The World

Zumbas and Oranges, Cromwells and Villiers

I’LL BE THE WHORE OF THE RABBLE: THE NINETEEN GENTLEMEN OF AMSTERDAM AND THE PIRATE PRINCE OF NEW AMSTERDAM

On 7 September 1628, a Dutch admiral, the fifty-year-old Piet Heyn,^* attacked a Habsburg treasure fleet off Cuba and grabbed the greatest prize in the history of naval pillage: sixteen galleons worth so much – eleven million guilders – that the silver market crashed, throwing the Habsburgs into a financial crisis. The silver paid for a Dutch offensive: the Groot Desseyn.

In 1621, at the start of the war, the States-General had awarded a western monopoly to the Nineteen Gentlemen who floated the new West India Company (GWC) to dominate the Atlantic sugar world. Sugar meant slaves. The Dutch were not new to the slave trade: since Charles V, Flemish and Dutch merchants had supplied slaves. Now in 1624 the Dutch tried to seize Luanda and Elmina, but failed; in 1627 they grabbed Gorée (Dakar, Senegal). Nor were they the only Europeans interested in sugar: in 1627, English merchants were planting sugar cane on their newly secured Caribbean island, Barbados; in 1635 the French planted Martinique. But the Dutch were playing on a different scale.

The success of the tiny, resourceful and sophisticated Netherlands reflected the singular development of European societies, where perpetual warfare inspired extreme competition, technical innovation and loyalty to states and faiths. Passionate Protestantism encouraged the family values, mutual trust and sombre industriousness personified by Jacob de Graeff, the most pre-eminent of the regenten, the oligarchs, rich on sugar, spices, slaves, who dominated Dutch politics for thirty years. His de Graeff and Bicker cousinhood masterminded the rise of Holland in uneasy cohabitation with the princes of Orange, whom they regarded as dangerously monarchical. The Netherlands pioneered the rule of law that was essential to trade and competition with their rivals, and founded universities that trained students in law, while the need for expertise encouraged others to concentrate on professions. Traders no longer just sold to people they knew at nearby markets but also did business with strangers, which meant they had to cultivate fairness, politeness and trust, alongside the ruthless avarice necessary to make profits: the conundrum of capitalism. Amsterdam, where Jacob de Graeff and his sons Cornelis and Andries were mayor one after the other, was at the forefront of urbanization: between 1500 and 1800, twenty million moved to cities mainly in northern Europe. Cities were unhealthy: many died – 1 per cent of city dwellers annually – but they were replaced by others. The bigger the cities, the more artisans, the greater the skills and comforts on offer. The grandee Andries de Graeff stands ruddy and gingery, proudly clad in Calvinist black with a white collar, in a painting that he commissioned from one of the most favoured artists of this Dutch golden age: Rembrandt.

In 1637, the GWC seized much of Brazil, whence it sent flotillas in further attempts to grab Elmina and other African slaving castles. In 1641, invited by Manikongo Garcia, they stormed Luanda. The Dutch were the first northern Europeans to enter the slave market on a vast scale. Queen Nzinga joined Garcia and the Dutch in a ferocious war that ruined Angola. In 1647, Nzinga defeated the Portuguese. Garcia’s gamble and the Dutch Groot Desseyn had paid off: suddenly the militarized corporations of the small hybrid republic of the United Provinces spanned the world.

On the way to the east, the Dutch stopped for provisioning at the Cape where Dutch frontiersmen founded Cape Town, then started to move inland and claim farms, suppressing, annihilating and mixing with the first people they encountered, the Khoikhoi, pastoral nomads who were rapidly broken by musket and pathogen. Across the Atlantic, in the New Netherlands, the GWC expanded their town on the island of Manhattan, New Amsterdam, where in the early 1640s an adventurous settler, Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt, progenitor of the Roosevelts, arrived as a teenager to start a new life, buying a small farm in what would later be midtown.

A less typical founder but also progenitor of a New York dynasty was Anthony Janszoon van Salee, the strapping son of a renegade Dutch pirate Murad Reis, president of the Salé pirate republic in Morocco, and his Moorish wife, who arrived in 1630 with some of his father’s ill-gotten treasure. Van Salee, a Muslim described as a ‘Turk’, and ‘mulatto’, protected free Africans and read the Quran. Even by the standards of this rough port, the son of an African head of state and his saucy German wife, Grietse Reyniers, ex-barmaid, scandalized the Dutch Reformed Church. Grietse was accused of flashing at sailors, measuring penises of patrons in her tavern with a broom and being the governor’s mistress, of which she joked, ‘I’ve long been the whore of the nobility; now I’ll be the whore of the rabble.’ The Church tried to expel the couple for impiety, but they stayed, had four children and died rich, the biggest landowners on Manhattan. Cornelius Vanderbilt, robber baron of the Golden Age, was descended from their daughter Annica. The Dutch traded furs and bought land from the Algonquin, who were then driven out by the Iroquois. The newcomers called the seafaring Dutch the Saltwaterers.

The scale of these Dutch triumphs was possible because the other Protestant sea power – England – had disintegrated.

SAINTS AND CAVALIERS: CHARLES, HENRIETTA MARIA AND CROMWELL

It was late afternoon on 2 July 1644, amid ferocious fighting on Marston Moor, near York, when Lieutenant-General Oliver Cromwell and the 5,000 cavalry under his command charged. It was the largest battle ever fought on British soil – 28,000 parliamentary and Scottish soldiers under the Scottish general Leven, opposed 18,000 Cavaliers under Prince Rupert of the Rhine, King Charles’s nephew. No one knew it then but it would be the decisive battle of the war, and the making of Cromwell.

It had been two years since Parliament and king had resorted to war. Neither side had yet landed a decisive blow or found a brilliant paladin. Charles had the advantage at first; the trained bands of Parliament were undisciplined enthusiasts. But one of the first to raise a troop of cavalry was the former Huntingdonshire farmer Cromwell.

Prince Rupert, still only twenty-five, was six foot tall, given to wearing the high boots, silk and velvet suits and broad hats of a cavalier, keen to enjoy mistresses and gambling and never seen without his lucky dog Boye; he possessed elan but lacked discipline. Cromwell was proud in his plainness: ruddy, balding with reddish hair, high cheekbones, ‘his voice sharpe and untunable, and his eloquence full of fervour’, his clothes rough and dark. As Rupert’s dashing cavalry had dominated the early battles, Cromwell noticed that ‘their troopers are gentlemen’s sons’ while parliamentary horsemen were ‘old decayed serving men and tapsters’. He decided to recruit believers instead: ‘You must get men of spirit.’ Some complained that these Cromwellians were ‘proud, self-conceited hot-headed sectaries’ who ‘call themselves godly’ and see ‘visions and revelations’. Cromwell called them his Lovely Company. Promoted quickly to colonel, he built around himself a ‘family’ of likeminded officers, led by Henry Ireton, who married his daughter Bridget. The parliamentary press called him Old Ironside; his godly horsemen became the Ironsides.

