turbulence from Constantinople to China, from Ukraine to Paris: it was so cold that the Bosphoros froze, people starved, Janissaries grumbled and, at the front, Osman’s huge army was halted by the Poles.
On his return to Istanbul in May 1622, just as Ferdinand devised his Theatre of Blood in Prague, Osman’s plan to demote the Janissaries and create an army similar to that of Abbas sparked a coup in which Janissaries descended from the palace roof on ropes and arrested the sultan. Imprisoned in the Yedikule Fortress, Osman was too forceful to accept dethronement. He resisted strangling so energetically that a strapping wrestler killed him by compression of the testicles – a respectful method in that it did not shed royal blood, but it certainly signalled the anger Osman inspired. It was the first Ottoman regicide, soon to be followed by an English version, marking a retreat from boundless monarchy.
Out of the chaos, Kösem finessed the accession of her boisterous eleven-year-old son, Murad IV. Now in close alliance with the grand vizier and the kizlar aga, she returned to power, seeking to protect Murad and her two surviving sons. In her frank letters to the grand vizier, Kösem – admired by the crowds as Valide-i Muazzama, the Magnificent Mother – was a master of business. ‘How are you getting along with salary payments? Is there much left?’, tolerating no nonsense and giving firm orders: ‘You can say attention should be paid to provisions for the war. If it were up to me it would have been taken care of earlier, it’s no fault of me or my son.’ She had a sense of humour too: ‘You really give me a headache, but I give you an awful headache too. How many times have I asked myself, “I wonder if he’s getting sick of me,” but what can else can I do?’
Growing up amid Janissary conspiracies and mob lynchings of his ministers, Murad would emerge as the greatest padishah since Suleiman. But, for now, a child sultan was too good a chance for Shah Abbas to miss. When Baghdad rebelled against the Ottomans, Abbas broke the peace and seized Iraq. That was not all: he also grabbed Bahrain from the Habsburgs and coveted their fortress at Hormuz that dominated the Persian Gulf. He lacked ships, but the English EIC was trying to negotiate trading concessions with Persia, so in 1622 he borrowed a flotilla of four – and stormed Hormuz.
The new king of Spain and Portugal, Philip IV, eighteen-year-old grandson of the Prudent King, was concerned less with Persia and more with two mysterious Englishmen named Smith who had unexpectedly arrived in Madrid.
THE SMITHS, THE PLANET KING AND TWO ARTISTS
On 7 March 1623, Philip was amazed to learn that Thomas and John Smith were in fact Charles, prince of Wales, aged twenty-three, and the thirty-one-year-old marquess of Buckingham, who had enjoyed a thrilling trip across Europe. James bemoaned the antics of ‘my babies’ but called them his ‘venturesome knights’ and promoted Buckingham to duke to help with the negotiations.
James was pursuing a Spanish match with the Infanta María, Philip’s sister, to keep England out of the war, to win back his son-in-law’s Palatinate and to obtain a useful dowry payment.* Charles had convinced himself that he was in love with María. Buckingham, keen to deliver the alliance to James but also to bind himself to the heir, encouraged a risky plan that appealed to the prince’s sense of romance. The duke should have known better. Ignoring the complexity of religion, the pair galloped for Paris where they admired the green-eyed Habsburg queen of France, Anne of Austria, Philip IV’s sister, whom Charles called the ‘handsomest’; he scarcely noticed her sister-in-law Henrietta Maria.
The Smiths galloped on towards Madrid. Their arrival embarrassed and fascinated Philip, who welcomed the ‘Smiths’ to the Alcázar Palace. A child of first cousins, his mother being Emperor Ferdinand’s sister, Philip had inherited the Spanish–Portuguese empires stretching across five continents but also the Habsburg jaw and the sacred formality of Spanish kingship. He was the centrepiece of the court’s ‘theatre of grandeur’, hailed as El Rey Planeta – the Planet King (the sun was then regarded as the fourth of the planetary hierarchy) – who at meals was served by courtiers on their knees. Philip moved slowly and unsmilingly like a ghostly human galleon; it was joked that he only laughed thrice in his long reign.
Yet in private the planetary one was insecure, pious, playful and amorous, directed by a masterful valido (premier), the count-duke of Olivares, a sturdy and florid extrovert with a nose like a red hammer, who promoted himself in martial magnificence. The valido had won favour by a mix of old-fashioned sycophancy – bearing the brimming royal chamber pot and arranging royal assignations with actresses – and magnetic confidence: he had a plan to invigorate Spain, tarnished by financial crisis and military overstretch, and it was already working. Red-haired with flying moustaches, Philip was no fool but admitted to being overwhelmed by a ‘sea of confusions and ocean of difficulties’, which is why he needed Olivares. The king ‘is endowed with all the gifts’, wrote the artist Peter Paul Rubens, who knew him well, but ‘mistrusts himself, and defers to others too much’.
It was just at this time that another artist, the twenty-three-year-old Diego Velázquez, a notary’s son from Seville, arrived to meet the king – just before Charles and Buckingham. Olivares had invited him for a royal audition. Now he had to wait while Philip and Olivares dealt with the clumsy Englishmen. The English marriage could not happen without the liberating of English Catholics and Charles’s conversion to Catholicism. Had Buckingham come to offer Charles’s conversion? If not, the visit was going to be very awkward. Philip allowed Charles to glimpse his veiled sister, but she refused to marry a heretic. Meanwhile, the two macho showboats Olivares and Buckingham argued and almost came to blows.
The one thing Philip and Charles shared was a love of art, the only winner in the whole debacle. Charles was given two Titians by the exceedingly polite Philip. Both men sat for Velázquez. Philip loved Velázquez’s style, showing the Habsburg as both flawed man and planetary majesty. After painting Olivares in all his bloated self-importance and sensitively portraying Philip and his jaw, Velázquez was appointed usher of the privy chamber.
Charles now realized that unless he signed a face-saving agreement Olivares would not let him return to London. He signed. Determined to avenge themselves on the Habsburgs, he and Buckingham returned home, where the public were delighted that they were not accompanied by an infanta. But all factions now wanted war against Spain – and a French alliance. Charles and Buckingham unwisely allowed the impeachment by Parliament of their own treasurer in return for war subsidies. In March 1625, James died with Buckingham holding his hand – shortly before Charles married the fifteen-year-old French princess, Henrietta Maria, whose dark eyes revealed her Medici blood.
