London in the Time of the Stuarts

London in the Time of the Stuarts captures a city at the breaking point of history. Besant traces London through its most turbulent century: the extravagant courts of James I and Charles I, the catastrophe of civil war that culminated in a king's execution, the horror of plague and the apocalypse of fire in 1666, and the debauched theatricality of the Restoration under Charles II. This was London's moment of supreme political consequence, when the City wielded power to depose monarchs and reshape the nation. Besant writes with the vivid particularity of a master storyteller who has mined countless contemporary accounts, bringing to life the narrow alleyways and coffee houses where revolution was plotted, the scaffold where kings died, and the ashes from which the modern city rose. For anyone who wonders how London became London, this is where the answer begins.