Until that day in Yorkshire, the two sides had been stalemated in a war where the early courtliness had now deteriorated into a ferocious sectarian scrimmage. But when the Scots, signing a Solemn League and Covenant that agreed to follow ‘the word of God’ and seek ‘the extirpation of popery’, joined the war, sending 22,000 men to form the Army of the Two Kingdoms, they tipped the balance towards Parliament.

The anxious king said goodbye to Henrietta Maria. When the war started, the queen, whose Catholicism attracted violent parliamentary hostility, was in Holland. She only just made it back, being nearly shipwrecked. Reunited with the king, she became pregnant again, but was forced to move from town to town, hunted by parliamentarians. She duly gave birth to a daughter, but their two younger children were already parliamentary prisoners. Just before Marston Moor, Charles sent her to France to raise funds. ‘Adieu, my dear heart,’ she wrote. ‘If I die, believe you lose a person who has never been other than entirely yours.’ They never met again. ‘I ought never to have left the king,’ she later told her son. Warwick, Parliament’s lord high admiral, pursued her, hoping to kill the papist queen, but she made it to France, accompanied by her court and Lord Minimus.^*

As the Anglo-Scottish army threatened to take York, Rupert prepared to fight at Marston Moor, already afraid of Cromwell’s Ironsides.

On an early summer’s evening, Rupert could hear the puritans singing hymns as Cromwell led his 4,000 Eastern Association cavalry plus 1,000 Scots in the charge, breaking one division of royal cavalry. Cromwell was a zealot but far from dour: instead he was impassioned, often giddy, charging into battle transfigured by a manic righteous glee, laughing aloud. ‘I could not, riding about my business, but smile out to God in praises, in assurance of victory,’ he wrote. The Ironsides charged with the shouts ‘God and our Strength’ and ‘The Lord of Hosts!’

Then Rupert charged. ‘Cromwell’s own division had a hard pull of it,’ observed a parliamentarian, ‘charged by Rupert’s bravest … they stood at the sword’s point a pretty while, hacking one another.’ Cromwell was wounded in the neck. ‘But at last (it so pleased God) he brake through them, scattering them before him like a little dust.’ Cromwell (and English historians) conveniently forgot that Marston Moor was really a Scottish victory: the Scottish paladin Leven occupied northern England for the next two years.

After the battle, the moderate Parliamentarians, the Presbyterian faction, wanted to negotiate but Cromwell, leader of the Independents, insisted on total victory. ‘Why did we take up arms at first?’ he asked. The power had moved from Warwick and his God-fearing magnates to the new hard men. Arguing for ‘vigorous and effectual prosecution of the war’, Cromwell urged, ‘Let us apply ourselves!’ While he advertised his God-fearing humility, he was the ultimate humble bragger, advertising his prowess in pamphlets, claiming as his own the exploits of others and undermining his superiors, whom he subverted and displaced one by one. The ruling Committee of Both Kingdoms commissioned a New Model Army under the dashing commander Sir Thomas ‘Black Tom’ Fairfax, a Yorkshire grandee, who became lord general with his deputy, Cromwell, promoted to lieutenant-general of horse. The duo worked well together: at Naseby, on 14 June 1645, the two finally won decisively with Cromwell leading the charge.

Charles surrendered to the Scottish marshal Leven, hoping to turn him against Parliament. Instead the Scots traded him to his enemies. In June 1647, the king twice negotiated with the parliamentary commanders, including Cromwell, who allowed him to meet his two imprisoned children, Elizabeth and Henry, duke of Gloucester: ‘the tenderest sight that ever eyes beheld’, in Cromwell’s view. Little Gloucester, not yet seven, did not recognize the king. ‘I am your father, child,’ Charles said.

Parliament was now dominated by diehard puritans who that June abolished all theatre, as well as Christmas and Easter, but moderate Presbyterians still hoped for a negotiated peace. In August, the army put an end to any talk of compromise. Fairfax rode into London at the head of the New Model Army with Cromwell commanding the rearguard. Their army was growing increasingly radical: some officers proposed a written constitution, universal rights, the abolition of the House of Lords and full male suffrage. Cromwell, socially conservative and monarchical by instinct, was appalled by this, but probably approved the military purge of Parliament that followed. While Fairfax was still lord general, the more political Cromwell became a master of inscrutable withdrawals and ever more ostentatious self-deprecation, yet always emerged with greater power. At times of tension, debates in Parliament or the army council, he would burst into manic laughter or start pillow fights. From now, he and his coterie of generals were the potentates. But what to do with the king?

The English meltdown was a tiny skirmish compared to the bedlam that was destroying the world’s largest kingdom. Charles was a desperate prisoner, but far to the east the Ming emperor, facing peasant revolts, famines and the invasion of the ferocious Manchu cavalry, found a uniquely extreme solution.

KILLING KINGS: BADGERS AND HETMANS, SUGAR CUBES AND BOWSTRINGS

On 25 April 1644, the Chongzhen Emperor, just thirty-three years old, after summoning his wife and daughter, killed both with his sword and then walked alone out to Jingshan Park in Beijing where he hanged himself on a tree, leaving a note that read: ‘I die ashamed, unable to face my ancestors.’^* As Beijing was ravaged by rebels, he had lost control of much of China and faced the advance of the Manchus from the north. Beijing descended into chaos until six weeks later, on 5 June, a Manchu warrior, wearing armour, his hair with the front shaven and a queue behind, rode up with a small escort of horse archers, dismounted and announced to the crowds simply, ‘I am the prince regent, Dorgan. The crown prince will arrive presently. Will you allow me to be the ruler?’

‘Yes,’ replied the citizens. Dorgon (whose name meant the Badger) was soon joined by a horde of horse archers; a boy, Shunzhi, Dorgon’s six-year-old nephew and grandson of the family founder Nurhaci, was now emperor of a new Qing dynasty. The talented Badger, formally styled Uncle and Prince Regent, conquered the rest of China, slaughtering entire cities. Then he forged a new order: he settled the elite corps – the Eight Banners – in Beijing, yet reinstated the civil service exams and promoted Han Chinese scholars, asking, ‘How can the Manchu and Han be united?’ Nonetheless Dorgon murdered all the Ming princes and ordered that all Chinese men wear their hair shaved at the front with a queue at the back or be put to death.^*

The boy emperor resented his uncle, whom he had assassinated during a hunt, but Dorgon had by then won a new Mandate of Heaven; the family would now restore the Central Country as the greatest empire on earth – just as the Habsburg world empire was falling apart.

Philip IV’s war had almost shattered both Habsburg Monarchies. France defeated the Austrians, then invaded Spain. The Portuguese had lost much of their empire to the Dutch and blamed the Habsburgs; in 1640, an assembly declared the duke of Braganza, great-grandson of Manuel the Fortunate, as João IV. The Swedes took Prague. The Planet King consulted a charismatic nun who, mystically transported to the Jumanos indigenous people of Texas, advised him to rule in his own right. He sacked Olivares and prepared to negotiate.