Travelling to Paris to collect the bride, Buckingham flaunted his glamour in twenty-five diamond-encrusted suits and at a garden party shamelessly flirted with Louis XIII’s wife, Anne of Austria. At court, he met one of the most fascinating figures in Europe, the Flemish diplomat-artist Rubens, whose extraordinary energy and ambition owed something to the notorious downfall of his father.* Rubens’s extravagant, glitzy, colourful, sensuous art was the aesthetic wing of the Catholic resurgence, designed to outshine as well as outfight dour Protestantism and to display Habsburg magnificence.* But he was unimpressed by the diamond-spangled Buckingham, who hired him to decorate his London palace.
When Charles met Henrietta Maria he could not believe how small she was. They matched, but she was irked by the restrictions at court. ‘I’m the most afflicted person on earth,’ she wrote. Brought up in Paris, daughter of a great king, the assassinated Henri IV, she was devoutly Catholic and very extravagant, her entourage numbering 200, including her favourite dwarf, Jeffrey Hudson. The latter was presented to her by Buckingham, jumping out of a pie in a suit of armour and becoming her inseparable Lord Minimus. Hudson would have a life almost as dramatic as those of his royal masters. But Charles’s marriage was dominated by Buckingham, while their policies floundered in the escalating European war.
Charles and Buckingham went to war against Spain and sent an expedition to restore Frederick of the Palatinate, yet they also supported the French Protestants, who were being crushed by Louis XIII, Henrietta Maria’s brother. They ended up at war with both Spain and France – a perfect muddle, as well as placing Charles’s marriage under strain. Buckingham took command but his expeditions were all disastrous. He spent £10,000 on his own clothes for the expedition to save Protestants at La Rochelle (including £367 for a silver perfuming pan) but then did not pay his soldiers. He grew to be hated. Even Rubens, painting the duke, remarked, ‘When I consider the caprice and arrogance of Buckingham, I pity the young king,’ and predicted that the duke was ‘heading for the precipice’. Parliament insisted that ‘until this great person be removed from intermeddling with the great affairs of state, we are out of hope of any good success’. But Charles instead dismissed Parliament and the wars went on.
On 23 August 1628, Buckingham, still only thirty-five, headquartered at the Greyhound Pub in Plymouth to organize his Spanish expedition, was stabbed in the chest by an embittered soldier. ‘Villain,’ shouted Buckingham, then collapsed. His pregnant wife rushed downstairs to find him dead on the breakfast table. While crowds celebrated, Charles ‘threw himself upon his bed, lamenting with much passion and with abundance of tears’, and stayed in his room for two days. Later, disgusted by parliamentary delight in the murder, he heaped praise on Buckingham and effectively adopted his two sons, who were brought up with his own children. But the assassination ended Charles’s Spanish war, the peace negotiated by Rubens, and saved his marriage.* Without Buckingham around, the chilly Charles thawed, and came to love Henrietta Maria. ‘Dear Heart,’ he wrote later, ‘thou canst not but be confident that there is no danger which I will not hazard, or pains that I will not undergo, to enjoy the happiness of thy company.’ In 1630, Henrietta Maria gave birth, aided by Peter Chamberlen and his secret forceps, to a prince of Wales, Charles, followed by a duke of York, James, and five other children.
Warm in private, Charles was obstinate and haughty in politics. He believed in divine kingship, even though English successions had long been confirmed by Parliament, made up of a House of Lords, hereditary and appointed, and a House of Commons of gentlemen, elected by around 5 per cent of the population – though women did not have the vote. Charles now dispensed with parliaments, funding himself through aggressive taxes. He was far from tyrannical: no one was executed, but his innovative taxes, levied without parliamentary consent, inspired loathing. Disapproving of the puritans in parliament, Charles adopted a High Church Protestantism that beautified churches and supported royal authority. Unlike continental rulers, English kings deployed fleets but not standing armies – and that meant they lacked the force to overrule their parliaments. Vicious religious strife became the sparkwheel that, combined with an ambitious but underfunded monarch, a divided nobility, an increasingly confident Parliament and a sense of millenarian catastrophe exacerbated by European war and economic hardship, cast England into sixty years of crisis. England was not alone, however: Germany, France, Spain, Poland, China and the Ottomans experienced their own devastating crises.
In this apocalyptic atmosphere, two men from opposite sides – a Catholic lord and a provincial puritan – looked not to England but to the New World. Jamestown had almost withered away: 3,000 out of the 3,600 settlers sent out between 1619 and 1622 had perished. But now Englishmen of different stamps sought a new life in America, not so much freedom for all as freedom for themselves from others.
SAINTS OF AMERICA: CROMWELL, WARWICK AND WINTHROP
A Huntingdonshire gentleman, elected to Charles’s last Parliament, was so disgusted by the king’s religious tyranny that he started to consider emigration to America. Oliver Cromwell would be the second remarkable statesman from his family.
Descended from the sister of Henry VIII’s enforcer Thomas Cromwell, his family were rich from the distribution of monastic loot that had survived the beheading of the vicegerent in spirituals; his rich uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell, knighted by Queen Elizabeth held court at a great mansion, Hinchingbrook, that often hosted James I and Prince Charles, both of whom young Cromwell would have seen, but he inherited little from his father. Ten years earlier he had married Elizabeth Boucher, uncouth daughter of a well-connected puritan merchant who gave birth to nine children. Following fitful legal studies, he found himself in the midst of a cascade of crises: after being elected MP for Huntingdon, he argued with the gentry, left the town and suffered valde melancholicus, a nervous breakdown. His only expertise was in horseflesh, an invaluable gift when he took command of cavalry. Redemption came with a Damascene conversion through which this ‘chief among sinners’ believed himself ‘among the congregation of the first born’, chosen by God to be one of the Saints predestined for heaven. He wrote endlessly about God and providence, yet he was surprisingly loving and tolerant of his children, even though as a believer he worried that his fun-loving favourite daughter Bettie ‘seeks her own vanity and carnal mind’. While Cromwell always presented himself as a plainspoken everyman raised by God – a portrait repeated by most historians – he was not quite what he seemed: gruff, mercurial and confrontational, he tended towards the cyclothymic, swinging between elation and despair.
As Charles seemed to have triumphed over Parliament and puritans, Cromwell was typical of those who dreamed of a ‘pilgrimage’ to a new Promised Land and he was probably distantly acquainted with the greatest advocate of colonization with whom he would be intimately linked: Robert Rich, earl of Warwick. Splendidly rich, gorgeously attired, supremely well connected, an early investor in both the East India and Virginia companies and admiral of his own anti-Spanish privateering flotilla, Warwick was a puritan sympathizer and innovative colonial entrepreneur. Intense, foxy, wearing a spur-shaped beard on the end of his chin, he was a man ‘of courage for the greatest enterprises’, playing the key role in two great events – the foundation of America and the fall of Charles I.
