The next year Elizabeth hit back, sending a small fleet under the erratic leadership of two favourites, an overpromoted young popinjay, the earl of Essex, and Raleigh, to seize Cadiz. In June 1596, they sacked the city. But Philip was not finished with God’s work. In October, while Essex was away raiding, the Prudent King sent his second armada – 130 ships and 20,000
On 13 September 1598, Philip died, succeeded by his only surviving son, Philip III, who continued his works, sending a fourth invasion of Britain to land in Ireland and expelling all the Muslims in Spain. Back in Prague, his cousin Rudolf, confronted by madness and treason among his own family, was convinced that the Church must strike back against the Protestants, using all the weapons at its disposal – war, politics and art. As Protestants dominated the Habsburg lands, Rudolf persecuted them in Hungary and Austria but tolerated them in Prague, inconsistent in all matters. Yet though the popes had led a Catholic counter-attack, it still looked as if the Protestants were winning. In alliance with the pope, Rudolf’s brothers, led by Matthias, believing Rudolf was a threat to monarchy and Church, started to encourage opposition and enforce conversion to Catholicism. Rudolf was stuck between the two sides. In 1605, the Hungarians and Transylvanians rebelled; Austrian Protestants recoiled from aggressive Catholic persecution. The strife was watched closely in London by a monarch who shared Rudolf’s ambivalence. They were not only the ones who feared an imminent religious conflict was about to embroil Europe.
On St Stephen’s Day, 26 December 1606, in a London where a wave of plague was killing many, leading to a lockdown of theatres and alehouses, and a conspiracy of Catholic terrorism had shaken the kingdom, James I, veteran king of Scotland, new king of England, was joined in the Grand Chamber of Whitehall by 300 of his courtiers to watch a new play by an actor-writer named William Shakespeare.
* Andreas Vesalius practised what to do with Henri by sticking shards into the heads of recently executed criminals, their bodies often snatched still warm from the gallows. In this era, surgery was limited by anatomical knowledge, the inability to stop bleeding, the absence of anaesthetic and antiseptics. Only two internal operations were possible: trepanning the skull and ‘cutting for the stone’. In the latter procedure, known as a lithotomy, a patient was trussed and held down by strong men without anaesthetic while the surgeon inserted a tube through the penis to hold the bladder stones in place, then cut the perineum and used a scoop extractor to drag out the stones; the wound was not sewn up but left to heal itself. Many patients died. Vesalius experimented with both procedures.
He was born into a dynasty of Flemish physicians: his grandfather was Emperor Maximilian’s doctor, his father was Charles V’s apothecary and valet de chambre, while the son became his doctor and the greatest of the pioneering anatomists: dissecting humans and macaques, he discovered some of the essentials of circulation and the skeleton, disproving many of the claims of Galen believed for over a millennium. Fighting off accusations of heresy by the Inquisition, he had become Philip II’s physician.
* Catherine was an innovator, said to have made forks and cutlery fashionable; until this time, even kings ate with their fingers, cutting up meat with a knife and eating with a spoon. Ordinary folk travelled with wooden spoons; grandees used silver. Catherine was also said to have introduced underwear, a fashion that became a French speciality – and she smoked American tobacco that was known as
