St. George's Cross; Or, England Above All

England, 1649. The king is dead, the Commonwealth rises, and the Channel Islands remain a stubborn pocket of Royalist resistance against the parliamentary tide. William Prynne, a politician whose principles have cost him his career, sits in a London rooms with a visitor: Michael Lempriere, an exiled Jerseyman carrying the weight of a lost cause. What follows is a meditation on loyalty tested past breaking point. These two men argue through the night about monarchy and conscience, about what it means to stand by a sinking ship or to have already gone down with it. Keene constructs his historical novel not as adventure but as intellectual drama, examining the machinery of civil war from the vantage of those who found themselves on the losing side and could not look away. The personal becomes political and back again, as Prynne and Lempriere confront the question that haunted every Royalist: what remains when the crown is dust?