While the first colonists are often portrayed as humble hymn-singing puritans, the creation of America was always a joint venture of grandees and people: after the starvation of Jamestown, it was a series of aristocrats who rescued Virginia and confronted the Powhatan peoples, who struck back with a series of massacres. But it was the planting of a new crop, tobacco, originally from south America and now re-exported from Europe, that gave the colonists their livelihood – and their biggest landowner was Warwick, proprietor of the Richneck tobacco plantation.
At just this time, 1630, seventeen ships bearing a thousand settlers led by an affluent puritan leader called John Winthrop, who had been sacked from office by Charles, arrived in New England to found the commonwealth of Massachusetts, envisioning a theocracy inspired by the Jerusalem of the biblical Israelites – ‘a city on a hill’. Warwick and his ‘godly friends’ had invested in the Massachusetts Bay Company. In March 1628, Charles granted Warwick land for a new company, the New England Company, and the earl now backed others, Saybrook in Connecticut, and Providence in Honduras/Nicaragua.
New England had been founded by accident. In 1620, two ships of ultra-puritan Pilgrims, the Mayflower and the Fortune, sailed for Virginia but instead arrived in New England where they founded a settlement, Plymouth. The settlers tried to create a sacred community while falling out among themselves about what that meant. During the 1630s, a further 21,000 settlers followed. Yet it was not only puritans who found America.
In 1632, Charles authorized a Catholic politician, George Calvert, Baron Baltimore – like Warwick an early investor in the Virginia and East India companies – to found a colony originally to be called Carola after the king. Charles renamed it Maryland after his wife.* Exhausted by his voyages, Baltimore died in 1632, his son Cecil succeeding him as First Lord Proprietary, Earl Palatine of the Provinces of Maryland and Avalon in America, and sending out two ships, the Ark and Dove, with two Jesuits and 200 settlers, followed by his younger brother as governor.
These colonies were immediately different from their mother country. Very early on, it was clear that the proprietors and founding companies could not control the colonists. Enjoying abundant land, but also afflicted by a shortage of labour and rising friction with the Powhatan, the first Virginians founded an elected assembly in July 1619. Elections were annual, and electorates were wider (over 70 per cent of white males), far ahead of the motherland. But the settlers needed a solution to the labour crisis. Settlers received headrights – the grant of fifty acres per settler – which encouraged the affluent to bring indentured servants to accumulate more land. The indentured labourers, often boys, who formed 70–85 per cent of settlers, worked for around seven years before being freed. But tobacco plantations, owned by Warwick and other planters, required even cheaper labour – and it was the puritan earl who showed the way.
In 1619, a Portuguese slave ship San Juan Bautista bearing 350 enslaved Mbundu left Luanda. During the hellish crossing, 143 perished. On reaching the Caribbean, twenty-four children were sold in Jamaica, ruled still by the Columbus dynasty, but twenty adults were captured by one of Warwick’s ships, which conveyed them to Virginia where they were set to work at Richneck. There were probably already a few Africans in the colonies, but these were the first to be traded to north America. In 1625, further south, in the Caribbean, English settlers claimed a former Spanish island, Barbados. During the next eighty years, 21,000 enslaved Africans were brought to north America,* but it was a century before slavery became essential to colonial life.
As England was founding these colonies, Spain claimed territory from Texas to California; the French had founded Quebec in 1608 and were exploring the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. In 1624 the Dutch bought Manhattan off a Native American ruler and founded New Amsterdam.* They did not arrive in an empty continent. Whatever European maps might show, the continent would remain the realm of the many indigenous nations for centuries to come. But it was thinly populated, perhaps two to seven million people, divided into a plethora of warring tribes – Massachusetts, Abenaki, Mohawks – who lived with minimal property, no central government and no formal law. Instead they discussed policies at assemblies in eloquent debates, electing leaders only for wartime. They lived by both horticulture and hunting, moving between seasonal hunting grounds. All were weakened by the pathogens brought by the Europeans, but their lack of any formal command structure put them at a disadvantage anyway. Often at war with one another, keen to obtain European musketry, their leaders allied with the Europeans to win an advantage against their rival tribes.
Had they united against the colonists, the American story might have been very different. But, for the moment, the Europeans clung to tiny, splintered European settlements, farming and praying, their muskets at their side in their fortified palisades. They were able in a series of small-scale but atrocious wars against mutating federations of tribes to hold their own. From the start, the settlers fought Native American ferocity with their own savagery, paying bounties for scalps.*
Cromwell was now tempted to join the puritans of Warwick’s Connecticut. Instead his life stabilized when he inherited property in England from a cousin. But a wider instability was developing. In 1637, King Charles’s religious innovations ignited a Scottish revolution when he imposed his new prayer book. The Scots signed a Covenant to resist. The king tried to repress them by force. An aesthete whom Rubens called ‘the greatest student of art’, Charles was no soldier, and his forces were defeated by the Scots whose success, coinciding with raging religious war in Europe, inspired opposition to his taxes in England. Warwick and his coterie of other lords and MPs were now convinced that Charles was an ungodly tyrant in cahoots with his Catholic wife. Warwick personally reprimanded Charles for his taxes. To pay for the Scottish war Charles now had to call Parliament, but he also appointed a dynamic enforcer, his lord lieutenant of Ireland, the earl of Strafford. The accelerating spiral of fear and hatred spun both sides towards violence. Warwick and his allies were encouraging a Scottish invasion, Strafford planning to import an Irish army. If Parliament did not destroy Strafford, he would destroy Parliament: in April 1641, MPs passed a bill of attainder, effectively convicting him of treason. In May, a righteous killing and a Protestant wedding showed the way things were going: meagre crowds celebrated the marriage of Charles’s nine-year-old daughter Mary to the Dutch prince of Orange, aged twelve, but thousands enjoyed the beheading of Strafford. In October 1641, the already heightened tension was redoubled by a Catholic rebellion in Ireland in which English Protestants were murdered. The parliamentarians believed Charles had fomented the rebellion and dared not give him an army to suppress the Irish lest he use it on them. Irish strife poisoned London politics: both sides now feared that this was a struggle for survival in which one side would destroy the other.
In December, the opposition successfully proposed a Grand Remonstrance against Charles calling for the reform of Church and state. In the House, Cromwell, now forty-one, whispered to his neighbour that had it failed to pass, he would have gone to America: ‘I’d have sold all I had the next morning and never seen England more.’ The committees of Parliament now seized much of government. On 4 January 1642, Charles and his guards entered the Commons and tried to arrest five MPs,* but they had fled and he was jostled by hostile crowds. A week later he left London and at Nottingham he raised his standard: it was war.
