The idea for a mechanical cock was never going to work. In 1595 the English ambassador to Constantinople, Edward Barton, advised Queen Elizabeth I that the surest way for her to impress Sultan Mehmed III, the new leader of the formidable Ottoman empire, was to send him a ‘clock in the form of a cock’.
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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £17.00. Tel: 08430 600033. Marcus Nevitt is senior lecturer in renaissance literature at the University of Sheffield. He’s working on books about 17th-century news-writing and William Davenant.
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