Complete and unabridged, with 39 full-page plates by Lambert de Hondt (II), Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa. A cowardly Oxford tutor is dragged into the plots around the Duke of Shrewsbury in the reign of William the Third, and narrates his own disgrace. Weyman made a career of brave heroes and here wrote the opposite deliberately - the narrator runs away in almost every chapter and is the more convincing for it. Thirty-nine plates after Claude Lorrain and Charles Le Brun, from duels to peasant families, carry the flight and disgrace of a narrator who never stops running.

Stanley John Weyman (1855-1928) was an English novelist born in Ludlow, a barrister who turned to fiction after a spell of ill health. His French historical romances were compared to Dumas and admired by Stevenson and Churchill. His works include A Gentleman of France, Under the Red Robe, The Red Cockade, and Shrewsbury.