Reign of Queen Anne, Volume II

The death of a queen. The fall of a hero. The birth of a new dynasty. Volume II of Justin McCarthy's masterly history opens with the bloodiest battle of the War of Spanish Succession, Malplaquet, where John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, confronts the French in a slugging match that kills and wounds forty thousand men. But the battlefield is only the prelude to a more devastating defeat: the political assassination of Marlborough himself, brought down by a parliamentary conspiracy led by the treacherous Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. McCarthy calls it the darkest chapter of Anne's reign, and one sees why. Meanwhile, London's coffee houses seethe with argument over the Spectator, while in the wings the Jacobites plot a Stuart restoration and the German cousins of Hanover wait to inherit. When Anne finally dies in 1714, the age of the Stuarts ends not with a bang but with a desperate whisper, and the messy, violent history of the Jacobite risings begins. McCarthy, writing as an Irish Liberal MP in 1902, brings a progressive's disdain for courtly intrigue and a storyteller's eye for the vivid detail.