The Tower of London, (vol. 2 of 2)

The second volume of Gower's meticulous history shifts to the Stuart era, where the Tower of London transforms from royal palace to political prison. Here live the great conspirators and claimants: Sir Walter Raleigh, imprisoned for thirteen years in the Tower yet somehow writing his monumental History of the World; Lady Arabella Stuart, whose claim to the throne made her the most dangerous woman in England; and the doomed favorites whose fates hinged on the paranoid calculations of James I and the brutal politics of his son. Gower, an art historian and son of a former Keeper of the Tower, draws on primary sources and intimate knowledge of the fortress to reconstruct the intrigues, betrayals, and tragic endgames that played out within its walls. The narrative builds toward the extraordinary confrontation between Charles I and Parliament, the Tower's role in the Civil War, and the execution that would forever change the monarchy. This is history written from inside the stones themselves, by someone who walked the same corridors as the prisoners he describes.