As England became a failed state, Shahjahan was taking Mughal India to its zenith.
Nurjahan had weaned Jahangir off the opium but it was too late: the padishah had lost control, humiliatingly taken prisoner by a mutinous general, though he was almost liberated by Nurjahan leading a rescue mission on an elephant. On Jahangir’s death,* Emperor Shahjahan ordered his vizier Asafkhan, Nurjahan’s brother and Mumtaz’s father, to kill his brother, two nephews and two cousins. As the son succeeded the father as padishah, the niece succeeded her aunt as empress.
Shahjahan was passionately in love with Mumtaz, whom he entitled Malika-i-Jahan – Queen of the World. ‘His entire delight,’ wrote his court historian, ‘was centred on this illustrious lady to the extent that he didn’t feel for his others one-thousandth of the love he had for her.’ She spent most of their nineteen-year marriage pregnant, bearing a child every sixteen months. Four boys and three girls survived.
It should have been a recipe for respect and loyalty. Instead power beat family: all seven, even the girls, would throw themselves into a gory tournament of power. Their first daughter, Jahanara, was the father’s favourite; the eldest boy, Darashikoh, was the heir, but the third, Aurangzeb, showed the necessary killer instinct: when he was charged by an elephant as a teenager, during an elephant fight, he coolly held his horse steady and waited, spear at the ready.
No one could play the emperor like Shahjahan, brought up not by his Rajput mother but by Akbar and Ruqaiya. While Akbar was portrayed in court art taking part in athletic hunts and Jahangir as a sensitive prince, Shahjahan cast himself as quasi-divine, messiah-like, the ‘second Lord of the Conjunction of Jupiter and Venus’, alongside Tamerlane the first Lord.
Mumtaz was his partner in all this, granted an unprecedented million-rupee allowance and given the imperial seal to enable her to check all documents. She always accompanied him, whether in war or peace.
In June 1631, the emperor and Mumtaz, aged thirty-eight, pregnant for the fourteenth time, travelled southwards to campaign in Deccan. At Burhanpur, she endured a thirty-hour labour before giving birth to a daughter, Gohara, and then haemorrhaging. Her eldest daughter Jahanara ran out to pray and distribute alms to the crowds, while a ‘paralysed’ Shahjahan sobbed desperately. But the bleeding would not stop.
TAJ MAHAL: MUMTAZ’S DAUGHTER AND KöSEM’S MAD SON
When Mumtaz died, Shahjahan howled for a week, his hair turning white. Jahanara thought he might die. After a year of recovery, he re-emerged, backed by Jahanara, who acted as his empress in the place of Mumtaz. Shahjahan conceived a white marble tomb for Mumtaz and himself that would express his love for her, the Crown of the Palace (Taj Mahal) – the statement of the ruler of the greatest state in the world at that time who recognized few limits.* Nonetheless Shahjahan did not neglect the first job of House Tamerlane: conquest.
It is not cheap maintaining an empire: the greater the power, the greater the aspirations, the higher the costs. It is a rule of imperial power and human nature that every state will expand its ambitions beyond its resources, by at least one degree. The second Lord of the Conjunction aspired to rule the rest of India, expelling impertinent Portuguese from Port Hooghly in Bengal, advancing southwards into Deccan and westwards into Afghanistan. The decline of his aggressive Persian neighbour, Abbas the Great, offered western opportunities: Abbas destroyed his own achievements by liquidating or mutilating all three of his sons. In 1629, he died, leaving the throne to a vicious, illiterate, opium-addicted grandson, Safi, spawn of his murdered crown prince, who killed most of the family. Shahjahan later seized Kandahar, while further west the Ottomans – led by a predatory but talented young padishah – joined the carve-up.
Kösem’s irrepressible son, Murad IV, was a muscular taurine giant who lived for hunting, drinking and wrestling. As he grew up, the Magnificent Mother ran the empire as regent – naib-i-sultanat – but she could not control him. Murad did as he wished: for example, he would gallop around the hippodrome. ‘Make them stop javelin-throwing in the hippodrome,’ his mother asked grand vizier Halil Pasha. ‘My son loves it, I lose my mind over it. Caution him but not right away.’ Kösem guided Halil – a female potentate in a male world running a tricontinental empire.*
The Magnificent Mother was loved because of her authority and beauty, not to speak of her charity: during the month of good works, Rajab, she dressed incognito to pay the debts of jailed debtors. But Murad resented her. ‘What can I do? My words are bitter to him,’ she wrote, sounding like any mother coping with a defiant teenager. ‘Just let him stay alive,’ she wrote to Halil, ‘he’s vital to us all.’
In 1628, when he was sixteen, Murad took power, launching a wave of terror, executing corrupt viziers with his own sword, banning drinking and coffee-housing, while patrolling Istanbul in disguise, executing any fraudsters. But he particularly watched Shah Safi’s declining Persia – and coveted Iraq. He took personal command of the armies. After defeating the Poles, in 1634, he stormed into the Caucasus to retake Yerevan, a feat celebrated in a Romanesque triumph in Istanbul (and the strangling of two half-brothers).
While he was away, Kösem was his ears and eyes. When she heard that the mufti (Islamic jurist) was conspiring, she had him strangled.
At home, Murad held court, showing off his wrestling skills, often challenging his courtiers to bouts that ended with him holding them above his head, as recounted by his friend the Sufi poet, adventurer and outrageous raconteur Evliya Çelebi, who was writing the world’s greatest travel book. Murad enjoyed the satirical verses of the poet Nefi but warned the wit against mocking the grand vizier and ordered a black eunuch to draft his apology. When a drop of black ink spattered the eunuch’s letter, Nefi could not resist a racist joke: ‘Your blessed sweat dripped.’ Hearing this, Murad ordered him strangled. The padishah was becoming a Neronian sadist: he would sit in a kiosk on the Bosphoros boozing and firing his crossbow at boatmen who came too close. In 1638, he invaded Iraq and routed the Iranians. Shah Safi died after a drinking contest and Murad secured Baghdad. Iraq remained Ottoman until 1918.
Murad held another Roman triumph in Constantinople, his mother Kösem parading in a golden carriage. He was only twenty-nine but, falling sick with cirrhosis, he lashed out, killing first his grand vizier and then his younger brother – and would have executed his last brother, the lunatic Ibrahim, had Kösem not begged for his life. When he died in 1640, the only Ottoman prince left alive was Mad Ibrahim, a murderous erotomaniac whose outrages forced Kösem to make an unbearable decision for a mother.
