Between 1605, when an English Catholic conspiracy notoriously failed to blow up King James I, and 1649, when the Puritan revolution executed his son, Charles, England made a remarkable transition from the Renaissance world of William Shakespeare to the more modern world of Milton, Hobbes and Newton. These fateful decades of English history are less celebrated than the Elizabethan glories that went before or the Restoration revels that came after, but remain a hinge moment that deserves closer scrutiny. This is one motivation for A Stain in the Blood, an innovative attempt to recover lost time, and re-examine a neglected period, specifically the succession of Charles I to his father’s troubled isle, a kingdom whose search for a settlement ended in civil war.
The emblematic figure on whom Joe Moshenska focuses to explore this story is a great English amateur, Sir Kenelm Digby, a central figure in mid-Jacobean London. Digby, who loved to cook, was close to Charles, and mixed up with the scientists, adventurers, writers and artists of the age in a way that was still, vanishingly, possible in the 1630s. As well as being a man of his time, Digby took inspiration from outstanding Elizabethans such as Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Philip Sidney, men who risked all at the crossroads of high politics and great ideas, and paid for it with their lives.
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