The book by Kondraty Birkin (P.P. Karataev), an almost forgotten Russian writer, offers readers a rare opportunity to feel the atmosphere of palace secrets, intrigues and scandals in Russia, England, Italy, France and other states in the period of the 16th–18th centuries. Feathers French novelists and the brushes of French painters surrounded the severed head of Charles I with such a radiant halo of a martyr that we barely have the courage to talk about him as an ordinary person, even a rather weak and characterless one. With the name of Charles I (we are sure) in the imagination of an enlightened reader there is a portrait of Van Dyck: a figure proudly akimbo and a thin face with a curled mustache and a pointed beard; a face that bears some resemblance to the face of Cardinal Richelieu, only without the expression of slyness characteristic of the latter...