Quarrel with the King

"A moving account of the Elizabethan golden age, retold through the varying fortunes of the Pembroke family." —The Observer (London)

Spanning the most turbulent and dramatic years of English history—from the 1520s through 1650—Quarrel with the King tells the remarkable saga of one of the greatest families in English history, the Pembrokes, following their glamorous trajectory across three generations of change, ambition, resistance, and war. With vivid color and fascinating detail, acclaimed historian Adam Nicolson recounts the story of a century-long power struggle between England's richest family and the English Crown—a fascinating study of divided loyalties, corruption, rights and privilege, and all the ambiguities involved in the exercise and maintenance of power and status.

"Beautifully written. . . . It evokes, too, the tense worlds of the Tudor and Jacobean courts, in which violent impulses seethed behind smiling faces. . . . An elegant, thoughtful, imaginative book about the need for dreams and the ugliness of modernization." —The Sunday Times (London)

"Intellectually adventurous. . . . We get a wonderful sense of everyday rural life in early modern England. . . . [His] greatest achievement is to show how all depended on one another." —Evening Standard (London)