The Ottomans were not the only dynasty in crisis: the Stuarts in England and Bourbons in France were mired in civil war as the Habsburgs fought for their position in Germany. The European crisis now escalated into a world conflict as the Dutch attacked the Habsburgs in Africa and America.
In 1641, Garcia II, manikongo of Kongo, was determined to expel the Portuguese, ‘who, instead of wanting gold or silver, now trade slaves, who aren’t made of gold or cloth, but are creatures’, and so he invited the Dutch in – a decision that would unleash a war from Brazil to Angola, destroy his own kingdom and intensify the European competition to control sugar and slavery. Ultimately it would open up the Atlantic not to the Dutch, but to a new player: England.
MANIKONGO GARCIA, QUEEN NZINGA AND AHOSU HOUEGBADJA: THREE AFRICAN KINGS
Manikongo Garcia was a hybrid Kongo and Portuguese monarch, ‘dressed in finery, with golden brocade sewn with pearls … on his head the royal crown embossed with the thickest pearls and jewels, his throne of crimson velvet’. He held court amid Flemish tapestries, wearing Indian linens, eating with cutlery of American silver in the company of titled Kongo nobles and bishops in red sashes, while secretaries took dictation. Ruling the region around the Congo River from his capital São Salvador (Mbanza Kongo), Garcia – also named Nkanga a Lukeni a Nzenze a Ntumba – was literate in Portuguese, having been educated by Jesuits, and practised in his private chapel a Catholicism infused with Kongo religion. He was not exactly a victim of Portuguese slave trading: after murdering the king and his own brother, he became notorious for the profits he made from slavery.
Just as the manikongos adopted European trappings, so the Portuguese were becoming increasingly Africanized in a way that was different from other Europeans. Many lançados – outcasts, the original settlers – had settled with African women and had Luso-African children who often adopted African traditions, even scarification, while practising a hybrid of Catholicism and Vodun (voodoo). Lançados married into African dynasties: Tomás Robredo married the daughter of Manikongo Álvaro V. Many Luso-Africans became aggressive slave traders, pombeiros.
Originally the Kongo dynasties were close to Portugal, but the expansion of Luanda and intensification of the slave trade had broken the relationship when the manikongos invited the Dutch to intervene. Now Kongo was being torn apart, not just by the Portuguese but also by incursions by African raiders of uncertain origin, the Jaga, and the Imbangala, a war band with a killing cult, which trained child soldiers initiated with gruesome rites – grinding babies into a grain mill, and cannibalism. Both would thrive in the coming mayhem.
Garcia had a further problem with his southern neighbour, Ndongo, and its remarkable queen. To supply slaves, the Portuguese had first encouraged Ndongo to raid Kongo. Then they tried and failed to conquer Ndongo, which was ruled by a ngola (king) named Mbandi who defeated the Portuguese forces. When Ngola Mbandi was poisoned, his sister, Nzinga Mbande, then in her twenties, seized the throne, keeping her brother’s remains in a reliquary so that he could be consulted. The queen had been baptized and educated by Jesuits, speaking and writing Portuguese. Now she defeated all claimants and seized a neighbouring kingdom, Matamba, hiring her own Imbangala auxiliaries, led by a warlord who called himself Nzinga Mona (Nzinga’s Son). Nzinga constantly facing male challenges, presented herself as a male king, sporting male garb, daggers and spears, enjoying male concubines and proving every bit as good a commander as her male rivals, European or African.
The Portuguese were the only Europeans who really penetrated the African interior: in west Africa, 50 per cent of Europeans died within a year of arriving, whether from malaria, yellow fever or dysentery, making deeper conquest impossible. Since European involvement barely extended beyond the ports, other rulers could handle things differently. The obas of Benin (southern Nigeria) rejected foreign interference; as a Dutch trader noted, ‘When it comes to trade, they are very strict and will not suffer the slightest infringement of their customs, not even an iota can be changed,’ and after the 1520s started to limit direct involvement in slaving – though they appointed the slave-trading obas of Lagos on the Slave Coast, Benini vassals who paid them tribute.
Simultaneously the conquests of a new potentate, Ahosu Houegbadja, a Fon warlord, generated thousands of new slaves that he sold to the Europeans.
His kingdom, Dahomey (today’s Benin) was founded by three brothers who around 1600 carved their own realms. Now Houegbadja, third ahosu (king) of the Alladaxonou family, united many of the Fon people, building a capital Abomey, where twelve palaces stood decorated with bas-reliefs recording the history of the kingdom and depicting sacred ancestors. Houegbadja presided over a complex court, always sheltered by a slave bearing a parasol, and escorted by a guard of female warriors who later became the vanguard of Dahomean armies. Every year, he held a festival that included military parades, the receiving of tribute and the ceremonies of xwetanu at which 500 and sometimes as many as 4,000 slaves were decapitated, often by female bodyguards, as offerings to the king’s ancestors. The kings were sacred but were elected by a council of princes and a family of priests; on their deaths, thousands of slaves were sacrificed.
Houegbadja received muskets for slaves, an incentive for African kings to capture more prisoners, but this implies a lack of agency on their part: the rivalry of these kingdoms, still barely understood by Europeans, led to wars just as such rivalries did in Europe and Asia. African wars, like those in Asia, yielded slaves. What was unique was the demand for chattel slavery in the Americas. African rulers sacrificed some of their slaves – though most others were later freed – but now a new European version of this servitude – chattel slavery – was being formalized. It is unlikely African leaders who sold enslaved captives to the Europeans initially understood that they were selling them into a new crueller bondage, designed to supply the tobacco and later sugar plantations of the Americas, though later they would surely have known the details. Most Africans believed that Europeans were cannibals and that slaves were destined to be eaten.
It was Portugal’s sugar empire of Brazil that was the voracious furnace of chattel slavery, its appetite and profits being the catalysts for this new global conflict. In 1530, the Portuguese exported a new plant to Brazil – sugar cane – but they were slow to develop their vast colony. By 1548, some 3,000 Amerindians were slaving in six sugar mills, but the Amerindians were being wiped out by disease, slave labour and suicide until in 1570 the king, prompted by the Jesuits, forbade the enslavement of the indigenous peoples unless they were captured in a ‘righteous war’. Mixed-race warlords known as bandeirantes, most famously António Raposo Tavares, launched saltos (raids) into the interior killing and enslaving thousands. The Amerindians struck back and launched messianic revolts, the sandidades, that justified yet more saltos. By the end of the century, around 50,000 slaves had been worked to death, creating shortages that were filled by Africans.
