The Story of Francis Cludde

A young man's desperate flight from shame becomes a journey through Tudor England's most dangerous court. Francis Cludde, nineteen and burning with pride, is publicly humiliated by his uncle and the fearsome Chancellor Stephen Gardiner, a confrontation that shatters whatever fragile peace he knew in his family home. When violence erupts and his world collapses around him, Francis abandons everything: his name, his family, perhaps his future. But in the shadowed corridors of power, in the storm-lit moors and perilous courts of Mary I's England, he discovers that running from your past is only the beginning. The question becomes whether he can survive long enough to become his own man, and what he'll sacrifice to do it. Weyman renders the Tudor period with visceral immediacy: the claustrophobia of family obligation, the violence barely beneath the surface of courtly manners, the terror of standing alone against powerful men.