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Turncoat - Roundhead to Royalist, the Double Life of George Downing (Hardcover, Main)
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Turncoat - Roundhead to Royalist, the Double Life of George Downing (Hardcover, Main)
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George Downing came of age as a Puritan pioneer in colonial
Massachusetts, before crossing the Atlantic to sign up for the
English Civil War. He fast became Oliver Cromwell's chief of
military intelligence and was later a diplomat and an MP. However,
Downing spectacularly switched sides, shamelessly betraying his
friends. He prospered under Charles II, yet he remains one of the
most elusive figures of his age. In Turncoat he emerges as the
extraordinary - if troubling - anti-hero of his own life story.
Judged by contemporaries to be 'a fearful gentleman' and a
'perfidious rogue', Downing was a double-dealer who bribed and
blackmailed his way to diplomatic success across Europe; and, when
it was expedient, betrayed friends to horrifically violent deaths.
He pioneered the practice of judicial kidnapping known today as
'extraordinary rendition', was a booster of the Atlantic slave
trade and had a hand in starting two major wars. Always at the
centre of events, Downing engaged with the most illustrious men and
women of his times. His patrons were Oliver Cromwell and King
Charles II. Samuel Pepys was his clerk; John Milton prepared his
letters and dispatches. William of Orange was godfather to his son;
his next-door neighbour was Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia; and when
Downing finally built his street, his surveyor was Sir Christopher
Wren. Turncoat follows George Downing from the asceticism of
Puritan New England, across English battlefields, through courts,
chancelleries and parliaments, to the fleshpots of Restoration
London, where he would spend his final years in unrestrained
indulgence as one of the richest men in the kingdom.
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