Sugar changed the world. It was not just a product, it was a destroyer and maker of worlds on both sides of the Atlantic. The trade now expanded into a vast diabolic enterprise. Portuguese planters migrated to Brazil, where they were enriched by the sugar and slave industries. By 1600, this involved 30,000 Portuguese with 15,000 African slaves; by 1620, there were 50,000 Portuguese ruling the same number of African and Amerindian slaves. After that, African slaves started to outnumber Amerindians and the trade became frenzied: by 1650, a total of 250,000 had been brought to Brazil and in many areas 75 per cent of the populations were slaves.
Luanda was the gateway of the new trade; the kingdoms between today’s Angola and Congo were its hunting grounds: between 1502 and 1867, around 2.8 million Africans were traded through Luanda. North America never challenged the scale of Brazil: of the estimated eleven million transported across the Atlantic, 4.9 million were delivered to Brazil. The slaves were seized in raids by African rulers. Those of lesser value, the old and sometimes children too young or too sick to work, were often killed.
At Pombe and other slave markets, they were sold to pombeiros who marched them, guarded by other slaves, in coffles across Africa. Out of slaves captured in Angola, it was estimated that 10 per cent died during capture, 22 per cent on the way to the coast. At the coast, those who had survived the journey were confined within hulking slave castles along the coast from Luanda in the south-west, to Elmina in west Africa. In the crowded dungeon barracks – barracoons – they were systematically broken, chained and branded, men whipped, females raped, as part of their ‘seasoning’. Killings and rapes took place only yards from luxurious European dining rooms and chapels. The slaves were depersonalized, known as peças (pieces) or cabeças (heads) or ‘Guinea ebony’. Ten per cent of those enslaved died in the castles.
Survivors were marched through the ‘doors of no return’ into the tumbeiros (undertakers), slave ships, which had often arrived from Brazil full of cachaça, rum, and fumo, coarse Brazilian tobacco treated with molasses. The traders bought grain from local rulers to feed (meagrely) their human property.
While the traders had every interest in not killing or damaging their merchandise, they also wanted to make as much money as possible, packing them into holds and feeding them just corn, olive oil and water. The journeys were hellish, marked by unbearable suffering: an estimated 6–10 per cent, sometimes 20 per cent, died during the voyages – fifty days to Rio – mostly from gastroenteritis, but there were also many suicides, the bodies tossed to a ravening escort of sharks. ‘That ship with its intolerable stink, the lack of space, the continual cries and infinite woes of so many wretched people,’ recalled Friar Sorrento, an Italian Capuchin on such a voyage with 900 slaves in 1649, ‘appeared to be hell itself.’ This hell was intensified because Africans generally believed that to join their ancestors after death they had to die among their own, but death on a slave ship, thrown into the sea, meant their spirits could never rest, their souls lost.
On arrival, they were washed and oiled and given ginger and tobacco to overcome their sadness; they were then auctioned, with the rule that if they became ill within a fortnight, they could be returned. A further 3 per cent died at this stage. As few as 50 per cent of those attacked in that African raid started work.
Sugar plantations were labour-intensive, the work brutally hard, the loss of life demanding ever more slaves. It was often easier to work slaves to death and import more than to let them have families. Known like cattle as ‘self-moving goods’, enslaved Africans started work at eight years old. After eight hours in the fields, they toiled in the mills. Average life expectancy was twenty-five. One plantation manager recorded that 6 per cent of his slaves needed to be replaced annually. The women were constantly raped by prowling masters, sexual abuse being endemic, even essential, to the psychology and practice of slavery. Slave masters propagated the myth that slaves were promiscuous, but actually slaves often abstained by choice so as not to bring children into this life. Suicides were frequent, often by eating earth. Slave masters feared tribal solidarity would lead to rebellions, so they suppressed tribal and family connections, separating clans and renaming slaves as if they had not existed before.* Every enslaved person dreamed of liberation, if not revolt. Submission required the constant threat of violence. Planters deployed an array of punishments: the whip, the iron collar, the slow death by iron mask. Slavery could not be sustained without violence, and ultimately both the violence and profitability could not be justified to white planters without a sense of natural racial superiority that later became a pervasive ideology.
Back in a Europe benighted by the spreading religious war, the Habsburgs, led by Emperor Ferdinand, performed well, conquering northern Germany thanks to an irrepressible, mercurial and mysterious Czech warlord, Albrecht von Wallenstein. But the Habsburg victory destroyed the balance of power, while the meteoric Wallenstein threatened to overwhelm the uncharismatic Ferdinand, who cautiously dismissed him.
In 1628, the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus, Lion of the North, who had already taken Livonia (thus excluding Muscovy from the Baltic for a century), stormed into northern Germany with a small but superb army and turned the tide back towards the Protestants. Heralding the Swedish empire – Stormaktstiden – Gustavus advanced into southern Germany. Ferdinand quickly recalled Wallenstein, who had some early success against Gustavus. Then during the drawn battle of Lützen against Wallenstein, the Lion was twice wounded, then assassinated with a shot to the temple as he lay on the ground.* The bankrupt and exhausted Habsburgs nonetheless needed help.* The Planet King sent a Spanish army under his brother, Cardinal-Infante Fernando, who at Nördlingen in September 1634 overruled cautious generals and defeated the Protestants. In Madrid, Philip and Olivares celebrated by building the colossal Buen Retiro Palace, decorated with portraits by Velázquez who painted both monarch and valido as armoured paladins on muscle-ripped horses. Faced with Habsburg victory, Louis XIII, now guided by the consummate Cardinal Richelieu, declared war.
It was now that Garcia of Kongo appealed to the Dutch who, allied with France, put into action their Groot Desseyn – grand plan – to destroy the Habsburg empire and steal the sugar and slave trades.
* Yet as James processed southwards, a conspiracy of noblemen, in correspondence with Madrid, planned to acclaim his cousin Arbella, great-great-granddaughter of Henry VII. This ‘main plot’ was mainly talk, but it implicated Walter Raleigh, whom James sentenced to death. He later pardoned Raleigh but kept him in the Tower. James recognized Arbella as fourth in line to the throne, but when in 1610 she tried to marry another royal cousin he imprisoned her for the rest of her life. Dying in the Tower aged thirty-nine, unmarried and childless, she was another female victim of a power family.
* Peter Chamberlen was a surgeon and accoucheur, a Parisian Huguenot, who arrived in England in 1596 around the time he invented a new instrument that revolutionized childbirth – an obstetrical forceps that gripped the skull of babies. Peter was the first of four generations of the family, who delivered most of the Stuart babies while disgracefully keeping their device secret, arriving at births with the simple contraption in a large gilded box, insisting that midwives were blindfolded. Untold numbers of women died because they did not share their invention: the Chamberlens became rich, buying a country house where centuries later their device was found hidden under floorboards.
