The Lion's Whelp

Cromwell's England seen from a Cambridgeshire manor: a Royalist household, a Puritan cousin, the Protector himself, and a marriage that neither side will bless. Amelia Barr wrote historical novels with a strong Nonconformist sympathy and knew the north country. Cromwell is drawn from the letters rather than from the legend, and the portrait is unusually cool for a novel of 1901. Forty-five plates after Rembrandt, Wilkie, Lavery and others carry the seventeenth-century world of the novel in its faces and households.