* 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
* 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
* 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.
Manchus and Shivajis, Bourbons, Stuarts and Villiers
VELáZQUEZ, BERNINI AND ARTEMISIA