All sides were stalemated and exhausted. In October 1648 at Westphalia, Philip and his Austrian cousin Kaiser Frederick III agreed a compromise end to what became known as the Thirty Years War that recognized the right of Germans to worship as they wished. Germany was by then ruined: in thirty years of war, the horses of the apocalypse had killed around ten million people. Westphalia established the sovereignty of states in a multipolar Europe, ensuring creative freedom – and destructive competition – for centuries to come. There were many losers but three winners: Sweden ruled the Baltic and a slice of Germany, Pomerania; the Dutch won independence; and an obscure old Swabian family.

The House of Hohenzollern, led by Elector Frederick William, had converted its impoverished sandpit of fiefdoms, built around Brandenburg and Prussia, into a north German power. The Great Elector saw his lands destroyed in the war – Berlin had just 6,000 inhabitants by 1648. Nonetheless, convinced that ‘Alliances are good but one’s own forces are better,’ he forged his Junker nobility into a warrior class, exploiting the war to break the representative Estates and impose the autocracy that would last until 1918.^*

The Elector was duke of Prussia, which was part of the huge Commonwealth Poland–Lithuania: in its southern provinces, Cossacks, free people, often petty nobles, burghers and escaped peasants and soldiers, founded a republic, ruled by elected hetmans, on the Sech islands beyond the Dnieper rapids. They and the peasants, who spoke Ukrainian, suffered the dominance of Polish Catholic lords. A series of Orthodox Cossack rebellions against the Catholic Polish kings had sought recognition for their noble status. In the spring of 1648, the year the Muscovites reached the Pacific, a nobleman and Cossack officer, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who had long served the king against the Ottomans and been captured and enslaved for two years, feuded with a Polish grandee over land and the Pole’s beautiful Cossack wife – known as Helen of the Steppes. Khmelnytsky, elected hetman of the Cossacks, launched a rebellion that spread across Ukraine. In May, his Cossacks, in alliance with the Nogai cavalry sent by the Crimean Giray khans, defeated the Poles, and in Kyiv that December he declared himself hetman, prince of Ruthenia and the Sole Autocrat of Rus. His Cossack armies, joined by some rebel burgers and Ukrainian-speaking peasants, slaughtered Polish nobles and priests, and, in 1648 alone, 60,000 Jews who had lived safely there for centuries but were trapped between Catholic masters and Orthodox Cossacks.

Khmelnytsky’s independent hetmanate scarcely lasted five years: Khmelnytsky needed a patron to protect his realm. Betrayed by the Crimean khan, he offered submission to the Ottoman sultan, who abandoned the hetman to the Tatars, forcing him to turn to Moscow.

In January 1654, the hetman swore allegiance to the Muscovite tsar Alexei, who along with his successors into modern times regarded Ukraine as a province – Little Russia – forever united with its fraternal Great Russia.^* The Ottomans were not interested, because Constantinople was embroiled in its own crisis. There, the mad sultan’s Magnificent Mother, Kösem, was facing a dilemma.

Could a mother kill her own son?

At first, Crazy Ibrahim, now thirty-three, was content to let his mother rule for him. Initially uninterested in women, possibly impotent, he turned to a charlatan spiritualist, Cinci Hoca, who prescribed aphrodisiacs and pornography. Ibrahim became priapic. When his mother was presented with an enslaved Russian girl called Turhan, Kösem gave her to the sultan, who quickly made her pregnant. But his depravities were expanding as the empire shrivelled: he favoured gigantic women and furs, preferably at the same time. He could only perform in a room full of sable, but he was so priapic that he tried to confine himself to one new girl a week on Fridays. Orders were sent out around the empire to find the biggest women. Then in 1644 the padishah started to assert himself, promoting to positions of power Cinci Hoca and his covin of bunglers, as well as a harem manageress.

He dispatched the cast of a cow’s udders and vagina around the provinces in order to find a woman who matched. A sixteen-year-old Armenian girl, Maria, whom he nicknamed Sugar Cube, was extremely fat. In addition to the Russian-born Turhan, he now appointed another seven hasekis (consorts), including Sugar Cube, whom he renamed Sivekar Sultan, granting them the revenues of his richest provinces, Damascus and Egypt – a grave error.

Sugar Cube supposedly told Ibrahim that one of the concubines had been unfaithful. On hearing this he had 280 odalisques sewn into sacks and drowned in the Bosphoros; for this, Kösem invited Sugar Cube to dinner and secretly poisoned her.

The padishah’s next error was catastrophic. Infuriated by Maltese pirates who had attacked a boat carrying Muslim pilgrims, Ibrahim ordered the navy to seize Crete, a Venetian province. The Venetians declared war, raided Ottoman Greece and blockaded the Bosphoros, causing food shortages and riots in Constantinople. The grand vizier and Kösem discussed deposing Ibrahim, who struck back, executing the vizier and banning his mother and his sisters from the harem. He was planning her murder, Nero-style.

On 8 August 1648, the Janissaries and the mob were so outraged by Ibrahim’s ineptitude that they lynched the new vizier, who was kebabbed and sold in the streets – he was known ever after as Thousand Pieces. Ibrahim, now rightly paranoid, had Mehmed, his little son with Turhan, thrown into a cistern. His selfishness was risking the very dynasty. Kösem rescued the boy.

The viziers approached Kösem, remarkably calling her Umm al-Muminin – Mother of Muslims, the title of Muhammad’s favourite wife – and hinting at the caliphal authority of the dynasty. ‘You’re not only the mother of the sultan; you’re the mother of all true believers. Put an end to this chaos.’ Eventually she agreed: ‘Ultimately he’ll kill you and me. We’ll lose control of the government. I’ll bring my grandson, Mehmed.’ She insisted that Ibrahim should not killed. The pashas arrested Ibrahim and girded Mehmed with the sword of Osman. Then they asked the Magnificent Mother to execute her son. Only a ruling by the empire’s religious authority – the sheikh ul-Islam – could permit a mother to kill her son. The sheikh signed a fatwa: ‘If there are two caliphs, kill one of them.’ Kösem acquiesced.

As the pashas and concubines watched from the windows of the Topkapı, the Tongueless came silently for Ibrahim.

‘Is there no one who’s eaten my bread who’ll take pity on me?’ cried Ibrahim. ‘These cruel men have come to kill me. Mercy!’ The bowstrings tightened.

As the Ottomans were executing a king so were the English.

In London, Oliver Cromwell, in his crablike way, was debating what to do with his captive, King Charles. If anyone had suggested trying the king, he claimed, he would have called him ‘the greatest traitor in the world’. The lord general Fairfax was uncomfortable with the idea, but the godly radicals in the army and probably his American chaplain, Hugh Peters, were proposing a trial. Cromwell looked to heaven: ‘Since providence and necessity hath cast them upon it, he should pray God to bless their councils.’ In other words, he believed it was time to try Charles. ‘I cannot but submit to providence.’

