By What Authority?

The year is 1559. Elizabeth has taken the throne, and England is tearing itself apart over which god to worship. In the village of Great Keynes, two families stand on opposite sides of an abyss: the Maxwells, who risk everything to shelter hunted Catholic priests in their walls, and the Norris family, whose Protestant minister watches the Catholics with suspicion and zeal. Old Sir Nicholas Maxwell is the bedrock of his household, a man whose faith has cost him comfort and will eventually cost him more. His sons face the impossible question that divided a nation: stay true to the old faith and face execution, or betray their souls to survive. Robert Hugh Benson, a convert to Catholicism himself, writes with the passion of someone who knows that religious identity in Elizabethan England wasn't abstract theology but a matter of life and death. The tension crackles through every interaction, especially as the suave Hubert Maxwell finds himself drawn to Isabel Norris, a Protestant, while his family hides men who could be executed for saying Mass. This is historical fiction that refuses easy heroes or villains. It asks the question that haunts its characters: by what authority do we live, and by what are we willing to die?