Prologue

This adventure is as historically accurate as I could make it, however I have not included my endless references because the main character, Daniel, is fictional. I have kept the descriptions and actions of the non-fictional characters as close to historical accounts as possible.

As a rule of thumb, if the character is a parliamentarian, or has a title, or has a military rank of captain or above, then they and their families are non-fictional. If the character is a member of the Wellenhay clan or goes unnamed, then they are fictional.

All dates have been converted to our modern calendar to save the reader the confusion of January being the tenth month of the old year rather than the first month of the new year.

Note that at the end of this book there is an Appendix which is organized like an FAQ. There you will find answers to dozens of questions such as:
- Where can I find out more about the historical characters and events?
- What was a Pistoleer?
- What was a Hellburner?
- What were the different pistols of the era?
However, the next nine short paragraphs will set the scene of this era for you.

* * * * *

Britain spent most of the 1630s at peace, but that does not mean that life was good for most Brits. They were struggling with increasing unemployment and higher prices for food and shelter because the coming 'Little Ice Age' was lengthening the winters. Since the aristocracy had a near monopoly on farm land, the gulf between the opulence of the aristocracy and the desperation of the poor was ever-widening. The educated middle class were horrified by the descent of the workers into depravity, but they were powerless.

They were powerless because King Charles Stuart was determined to be the absolute ruler of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. He rarely called parliament into session, for that just gave a forum for the educated middle class to question the corruption and incompetence of his regime. Charles was always squeezed for money to keep up his lavish palaces but without calling parliament he could not enact any new taxes. Instead he twisted the existing laws, even outdated laws, to wring out more income. He tended to do this at the expense of on the merchant middle class of the cities rather than of the aristocratic landlords.

One source of income was from twisting ancient laws in order to privatize and then sell off the common land that was traditionally shared by rural cottagers. The King's Deputy, Lord Strafford, was doing this to create a plantation-economy in Ireland, and other favourite Lords were doing this in the wetlands and fenlands of England. These were very bad times for cottagers and farming clans, so there was an ever increasing number of small local rebellions against such privatizations.

Under the Stuart Regime, Britain had become a peaceful, self-involved, and corrupt backwater that was being left far behind in the European race to create worldwide empires. The British Empire consisted of the four kingdoms plus a few failing colonies in the Americas. English was rarely spoken outside of England ... it was not even spoken in Scotland outside the main cities.

In contrast the Dutch Republics were booming, despite having suffered through seventy years of war with the Hapsburg Empires. The Netherlands had become the first modern nation state, complete with global trade, international banking, multinational corporations, stock markets, and stock market crashes. Dutch was fast becoming the international language of commerce. The young and vibrant of Britain were leaving for the opportunities offered in the Netherlands in trades, commerce, and the army.

The Dutch and the Swedes were allied to the German Protestants who were fighting the Catholic Hapsburg Empires, while Britain was neutral. Previous Stuart forays into international politics had been so disastrous that Charles had signed peace treaties with Britain's historic enemies in the south of Europe, and had distanced himself from Britain’s historic allies around the North Sea. Thus Britain was at peace, while the Thirty Years' War was killing off a fifth of the population of Europe, including half of all German men.

Charles shattered this peace on a whim when he demanded that the Scots use his prayer book. Since Henry VIII, the Church of England had looked, sounded, and behaved like a Catholic church, but with the king as its head rather than the pope. In Scotland, however, the Church had been further reformed by Knox Presbyterians, for whom King Jesus was the head of the church, while the king was a parishioner. This did not sit well with 'absolute ruler' Charles, so in 1638 he set about un-reforming the Church of Scotland to make it more like the Church of England.

The Scottish Presbyterians were outraged, for to them this was a giant step backwards towards Catholicism. Some Scottish clerics and lawyers drafted 'The Covenant' as a petition to tell Charles that their Church was already perfect in the eyes of Jesus and therefore he must not mess with it. Since the petition was signed by over half of the Scots (known afterwards as the Covenanters), Scotland refused Charles' un-reforms, including his choice of bishops and his prayer book.

This anti-Episcopalian snub hit Charles in his absolute ego, so he called up the militias of his kingdoms and sent an army to invade Scotland and punish the Covenanters. At a time when the Hapsburg Emperors and the Imperial Catholic church were slaughtering entire cities on the continent, the amateur armies of Britain fought over the choice of prayer books. Such was the extent of the incompetence of the Stuart regime and of the inbred aristocracy who supported it.

* * * * *

This is the first of a series of historical adventure novels set in the era of the British Civil Wars. In this first novel two battles are described. The first is the Standoff at the Tweed in May 1639 during the First Bishop's War. In this war, King Charles Stuart marched 20,000 men to the Scottish border where they were met by the Covenanter army of the Scottish Parliament. Unfortunately for Charles, a Swedish Field Marshal called Alexander Leslie had rushed back to Scotland from fighting the Thirty Years' War and had brought his veteran Scottish mercenaries with him. Though it is now seen as the first of the dozen wars that make up the British Civil War, at the time it was mocked by the rest of Europe.

Meanwhile, Europe was nervously watching the weapons race between the Dutch Confederate Navy and the Spanish Armada. The second battle in this novel is the Battle of the Downs in October 1639, where Dutch Admiral Maarten Tromp destroyed the combined Spanish and Portuguese Armada. Since it was fought within range of Southern England's gun forts and under the eyes of England's navy, Charles' neutrality was criticized by both sides of the battle, but more importantly, by his own subjects.

The collapse of the Empire's navy drastically changed the trading maps of the world, for it allowed Dutch merchants to take over much of Portugal's rich spice trade with the Indies. The defeat of this armada was far more important to the world than Queen Elizabeth's defeat of the previous one.

Enough history ... flip to Chapter One and enjoy.