INCORRUPTIBLE CROWN AND THE MAGNIFICENT MOTHER

In January 1649, Cromwell got what he wanted: the rump of the Parliament voted to exclude the Lords from government, to declare a ‘Commonwealth and Free-State’ and to try Charles. The heavily guarded king, diminutive and elegant in black silk, was brought to Westminster Hall and accused of ‘a wicked design’ – treason. Lord Fairfax was chosen to head the court, but then absented himself. ‘I would know by what power I am called hither,’ Charles demanded. ‘Remember I am your king, your lawful king, think well upon it.’ He refused to cooperate, but Cromwell had no more doubts. ‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘we’ll cut off his head with the crown upon it.’ As the sixty-eight commissioners of the High Court of Justice sat, Hugh Peter orchestrated a chant, ‘Execution! Justice!’, though there were also shouts of ‘God save the king.’ When Fairfax was mentioned, his wife Anne shouted from the gallery, ‘He had more wit than to be here,’ and when the judges claimed to act for ‘all the good people of England’, she declared, ‘No, nor the hundredth part of them,’ and was removed. The commissioners voted that the ‘tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy to the good people of the nation’ should be ‘put to death by the severing of his head’.

‘I’ll have you hear a word, sir!’ said Charles.

‘No, sir!’ replied the judge. ‘Guard, withdraw your prisoner.’

When Cromwell became an advocate of his execution, his guidance was nothing less than divine: ‘we have not been without our share of remarkable providences and appearances of the Lord. His presence hath been amongst us.’ Without consulting them beforehand, 135 ‘commissioners’ were named to try the king; forty-seven never turned up. At the end of the four-day trial, sixty-seven found him guilty but some resisted signing the death warrant. Cromwell signed third, then menaced the others: ‘These that are gone in shall set their hands; I will have their hands now.’ In one of his manic interludes, he roared with laughter as he and one of the commissioners splattered ink on each other’s faces. Fifty-nine ultimately signed.

In St James’s Palace, Charles realized he would never again see his eldest son, the prince of Wales, nor his second James, who had escaped parliamentary captivity in female dress. ‘I’d rather you be Charles le Bon than Charles de Grand,’ he wrote to the prince. ‘Farewell, till we meet, if not on earth, yet in heaven.’ But he asked to see his children, the thirteen-year-old Elizabeth and eight-year-old Henry. Their adieu was heartbreaking. As Elizabeth sobbed, Charles asked her ‘not to grieve and torment yourself … for it should be a glorious death’; he suggested she console herself in reading, and sent his love to Henrietta Maria. ‘His thoughts never strayed from her, his love should be the same to the last.’ Then he hugged the girl: ‘Sweetheart, you’ll forget this.’

‘I’ll never forget this,’ she replied, ‘while I live.’

Then he invited Henry on to his knee. ‘Sweetheart … they’ll cut off my head and perhaps make you a king,’ he said. ‘But you must not be a king while your brothers Charles and James do live.’

‘I’ll be torn in half first,’ replied the boy. Charles kissed both, crying with ‘joy and love’. As they were led away, Charles, watching from the window, ran after them and kissed them again, then fell on his bed.

On 30 January 1649, a freezing afternoon, as Cromwell worshipped at a prayer meeting, Charles, aged forty-eight, hair and beard now white, donned two shirts, so that he would not be seen to shiver in the freezing temperatures, and a garter band with 412 diamonds, divided up his belongings for his children (and a gold watch for the daughter of his never-forgotten friend, Buckingham).

‘Come, let us go,’ he said, before walking through St James’s Park, surrounded by troops, drums a-beating, into the rambling Whitehall Palace and then out through the Banqueting House, with its ceilings by his friend Rubens, on to the scaffold. There waited ‘Young Gregory’ Brandon, hereditary headman, and his assistant, both in wigs, sailors’ garb and fishnet masks, with the axe. As Charles addressed the crowd, a soldier twice knocked against the axe. ‘Hurt not the axe that may hurt me,’ Charles said, before concluding: ‘I go from a corruptible crown to an incorruptible crown where no disturbance can be. It’s a good exchange.’ Then he laid his head on the block and stretched out his hands to show he was ready. Brandon cut clean. The assistant raised the head: ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ The soldiers cheered and clapped; others stood in respectful silence. The assistant – who may have been the American preacher Peter – dropped the head, bruising the face. Soldiers and spectators jostled to cut locks of royal hair, dip kerchiefs in the blue blood and chisel the scaffold for keepsakes.^* Days later the news reached his family. At the Louvre in Paris, where the queen was dining, she sat ‘without words’ for a long time, while in The Hague their son Charles realized his father was dead when he was addressed as ‘Your Majesty’. He sobbed.

In Constantinople, Kösem ruled for her seven-year-old grandson, Mehmed IV. Presiding over the councils from behind a screen, in the presence of the boy padishah, the Magnificent Mother tore a strip off male viziers. ‘Have I made you vizier to spend your time in gardens and vineyards?’ came the voice from behind the curtain. ‘Devote yourself to the affairs of the empire and let me hear no more of your cavortings.’ But the sultan had his own mother Turhan, who had been trained by Kösem and then presented to Ibrahim. She aspired to be regent and plotted against Kösem, who in turn planned to depose the boy and enthrone another grandson with a less ambitious mother. But fatally Kösem had a spy in her own retinue, who informed Turhan of her mistress’s plan. Now it was a race to see which woman would kill the other first.

‘Thanks to God, I’ve lived through four reigns and I have governed for a long time,’ Kösem told the council. ‘The world will neither be improved nor destroyed by my death.’ Turhan moved first. On 2 September 1651, the sixty-three-year-old Kösem was hunted down through the palace as a loyal slave tried to save her by crying, ‘I am the valide.’

Kösem hid in a cupboard, but her dress was spotted. As she was strangled by a curtain, she fought so desperately that blood came out of her ears and nose. When the news got out, the people shut down Constantinople for three days to mourn the Magnificent Mother.

A new family were taking control in London – and they were not royal. The body of Charles I, its head sewn on to the neck, lay embalmed in St James’s Palace where it was shown to paying viewers. Cromwell was said to have gazed upon it, murmuring, ‘If he had not been king, he’d have lived longer.’

THE BOWELS OF CHRIST: PROTECTOR OLIVER AND PRINCE DICK

The new republic was embattled. The army under Cromwell and his conservative officers clearly dominated – but its ranks seethed with dangerously radical ideals of democracy. In Ireland, Catholic rebels attacked Protestant settlers. The parliamentarians had been terrified of a royal Irish army crushing England, but English colonizers had long treated the Irish as semi-barbarian, outside the usual rules of warfare. The fact that they were also Catholic placed them beyond redemption. Cromwell crossed to Ireland. In a frenzy of self-righteous hatred, he stormed Drogheda, burning soldiers sheltering in a church; priests had their heads shattered after surrendering; captured units were decimated; 3,000 were killed. ‘This is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches,’ Cromwell explained, ‘who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood.’

