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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.