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The success of the tiny, resourceful and sophisticated Netherlands reflected the singular development of European societies, where perpetual warfare inspired extreme competition, technical innovation and loyalty to states and faiths. Passionate Protestantism encouraged the family values, mutual trust and sombre industriousness personified by Jacob de Graeff, the most pre-eminent of the regenten, the oligarchs, rich on sugar, spices, slaves, who dominated Dutch politics for thirty years. His de Graeff and Bicker cousinhood masterminded the rise of Holland in uneasy cohabitation with the princes of Orange, whom they regarded as dangerously monarchical. The Netherlands pioneered the rule of law that was essential to trade and competition with their rivals, and founded universities that trained students in law, while the need for expertise encouraged others to concentrate on professions. Traders no longer just sold to people they knew at nearby markets but also did business with strangers, which meant they had to cultivate fairness, politeness and trust, alongside the ruthless avarice necessary to make profits: the conundrum of capitalism. Amsterdam, where Jacob de Graeff and his sons Cornelis and Andries were mayor one after the other, was at the forefront of urbanization: between 1500 and 1800, twenty million moved to cities mainly in northern Europe. Cities were unhealthy: many died – 1 per cent of city dwellers annually – but they were replaced by others. The bigger the cities, the more artisans, the greater the skills and comforts on offer. The grandee Andries de Graeff stands ruddy and gingery, proudly clad in Calvinist black with a white collar, in a painting that he commissioned from one of the most favoured artists of this Dutch golden age: Rembrandt.

In 1637, the GWC seized much of Brazil, whence it sent flotillas in further attempts to grab Elmina and other African slaving castles. In 1641, invited by Manikongo Garcia, they stormed Luanda. The Dutch were the first northern Europeans to enter the slave market on a vast scale. Queen Nzinga joined Garcia and the Dutch in a ferocious war that ruined Angola. In 1647, Nzinga defeated the Portuguese. Garcia’s gamble and the Dutch Groot Desseyn had paid off: suddenly the militarized corporations of the small hybrid republic of the United Provinces spanned the world.

On the way to the east, the Dutch stopped for provisioning at the Cape where Dutch frontiersmen founded Cape Town, then started to move inland and claim farms, suppressing, annihilating and mixing with the first people they encountered, the Khoikhoi, pastoral nomads who were rapidly broken by musket and pathogen. Across the Atlantic, in the New Netherlands, the GWC expanded their town on the island of Manhattan, New Amsterdam, where in the early 1640s an adventurous settler, Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt, progenitor of the Roosevelts, arrived as a teenager to start a new life, buying a small farm in what would later be midtown.

A less typical founder but also progenitor of a New York dynasty was Anthony Janszoon van Salee, the strapping son of a renegade Dutch pirate Murad Reis, president of the Salé pirate republic in Morocco, and his Moorish wife, who arrived in 1630 with some of his father’s ill-gotten treasure. Van Salee, a Muslim described as a ‘Turk’, and ‘mulatto’, protected free Africans and read the Quran. Even by the standards of this rough port, the son of an African head of state and his saucy German wife, Grietse Reyniers, ex-barmaid, scandalized the Dutch Reformed Church. Grietse was accused of flashing at sailors, measuring penises of patrons in her tavern with a broom and being the governor’s mistress, of which she joked, ‘I’ve long been the whore of the nobility; now I’ll be the whore of the rabble.’ The Church tried to expel the couple for impiety, but they stayed, had four children and died rich, the biggest landowners on Manhattan. Cornelius Vanderbilt, robber baron of the Golden Age, was descended from their daughter Annica. The Dutch traded furs and bought land from the Algonquin, who were then driven out by the Iroquois. The newcomers called the seafaring Dutch the Saltwaterers.

The scale of these Dutch triumphs was possible because the other Protestant sea power – England – had disintegrated.

SAINTS AND CAVALIERS: CHARLES, HENRIETTA MARIA AND CROMWELL

It was late afternoon on 2 July 1644, amid ferocious fighting on Marston Moor, near York, when Lieutenant-General Oliver Cromwell and the 5,000 cavalry under his command charged. It was the largest battle ever fought on British soil – 28,000 parliamentary and Scottish soldiers under the Scottish general Leven, opposed 18,000 Cavaliers under Prince Rupert of the Rhine, King Charles’s nephew. No one knew it then but it would be the decisive battle of the war, and the making of Cromwell.