* ‘My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; / If snow be white why then her breasts are dun, / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head / … And yet by heaven I think my love as rare, / As any she belied with false compare.’
* Raleigh was said to have brought the first tobacco to England. James grumbled that tobacco was ‘hateful to the nose, harmful to the braine, dangerous to the lungs and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomless’. Later, when the Stigian stinking fume became the only profitable crop grown in Virginia and increasingly popular in England, James granted himself the lucrative tobacco monopoly.
* These quasi-governmental war companies were invented by the Dutch. They were not totally new, reviving the armed commercialism of the military-religious orders of the Crusades and the Reconquista and of the semi-state companies like Genoa’s Bank of St George that ran its colonies in Crimea. Nor were they particularly European: the Chola rajas had allied with the Ainnutruvar and other privateering guilds, while networks of Chinese privateers ruled parts of China and Japan, most prominently the Shuangyu syndicate. The new version was forged in the wars against Spain as trade and conflict fused at a time when European sovereigns and states were too weak to compete in foreign adventures. Instead Protestant leaders Elizabeth and William the Silent invested in the expeditions of Drake and the Sea Beggars. The companies were a compromise that enabled the monarchs, as shareholders, to participate but spread the risk and cost.
* Not everything went well. In June 1629, one of the VOC’s first voyages to Australia, on board the ship Batavia, went spectacularly wrong when, after a shipwreck on the Abrolhos Islands, off Australia, its deputy captain Jeronimus Cornelisz mutinied and launched a demented terror against his crew out of personal megalomanic and Calvinist righteousness, killing 120 people in a orgy of stabbing, bludgeoning, drowning, hanging while the seven surviving girls were turned into sex slaves – until his reign was ended by the arrival of another VOC ship: Cornelisz had his hands amputated by a chisel then was beheaded. A little later, another tough VOC Dutchman, Abel Tasman, reached islands off Australia, first a small one which he named Van Deiman’s Land after the governor-general in Jakarta, who planned the conquest of Great Southland – Tasmania – and then a larger one that he called Staten-Landt after the States-General back in Holland – Aotearoa, today’s New Zealand – where Maori warriors in canoes killed several of his men.
* One of Prince Khusrau’s supporters, Guru Arjun, was the leader of the Sikh religion in Punjab, founded in the 1530s by the poet-saint Guru Nanak, who created a movement independent of Islam and Hinduism. Sikh just means learner in Sanskrit. Nanak preached against Brahmin exploitation and Muslim oppression in favour of one God, one community, abolishing caste – a sect that blossomed under his successors, the nine gurus, who developed a sacred city, Amritsar, a shrine (the Golden Temple) and a scripture (the Adi Granth). But their independence clashed with Mughal authority. Now Jahangir tortured then executed Arjun, whose son Guru Hargobind responded by fostering Sikh martial culture: his wearing of two swords symbolized miri piri – the union of spiritual and temporal power. Savagely repressed by the Mughals, the Sikhs thrived in adversity.
* The negotiations reveal the real power matrix between Europeans and the Asian empires. It is easy to exaggerate the span and power of the EIC and its Dutch rival, the VOC: they could defeat local potentates; they could hold fortresses; but the European companies were not strong enough to conquer broad territories or challenge great monarchies. In 1623, when the VOC seized the Penghu islands, its troops were defeated by a Chinese fleet and not for the last time. In Japan, Tokugawa and sons banned Europeans. The Dutch and English had to negotiate cringingly with Ming or Mughals, Vijayanagarans or Safavis. It was only later when these kingdoms disintegrated that the VOC and EIC shapeshifted into empire-building company states.
* The Habashi play a major but often neglected part in Indian history. They were often freed after a few years of service, but even when they were enslaved, many were promoted as courtiers and generals – and sometimes they seized power for themselves. In Bengal in 1487, Barbak Shahzad, chief of the black palace guards, had assassinated the Bengali sultan and ruled until he was killed by another Abyssinian.
* Traditionally eunuchs had been white slaves from Russia/Ukraine and the Caucasus who, following Byzantine practice, lost only their testicles, but now African children, captured in Ethiopia and Darfur by Arab slavers, were traded to Coptic priests who subjected them to Mamluk castration, chaining them to a table and cutting off their penises as well as their testicles. Given fragrant names such as Hyacinth, in adulthood they were either very fat or very thin, suffered osteoporosis, skeletal abnormalities including elongated fingers, and premature wrinkling. The chief eunuch – kizlar aga – was always an African, and was now steward of the harem whose power was often based on his relationship with the sultan’s favourite or his mother.
* Rudolf’s collapse was exacerbated by the crimes of his eldest son, Don Julius Caesar. That year, Rudolf bought him Castle Krumlov, where the diabolic boy, twenty-one years old, hunted girls in the villages until he found a barber’s daughter, Markéta Pichlerová. He became obsessed with her and took to torturing her, until finally he stabbed her and threw her out of a window. But she landed on a rubbish heap and survived. Julius Caesar begged the parents to send her back to him. They resisted until he threatened to kill the family and then arrested the father. The Bluebeardian monstrum finally had Markéta back in his clutches. He tortured her for days. He was found naked and covered in excrement embracing her headless, dismembered body, ears cut off, eyes gouged out. A month later, the horrified emperor imprisoned the monstrum.
* After the death of Brahe, Rudolf’s astronomer Kepler finished the Rudolfine Tables and charted planetary motion, but placed God at the centre of the universe. Three emperors, Rudolf, his brother Matthias and later Ferdinand, consulted the Protestant Kepler’s readings: astronomy and astrology were seen as scientific studies. Kepler also invented a new genre, science fiction, writing an autobiographical story Somnium (The Dream), predicting space travel. He lived until 1630, leaving this epitaph: ‘I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure; / Skybound was the mind, earthbound the body rests.’
* James’s Spanish detente had already cost Walter Raleigh his life. In 1616, he persuaded James to release him and send him to find Eldorado in Guiana, provided that he did not attack Spanish interests. But Raleigh lost control of his officers, attacked the Spanish – his son was killed in the fighting – and found no gold. On his return, the Spanish ambassador demanded Raleigh’s head as the price for the treaty. James agreed. Raleigh gave a virtuoso performance on the gallows, inspecting the axe, ‘This is a sharp medicine, but a physician for all diseases and miseries,’ then telling the executioner, ‘What dost thou fear? Strike, man, strike!’ The execution was widely regarded as a disgrace – and Raleigh never finished his world history.