Charles II, aged twenty, now landed in Scotland where the Scots under Leven, alarmed by Cromwell, switched sides. Fairfax finally resigned as commander-in-chief, and Cromwell was appointed captain-general. Warning, ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken,’ Cromwell smashed the Scots at Dunbar, whereupon Charles marched south with another army. Cromwell gave chase, defeating the boy at Worcester in ‘a crowning mercy’ that fortified his invincible prestige as what his Latin secretary, a half-blind poet named John Milton, called ‘our chief of men’. Cromwell ordered Parliament to agree on a new British state, but when they resisted his management he barged into the chamber in a fit of fury, ranting like a madman at ‘whoremasters’: ‘I’ll put an end to your prating. You are no parliament.’ He then summoned soldiers: ‘Call them in!’ Seeing the Speaker in his chair, he snarled, ‘Fetch him down!’, and seized the ceremonial mace. ‘What shall we do with this bauble? Here, take it away!’ Next, addressing the amazed parliamentarians, he declared, ‘It’s you who forced me to do this for I have sought the Lord night and day.’ Cromwell disdained Parliament: ‘There wasn’t so much as the barking of a dog!’

As one radical general proposed a theocracy that he called the Sanhedrin of Saints – an optimistic name for any group of politicians – the gifted general John Lambert crafted a mixed monarchy under Cromwell, a council of state and an elected parliament. At Westminster Hall, on 16 December 1653, wearing black, escorted by his old ally Warwick and other peers, he was sworn in as ‘His Highness Lord Protector’. He was granted royal apartments in Hampton Court and Whitehall, he was to be greeted with a raised hat like a king, his wife was to be addressed as ‘Your Highness’, his sons and daughters were to be princes and princesses, his decrees were to be signed ‘Oliver P’ – and he could name his own successor. Oliver’s court lacked Stuart splendour, nor would there be a whisper of Jacobean scandal, but it was not completely joyless either: Oliver enjoyed the company of his bevy of cheerful daughters and the glamorous countess of Dysart. He ruled through a coterie of generals and relatives; one daughter married two top generals; two married Cromwellian peers; and the fourth married into the greatest puritan–colonial dynasty – that of the earl of Warwick.^* Both his sons, Richard, known as Dick, and Henry, joined the council of state, but the future depended on Dick, chinless, long-faced and extravagant, drowning in debt – very different from His Highness Oliver, who tried to groom him, advising, ‘Seek the Lord and His face continually.’ He preferred the capable Henry, but Dick was the eldest, so Dick must succeed.

Oliver, like many dictators, sought power yet pitied himself for attaining it: ‘You see how I am employed. I need pity. I know what I feel. Great place and business in the world is not worth the looking after; I should have no comfort but my hope is in the Lord’s presence. I have not sought these things; I have been called to them by the Lord.’ Oliver was just God’s ‘poor worm and weak servant’.

The ‘worm’ was now almost king of a new Israel: ‘You’re as like the forming of God as ever people were,’ he told his new Parliament. ‘You’re at the edge of promises and prophecies.’ This Second Coming could happen only when biblical prophecies were honoured, the Jews returned to Zion and then either converted or destroyed in the End of Days. It was this role in cosmic providence that endeared the Jews, long banned from England, to Cromwell, who met the Dutch rabbi Menasseh ben Israel and began the process that allowed them to return.

While he acted to seize control of the American colonies,^* Oliver envisioned a sacred offensive against the Catholic Habsburgs to establish an English empire. This was inspired by Thomas Gage, a Catholic monk turned Protestant avenger who proposed a ‘Western Design’ – the conquest of the Spanish Caribbean and south America.

‘God has brought us where we are,’ said Oliver, ‘to consider the work we may do in the world as well as at home’ – and providence had never denied him a victory. Over 25,000 white settlers had already flocked to the colony of Barbados with its new, lucrative sugar plantations, which were worked by white indentured workers (many of them deported Irish Catholics, others impoverished children), but they were now replaced by African slaves. The English planters were soon outnumbered and now confronted a fear of slave rebellions, along with the problem that slavery did not exist under English law. Their answer was the Act for Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes, which would be the cruel basis for all American and Caribbean slave legislation, stating that ‘being brutish slaves’, they had no rights; punishment for disobedience would be whipping for a first offence, nose-slitting, whipping and branding for a second; and if ‘any Negro under punishment by his master unfortunately shall suffer in life or member, no person shall be liable to any fine therefore’.

As he planned his Western Design, Oliver found himself at war with his Catholic enemies, the Spanish, but also with his traditional Protestant allies, the Dutch, over trade and the support for the Stuarts from Charles II’s brother-in-law William, prince of Orange. Keen to make peace with these fellow Protestants, he proposed a political union with the United Provinces, then, forming an alliance with Cardinal Mazanin of France, he unleashed his fleet against the Spanish. Now he dispatched his ‘Invincible Armada’ under the joint command of an irascible republican, Robert Venables, and a vigorous young gentleman, William Penn. The timing was good: the Habsburgs were struggling as English troops landed on the rich sugar isle Hispaniola.

GANGA ZUMBA – KING OF PALMARES

The invasion was a fiasco. The soldiers fought ‘in a most sad and miserable manner’, admitted General Venables, ‘tormented with heat, hunger and thirst’. Instead in May 1655 they seized Santiago (Jamaica), which was still owned by the Columbuses. As the Spanish resisted and the local Maroons supported the English, the first governor invited the Brethren of the Sea, English pirates, to base themselves in Jamaica and raid Spanish ports. Led by a Welsh adventurer, Henry Morgan, they turned their headquarters, Cagway (soon Port Royal), into the world’s sleaziest, gaudiest, deadliest stew.

The English now started to accelerate the import of African slaves for their Jamaican and Barbadian plantations.^* But at home the failure of the godly empire stunned Oliver: God had withdrawn his blessing from this nation of sinners. Cromwell sought to correct the moral venality of his people, ruling through his major-generals, who closed taverns and banned ungodly dancing, cockfighting, football, bear-baiting. Christmas remained cancelled. But England was about to receive an opportunity thanks to the modest new king of Portugal, João IV, who struck back against the Dutch. Their Groot Desseyn had won them an Atlantic nexus from Elmina and Luanda to Manhattan and Brazil, where the brutal efficiency of the Calvinist Dutch slave masters had alienated white nobles and mixed-race Amerindians, Catholic slave masters and slave hunters who led an insurrection in Pernambuco. The war, fought in Brazil and Angola, was viciously multi-ethnic: both sides recruited Amerindians and Afro-Lusitanian auxiliaries; the Portuguese recruited slaves, who were promised freedom in return for service.

In February 1649, João’s multiracial army, led by an Afro-Brazilian called Henrique Dias, a freed son of slaves, entitled Governor of all Creoles, Blacks and Mulattoes, and a Potiguaran Amerindian, Felipe ‘Poti’ Camarão,^* defeated the Dutch at Guararapes. Then the Afro-Brazilians sailed across the Atlantic to restore Portuguese rule in Africa under an Afro-Lusitanian commander, Salvador Correia de Sá. During fifteen years of war, the Dutch, their Kongo ally Garcia and Queen Nzinga of Ndongo fought back, both sides fielding cannibal Imbangala militias. The Portuguese retook Luanda; retreating into the interior, Garcia of Kongo and Nzinga of Ndongo survived, both dying peacefully, while the Imbangala under a jaga (king) named Kasanje formed their own kingdom which lasted for two centuries. But now came a settling of scores.

