The Caged Lion

Complete and unabridged, with 54 full-page plates by John Nost Sartorius, Francis Sartorius and John Boultbee. James I of Scotland, taken at sea as a boy and held eighteen years in English castles — educated, admired, made a poet and a knight, and never allowed home. Around him: Henry V, Agincourt, and a Scots household in exile. Yonge worked from the chronicles and from James's own poem; the caged lion is not a metaphor she invented, and the ending is history. Fifty-four plates, from Jörg Breu the Elder to Thomas Gainsborough, gather the hunting fields, greyhounds and grey skies that surround a king who could never ride free.