Marcus Nevitt

It was the brightest of futures; it was the End of Days. Three hundred and fifty years before Brexit, England experienced a series of epochal events which forced subjects to rethink their relationships with each other, their political leaders and their European neighbours. In the space of a tumultuous 12 months England endured the devastation of plague, the most humiliating of naval defeats at the hands of the Dutch, and the catastrophe of a Great Fire which transformed its capital city forever.

The idea for a mechanical cock was never going to work. In 1595 the English ambassador to Constantinople, Edward Barton, advised Queen Elizabeth I that the surest way for her to impress Sultan Mehmed III, the new leader of the formidable Ottoman empire, was to send him a ‘clock in the form of a cock’. Knowing that Mehmed had a growing reputation for psychopathy rather than ornithology — he had his 19 brothers circumcised and then strangled to death — Elizabeth demurred and eventually sent him an elaborate clockwork organ instead. The organ was accompanied by its maker, Thomas Dallam, who spent his first month in Constantinople fixing the damage it had suffered in transit before eventually playing it for the Sultan and his retinue at the Topkapi palace.

Beware hedonists bearing white powder. This, in part, was the message pressed in a short book about the excesses of the Jacobean court written by a Scottish Catholic physician and occasional counterfeiter, George Eglisham. The Forerunner of Revenge, published in Antwerp in 1626 in English and Latin, quickly gained notoriety across Europe for its particular depiction of the Stuart monarchy as a dynasty under siege.