In 1665, at Mbwila, Garcia’s son, Manikongo António, backed by the Dutch, fought the Portuguese. Among his commanders was a royal princess, Aqualtune, two of her sons, Ganga Zumba and Ganga Zona, and her daughter Sabina. The Bakongo were routed, António killed, the princess and family enslaved and sent to Brazil. But that was not the end of the story, for they would become the rulers of America’s biggest rebel slave kingdom.

Slaves had resisted from the start, but revolts were crushed ferociously. The other choice was to ‘head to the bush’, but they needed somewhere to go. Slave catchers – capitães do mato – were dismal manhunters, righteously protected by St Anthony, paid by masters to retrieve or kill escaped slaves, travelling with their leather bags in which they stowed the slave’s head to be presented for payment. But since early in the century runaway Brazilian Maroons had created quilombos – rebel slave communities – named after the Imbangala war camps of Angola. In these macombos – hideaways – ex-slaves built villages, lived on palms, beans and chickens, and became expert guerrillas, using guns and capoeira, a discipline that is both dance and martial art. Early in the century, forty slaves from one estate had fled and formed a quilombo near Recife at the eastern extremity of Brazil that they named Palmares after the palms they ate. Known as Little Angola since so many Palmarians were Bakongo, its elected leaders were often princes from Africa whose prestige continued into their slave lives. When the Dutch were defeated, the Portuguese tried to crush Palmares, launching over twenty attacks, all of which failed. ‘It is harder,’ reflected a Portuguese governor, ‘to defeat a quilombo than the Dutch.’

When Princess Aqualtune and her sons Ganga Zumba and Ganga Zona were enslaved, they were placed on a sugar plantation, Santa Rita, in Pernambuco, north-eastern Brazil, not far from Palmares where their sister Sabina, enslaved earlier, was already living. Soon after their arrival, Ganga Zumba and his family escaped to Palmares where this grandson of a manikongo, aged around thirty-five, an experienced fighter, was chosen as king. His name is unknown – Ganga Zumba is a title based on the Kikongo for great lord – but he placed his brothers and his mother Aqualtune in charge of the different villages as he repeatedly defeated Portuguese attacks, attracting more rebel slaves until he was ruling 30,000 people (Rio had 7,000 citizens) and a territory the size of Portugal. He held court in a small palace with three wives (two black and one mixed-race), guards and courtiers, advised as in Africa by older females, his mother and a matriarch named Acotirene.

The king was greeted with kneeling and clapping as in Kongo. Each town, fortified with palisades and traps, had a chapel with a priest, yet this was a hybrid creole Catholicism which tolerated polygamy and Bakongo rites. Ganga Zumba promoted his nephew Zumbi. While the dates and relationships between the family are uncertain, Zumbi, born in Palmares in 1655 before his uncles arrived, had been captured on a raid by the Portuguese and raised by a priest António de Melo. Baptized as Francisco and taught Portuguese and Latin, he impressed his teacher with ‘a skill which I never imagined in the black race, and which I have very rarely seen among whites’. At fifteen, he escaped back to the quilombo where he took the name of Zumbi, linked to the immortal nocturnal spirits in the Bakongo cult of ancestors. Now his uncle appointed him commander of the Palmarian army.

By the late 1670s, Zumba’s Palmares kingdom was famed throughout the Americas, encouraging other rebellions. In 1677, Ganga Zumba was wounded in an assault, in which some of his family were captured. The next year, the Pernambuco governor Pedro Almeida, offered a peace deal in which those born in Palmares would remain free if they recognized the crown, while recent runaways would be returned to their masters.

Exhausted by fifteen years of war and twenty campaigns, Ganga Zumba decided to negotiate, but his nephew Zumbi opposed the return of any runaways. When Zumba signed the agreement, Zumbi, advised by his wife Dandara, poisoned his uncle and was elected king.

THE WORLD SEIZERS: SHIVAJI, AURANGZEB AND THE POETESS

Zumbi repeatedly repelled Portuguese attacks, almost one a year, yet he had not forgotten his priest teacher, secretly visiting him three times at great personal risk. Even Almeida admired Zumbi, a ‘black man of singular valour, great spirit and rare constancy, the overseer of the rest, because his industry, judgement and strength to our people serve as an obstacle; to his, an example’.

In September 1657, as the Ganga dynasty ruled Palmares,^* the world’s greatest potentate Shahjahan did not appear at the balcony for the jharokha at the Red Fort: he was ill.

After Mumtaz’s death, Shahjahan had consoled himself in a priapic spree, powered by aphrodisiacs, ranging through his harem but also seducing wives of his courtiers, often picked up at palace bazaars that he patrolled, accompanied by two Tatar concubines who noted his choices. Later his beautiful Mumtazesque daughter Jahanara arranged his assignations, an intimacy that led to gossip that she also became his lover. Of his four sons, he favoured the first, Darashukoh, who was diffident, naive and innovative, challenging religious orthodoxy as Akbar had done. But this offended strict Muslims – such as the third son. Aurangzeb, fierce, morose, abstemious, who now served as his father’s roving paladin. Starting in 1636, aged only seventeen, he tried to expand from their Afghan base of Kabul and, failing there, he turned to Deccan.

Aurangzeb was married to an Iranian princess, Dilras Banu Begum, with whom he had five children.^* Then in 1653 the prim ascetic noticed Hira Bai Zainabadi, a singer-dancer in his aunt’s household, climbing a tree to pick a juicy mango, ‘a heart-robbing movement’. Aurangzeb ‘obtained her possession from his indulgent aunt and … he gave her his heart’. He poured her wine but refused to drink himself, until one day she ‘put a glass in his hand and urged him to drink. Though he begged and prayed, she had no pity and the prince was about to drink when the sly girl drank it.’

‘It was to test your love,’ she laughingly told the mortified Aurangzeb.

When just a year later Hira Bai died, Aurangzeb was heartbroken, but, he reflected, ‘God had been gracious to him by putting an end to that dancing girl’s life.’ He emerged from the affair ice-cold.

Now that Shahjahan was ill, Darashukoh claimed the regency, sparking a ferocious family war. Aurangzeb watched and waited while the other two brothers, Shahshuja and Murad, declared themselves padishah. Shahjahan wanted to leave his sickbed to persuade his sons to return to their provinces, but the overconfident Darashukoh refused. Their sister Jahanara tried to mediate, until Aurangzeb discovered his father was colluding with Darashukoh. In June 1658, Aurangzeb besieged Shahjahan in the Agra fort, cutting off the water and reducing the old emperor to pathetic poetry:

My son my hero … yesterday I had an army of 900,000,

Today I’m in need of a pitcher of water.

‘As we reap, we sow,’ wrote Aurangzeb on his father’s letter. ‘You did not love me,’ he later told his father. Shahjahan surrendered. Aurangzeb invited Murad to a boozy feast. Sleeping it off, Murad was arrested then later murdered. While Darashukoh fled, Shahshuja was defeated and escaped to Burma, where he perished.

