A note from the author: 'All the characters in this novel are real people, revived from the pages of Yorkshire history to enact again their significant drama of love and strife, human strength and human weakness. If I have sometimes deepened the lines, and supplied the gaps, of this story of England's Civil War, from my own invention, that is the novelist's privilege: to create a symbolic unity from scattered hints and dispersed incidents.'

In this novel of the English Civil War, Phyllis Bentley brings her lightness of touch, and real human compassion, to one of the darkest periods of English History.