The English Civil War is coming, and it will tear England apart. It will also tear apart the friendship between Harry Furness and Herbert Rippinghall, two boys who have known each other their whole lives but whose families now stand on opposite sides of an unbridgeable divide. Harry's father rides with the King's Cavaliers; Herbert's father fights for Parliament. The war asks everything of them: their loyalties, their convictions, their courage. Yet through battles and betrayals, through the fall of kings and the rise of new orders, the faint hope persists that boys who learned to ride together might find a way to remain friends, though divided. G.A. Henty, the Victorian era's master of historical fiction for young readers, tells this story with a remarkable evenhandedness, neither Royalist nor Roundhead is a caricature; both are shown as men and boys genuinely convinced of the rightness of their cause. It is a story about what happens when history crashes into childhood, and what survives when the fighting stops.