‘Darashukoh must be exterminated,’ said Aurangzeb. In August 1659, Darashukoh was betrayed and then beheaded, his son Sulaymanshukoh forced to drink opium until he overdosed. Aurangzeb had Darashukoh’s headless body paraded on an elephant. When the head was delivered to him, Aurangzeb refused to look – ‘As I didn’t wish to see this infidel’s head in his lifetime, I don’t now’ – but it is possible he sent it to their father, who resided at the Agra fort with Jahanara. Aurangzeb insisted that he only assumed ‘the perilous burden of crown out of necessity and not free will’. He lectured his father: ‘When you fell ill, Darashukoh usurped power to promote Hinduism and destroy Islam,’ while he himself had won because ‘I’ve always been a faithful defender of the Quran.’ His brothers had to die, ‘due to the demands of justice’.

Emperor at forty, Aurangzeb became Alamgir – World Seizer. Under him, House Tamerlane reached its Indian zenith. Alamgir at first enjoyed music and patronized musicians. He fell for an enslaved teenaged Georgian concubine-dancer, Udaipuri, whom he had inherited from his murdered brother Darashukoh. His favourite daughter, the poetess Zebunnissa, on his succession was permitted considerable freedom, but she became too independent. ‘Oh Makhfi, it is the path of love and alone you must go,’ she wrote. She was also having a public affair with a young nobleman and communicating with her mutinous brothers. Alamgir imprisoned her for twenty years.

This micromanaging puritan tried to limit sensuality, banning women from wearing tight trousers and in Kashmir ordering people to wear drawers instead of nothing. As his court became more rigorous and orderly, he lectured his son Azzam, ‘Fear the sighs of the oppressed,’ and warned his vizier, ‘Oppression will cause darkness on Judgement Day.’ Alamgir was probably the hardest-working ruler in Indian history, barely sleeping, poring over his paperwork: ‘I was sent into the world by providence to live and labour, not for myself but for others.’ Often reflecting on power, he was a Machiavellian – ‘One can’t rule without deception’ – and violence.^* ‘The greatest conquerors,’ he claimed, ‘aren’t the greatest kings,’ but this scion of Tamerlane lived for conquest: ‘When you have an enemy to destroy, spare nothing, anything is permissible … that can deliver success.’

For all his talk of justice, Alamgir restored dominion over Punjab by executing the Sikh guru Tegh Bahadur, crushed Afghan resistance, then devoted his reign to conquest of the south, where his ambitions collided with those of a charismatic Hindu warrior.

In 1660, Alamgir sent an army to destroy a descendant of one of Ambar’s generals, a Hindu warlord named Shivaji, who based at Pune rebelled against the sultan of Bijapur and started to craft a kingdom in the Deccan. In 1659, at a meeting with a Bijapuri general, Shivaji used a tiger claw in his sleeve to eviscerate his opponent, then smashed his army. He stressed that the Mughals were Turkish foreigners. Instead he aspired to create a Hindavi swarajya – a Hindu Indian kingdom. When he routed Alamgir’s armies, the emperor invited him to court, hoping to co-opt him and his son Sambhaji with the traditional blandishments, only to humiliate then imprison the proud Marathas. While he debated whether to kill Shivaji or appoint him governor of Kabul, the Tiger of Deccan was daily sending out baskets of sweets for the poor. One day he and his son escaped in their sweet baskets and returned to Deccan to conquer their own empire.

Soon after Alamgir seized the world, the century’s greatest English ruler fell ill.

QUEEN DICK

In September 1658, Oliver Cromwell, now fifty-nine and poleaxed by the agonizing death from cancer of his favourite daughter Betty, took to his bed suffering blood poisoning from a kidney infection. His generals planned the succession around his deathbed.

In March 1657, the Speaker of the House had again offered Oliver the crown. His eldest son Dick, who would succeeded to the crown, was uncertain. But the younger son Henry, lord lieutenant of Ireland, good-looking and competent, regarded it as ‘a gaudy feather in the hat of authority’. Cromwell chain-smoked as he mulled over the idea, which he too called ‘this feather in a cap’. He decided to accept it – until he took a walk in St James’s Park and encountered three of his republican generals who told him they would resign if he did. ‘I can’t undertake this government with that title of king,’ Oliver told Parliament. ‘God hath blasted this title.’ Instead, in June, he was invested with a quasi-royal panoply, a procession with the sword of state, borne by Warwick, and a sceptre, riding through London with his eldest son Dick by his side. When he fell ill, he prevaricated about naming his successor.^*

‘Tell me, is it possible to fall from grace?’ he asked those around him, adding the certainty: ‘Faith is the covenant, the only support.’ As he sank into a coma, the generals asked him to name his successor: Dick? ‘Yes,’ he whispered, rallying in the morning to tell his children, ‘Go on cheerfully,’ before meeting his maker.

Dick, thirty-one years old, was at the bedside along with the Protector’s son-in-law General Charles Fleetwood and brother-in-law John Desborough, who represented the army. Henry Cromwell held Ireland. That evening the council visited Dick and appointed him head of state. Dick genially accepted. ‘The Most Serene and Renowned Oliver, late Lord Protector, having in his lifetime declared and appointed the most noble and illustrious Lord Richard, eldest son of his said late Highness, to succeed him in the government of this nation,’ the Cromwellians on 9 September 1658 declared him the rightful Protector. Charles II, watching from Holland, despaired that he would ever return. But Dick, unvarnished by charisma, unguided by experience, unblessed by providence, lacked authority.

While the Cromwellians supported Dick’s protectorate, many of the generals, diehard puritan republicans, wanted a saintly republic. Dick raised army pay but, short of cash, he launched a coup to seize control of the army, dissolved the council of officers and summoned a new Parliament, but it failed. In the event he could control neither the assembly nor the generals, who forced its dismissal and recalled the remains of the Parliament that had been elected in 1640. His French allies offered to invade and back him, but crushed between generals and Cromwellians, republicans and monarchists, with zealots on both sides, ‘Richard P’ – now nicknamed Queen Dick – floundered, musing that he would never spill blood to hold power ‘which is a burden to me’. His debts were so great that Parliament had to grant him immunity from arrest and agree his pension. There is only one thing more contemptible than a competent dictatorship and that is an incompetent one. On 25 May 1659, after eight months in office, Dick was deposed and a junta, the Committee of Safety, took power. As General Lambert, popular with the army, hoped to rule himself, the Cromwellian commander in Scotland, George Monck, aided by Black Tom Fairfax, defeated the radical general and marched south, secretly advising Charles II to declare reconciliation and then return.