* The artist was the son of Jan Rubens, a leading Antwerp lawyer during the golden age of the city as capital of the Habsburgs’ Seventeen Provinces and mercantile hub. Its prosperity was ruined by the Dutch revolt, after which it was replaced by Amsterdam. Jan had become legal adviser and then lover of William the Silent’s widow Anne of Saxony, fathering a child with her. He was arrested and likely to be executed; his wife (the artist’s mother) may have saved her unfaithful husband’s life by having an affair with the prince’s brother. Either way, young Rubens received unusual benefits for the son of a scandalous attorney. He was brought up in ignorance of the scandal but when he learned of it he changed, pursuing his career with discipline and self-control. He studied art in Italy (he signed paintings as Pietro Paolo) and then enjoyed an astonishing career of art combined with diplomacy. He became the court painter for the Habsburg governors of the Netherlands, Albert and Isabella, who used him as a diplomat and spy, promoting him to secretary of their privy council. Living in luxury in Antwerp, he trained the young Anthony van Dyck, who would soon set off for London. In Paris, Louis XIII’s mother and widow of Henri IV, Marie de’ Medici, had hired him to paint a series for her Luxembourg Palace while he negotiated with France and Spain.
* In the next century, this movement became known as baroque, possibly from the Portuguese barrocco, meaning a flawed pearl, but there are many other possible explanations.
* Charles I and Philip IV both knighted Rubens. In Madrid, Philip commissioned over eighty paintings from him, and loved watching him paint. The artist was rich enough to buy an estate outside Antwerp. Fifty-three when his first wife died, he then married her sixteen-year-old niece, Hélène Fourment, whose sister he had also had an affair with. One of Rubens’s friends called her ‘Helen of Antwerp, who far surpasses Helen of Troy’. Hélène modelled naked for him – rare in a woman of her status. In The Pelt, she glows in just a fur. Her red-blonde tresses, white skin and voluptuous figure appear in so many of his paintings that she inspired the adjective Rubenesque. She had five children with Rubens.
* Baltimore could not have been further politically from the likes of Warwick and Cromwell: he had been James’s secretary of state who had championed the Spanish Match, losing his job after Charles’s escapade, and had then converted to Catholicism.
* In 1640, two white indentured servants, a Dutchman and a Scotsman, and an African, John Punch, escaped from an English proprietor’s estate, only to be recaptured and sentenced to thirty lashes. The whites were returned to servitude ‘and the third being a negro named John Punch’, ruled the judge, was enslaved ‘for the time of his natural life here’. The judgment hinted at what was to come: a legal and ideological system so founded on human bondage, and so afraid of rebellion by enslaved Africans, that slave masters were discouraged from ever manumitting their own slaves. DNA suggests that Punch was the progenitor of many Americans, white and black, including the white mother, Ann Dunham, of the first black president, Barack Obama.
* It is hard to find any region of the world that has not been created by migrants, but in modern times it was America, North and South, that was most shaped by settlement, conquest and intermarriage. Between 1492 and 1820, around 2.6 million Europeans, half of them English, 40 per cent Spanish and Portuguese, migrated to the Americas, while around 8.8 million Africans were enslaved and forced to work there. Between 1492 and 1640, 87 per cent of these 446,000 migrants were Iberians. The Atlantic world was dominated by Spanish and Portuguese, not the Anglos. But that was about to change.
* It was not just the men who were tough. Later in the century, in 1697, Hannah Duston, aged forty, a farmer’s wife and mother of nine, was captured with her baby in an Abenaki attack during which twenty-seven colonists, mainly children, were slaughtered. After the Abenaki had killed her baby, Hannah rebelled with two other captives, scalped ten Indians (including six children) and then escaped with the scalps to claim the scalp bounty, that ironically could only be paid to her husband.
* Henrietta Maria, the target of so much anti-Catholic hate, was wise enough to advise Charles to negotiate with Parliament, even offering: ‘Leave me to do it, for the good of your affairs in this country.’ But Charles was unsuited to compromise, and refused. Once it was war, she backed him, delivering arms and even commanding troops, and was nicknamed the Generalissima.
* Jahangir died travelling from Kashmir to Lahore, where he was buried in the resplendently Persianate–Mughal Shahdara Bagh tomb. Shahjahan retired his stepmother Nurjahan to Lahore, where she lived quietly for eighteen years. When she died at sixty-eight, she was buried with Jahangir.
* The Taj Mahal was built in a Persianate design that owed something to the simplicity of Tamerlane’s tomb in Samarkand and Humayoun’s in Delhi but was vast in scale and blazing pristine whiteness. It took sixteen years to build. But it was only a part of his dedication to sacred monarchy; he also moved the capital from Agra to Shahjahanabad at Delhi built around a new palace, the Red Fort, itself centred around the emperor’s diwan-i-khas (audience hall) where he held court on a Peacock Throne and appeared daily on the marble balcony for his jharokha darshan – the rituals that defined House Tamerlane. The Mughals had become gradually Indian thanks to their Rajput wives, who brought their culture to the central Asian harem. Shahjahan, whose mother was a daughter of the raja of Jodhpur, was three-quarters Indian, only a quarter Tamerlanian, but their style was Persianate; his vizier and queen Mumtaz were Persian; and he preferred Persian to the Turkish of Tamerlane and Babur.
* ‘My son leaves in the morning and comes back at night. I never see him. I’m distraught … He won’t stay out of the cold and he’ll get sick again. I tell you, this worrying is destroying me. Talk to him.’ Kösem trusted the vizier, offering, as was the tradition, one of her daughters as wife: ‘Whenever you’re ready let me know … We’ll take care of you immediately. I have a princess ready.’ The Armenian-born Halil married one of the daughters, becoming a damad – imperial son-in-law – quite a rise from enslavement.
* The slaves embraced a secret culture of their own, publicly worshipping Catholicism but cultivating music, dancing and religions, vodun (Fon people), santería and candomblé, brought by Yorubas, which fused African gods, orishas, with Catholic saints. Vodun became voodoo.
* One of Gustavus’ favourite commanders at Lützen was Alexander Leslie, an illegitimate Scottish nobleman, promoted to field marshal in 1636, who would later, as earl of Leven, command troops at the battle of Marston Moor against Charles I.
* Victory had almost bankrupted Ferdinand, who turned for troops and money to Wallenstein, imperial generalissimus and admiral of the North and Baltic Seas, granting him a personal kingdom of the dukedoms of Friedland, Sagan and Mecklenburg. Wallenstein now planned to negotiate a European peace, betraying the Habsburgs. Ferdinand, fearing that Wallenstein aspired to seize the empire, ordered his assassination. In February 1634, in Cheb, Bohemia, three Irish and Scottish officers slaughtered his retinue then, awakening him in his bedroom, speared him to death – the definition of Icaran downfall.
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