Tumbledown Dick, lingering in Whitehall and besieged by debtors, appealed for Monck’s help: ‘as I can’t but think myself unworthy of great things so you will not think me worthy of utter destruction’. As Oliver’s secretary Milton wrote Paradise Lost about the Fall in the Garden of Eden, many Cromwellians, including the clerk Samuel Pepys, negotiated pardons and rewards. Oliver’s naval commander and friend Edward Montagu changed sides with the fleet, and with his young cousin Pepys onboard sailed to collect Charles II from Holland. Monck protected Dick, who wrote sadly that ‘out of town’ was ‘the most proper place for persons that are out of employment’ and fled to the continent.^* By then, in May 1660, Charles II, Dick’s junior by four years, had disembarked at Dover. England celebrated Restoration.

The Planet King must have envied England its jovial young prince. Philip IV’s need of sons would lead to the incestuous marriage that would spawn the most freakish tragedy of the dynasty.

* As a young man, Heyn had been captured by the Spanish and enslaved to work the galleys for four years, making him a rare opponent of slavery.

* Jeffrey Hudson no longer enjoyed the mockery of her courtiers. When her master of the horse bullied him, he challenged him to a duel. The courtier arrived armed with a marrow, but Hudson was armed with a pistol and shot him in the forehead. Still only twenty-five, he was sentenced to death, but the queen pardoned him. She sent him back to England but somehow his ship was captured by Barbary pirates who enslaved him for over twenty years, during which he endured rape and servitude, and he only returned to England in 1669.

* The tree famously still stands, though it may be a more recent replacement.

* The Chinese hated this submissive hairstyle and rebelled rather than wear it. The Manchu enforced it. While Manchu women, like those of the Tang and the Mongols, were liberated and rode horses, Han Chinese women increasingly were confined to the home, binding their feet as a sign of submission and delicacy.

* In 1678, when he fell out with his Swedish allies, the Great Elector commandeered peasant sleighs to transport his troops. In 1929, the Great Sleigh Drive inspired a German officer, Heinz Guderian, to devise panzer warfare.

* The prize of adding the heart of Rus to his tsardom helped the second Romanov consolidate his weak new dynasty, and for future rulers, right up into the twenty-first century, Ukraine became essential – as historic realm and breadbasket – to a certain vision of Russia. Ukrainian nationalists later regarded the Cossack hetmanate as the first modern Ukrainian state though it was dominated by Cossack nobles. The crisis drew Tsar Alexei into Poland–Lithuania, which was shaken by what Poles called ‘the Deluge’ and never recovered its power. Khmelnytsky died and so did the story of the hetmanate. In 1667, Romanov tsar and Polish king divided Ukraine. Alexei got Kyiv and the lands on the left bank of the Dnieper, while the Cossacks remained autonomous under their hetmans; the south was ruled by the Crimean khan with key fortresses held by his Ottoman masters. There would not be another independent Ukraine until 1917.

* Among those watching the execution and celebrating it was a St Paul’s schoolboy, Samuel Pepys, who later served Charles’s son. ‘Thus it was my chance to see the King beheaded at Whitehall,’ he wrote eleven years later. At the time, he supported the execution, an attitude he came to regret: ‘I was a great Roundhead when I was a boy.’

* The secretary of the new council of state was John Milton; one of the council’s clerks was a young republican: Samuel Pepys, who owed his job to his patron, Edward Montagu, a genial but competent Huntingdon grandee whose mother was a Pepys. Montagu, who now owned Hinchingbrook, the grand pile of Sir Oliver Cromwell, the protector’s grandfather, was an old friend of Cromwell with whom he had fought at Naseby but retired to his estates for the second bout of civil war, recalled by Cromwell to join his house of peers and council of state and command his fleet.

* Among those driven out of the Anglican Church during Cromwell’s reign was Lawrence Washington, a minister sacked from his parish, accused of being a ‘frequenter of alehouses’, who now left for America. In 1656, his son John Washington traded tobacco and, after being shipwrecked in Virginia, voraciously gathered land, importing indentured servants to capitalize on the law that gave each fifty acres, as well as slaves, was elected to the House of Burgesses and commanded the militia, fighting Native Americans. George Washington’s great-grandfather left 8,500 acres.

* Peter Beckford, who arrived in Jamaica aged twenty, became the richest English slave owner, leaving twenty Jamaican estates, 1,500 slaves and £1,500,000 earned by exporting sugar.

* Poti hinted at the complexity of the Atlantic world: ‘Why do I make war against people of my own blood,’ he warned a rival Amerindian fighting for the Dutch. ‘Come to me and I will forgive you. I will make you one with your ancient culture again. Those that stay there will be destroyed.’ The king ennobled the Amerindian Poti but may have resisted promoting the black Dias.

* Zumbi ruled for around twenty years. But in 1694 around 9,000 Portuguese musketeers and Amerindians led by the harshest bandeirante, Domingos Jorge Velho, bombarded and stormed Palmares. Dandara was captured but committed suicide; Zumbi led a breakout and vanished, adding to his reputation for immortality. Betrayed in 1695, Zumbi was mutilated, his head packed in salt and then displayed in Recife to prove his night spirit was really dead.

* Dilras Banu Begum was so intelligent and haughty that even he admired her ‘imperiousness, but to the end of her life I always loved her’. Together they had three girls and two sons; the eldest was a talented princess, Zebunnissa, who wrote poetry under the pseudonym Makhfi (Secret); their son Azzam became heir apparent. Dilras died just before Aurangzeb became emperor, inspiring his most sumptuous monument, the Bibi Ka Maqbara in Aurangabad, designed by the son of the architect of the Taj Mahal. He also built the Pearl Mosque in the Red Fort of Shahjahanabad.

* Alamgir is now notorious among Hindu nationalists in India as an Islamic enforcer and persecutor of Hindus. Indeed he saw himself as an Islamic warrior, but also as the all-Indian padishah, promoting more Hindu officers (31.6 per cent) than his father (22.4 per cent) and refusing to sack non-Muslims: ‘What connection have earthly affairs with religion?’ He corresponded with Rajputs and patronized Hindu temples – but if the temples were used by rebels, he destroyed them. His predations were conducted for political and not religious purposes. But against his sister Jahanara’s advice, he reintroduced the jizyah tax for non-Muslims, a measure to raise revenue but one clearly aimed at Hindus. His repression of any Hindu or other resistance was merciless.

* It was now that George Villiers, the young duke of Buckingham, son of James I’s favourite, returned to England, earning a living as a masked busker, performing skits and songs as an actor-singer, on the streets and on stage at Charing Cross, demonstrating that Cromwellian London was not totally grim – but it was a unique role for a duke. Politician, lover, playwright, actor and murderer, his career would be almost as extraordinary as his father’s. Next, he headed north on his real mission – to court and marry Mary Fairfax, daughter and heiress of the parliamentary general Fairfax, who had been granted all the Buckingham estates. Buckingham married Mary, but Cromwell ordered his arrest. Fairfax got him released, just in time to enjoy his estates in the Restoration.

* Leaving his wife with the children in England, Dick travelled for twenty years, using the alias John Clarke, ‘drawing landscapes’ and avoiding assassination, until he was able to return in 1680, unmolested by Charles II. Almost outliving the Stuart dynasty, Dick died in 1712 aged eighty-five, England’s longest-lived head of state until Elizabeth II.