A stranger rides across the Kentish countryside when his attention is called to a cottage where violence is being done to an elderly couple. The knight, for such he appears to be, rushes to their aid. Soon after, the strange and prophetic Sir Cesar appears on the scene and foretells of danger ahead. We follow this knight as he encounters an evil landowner; the good and faithful Longpole, son of the elderly couple; the beneficent Duke of Buckingham--or is he a traitor?; and the coquettish Lady Katrine. He is reunited with his kindly but naif old tutor and a childhood companion, now grown into the beautiful Lady Constance. How will each help or hinder him in obtaining his goal of an audience with King Henry VIII and gaining back his ancestral home for his disgraced father and himself? A tale spanning the courts of Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France, the climax comes at the famous meeting between the two monarchs on 'the Field of the Cloth of Gold'.
By : George Payne Rainsford James (1799 - 1860)
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George Payne Rainsford James, Historiographer Royal to King William IV., was born in London in the first year of the nineteenth century, and died at Venice in 1860. His comparatively short life was exceptionally full and active. He was historian, politician and traveller, the reputed author of upwards of a hundred novels, the compiler and editor of nearly half as many volumes of letters, memoirs, and biographies, a poet and a pamphleteer, and, during the last ten years of his life, British Consul successively in Massachusetts, Norfolk (Virginia), and Venice. He was on terms of friendship with most of the eminent men of his day. Scott, on whose style he founded his own, encouraged him to persevere in his career as a novelist; Washington Irving admired him, and Walter Savage Landor composed an epitaph to his memory. He achieved the distinction of being twice burlesqued by Thackeray, and two columns are devoted to an account of him in the new "Dictionary of National Biography." Each generation follows its own gods, and G. P. R. James was, perhaps, too prolific an author to maintain the popularity which made him "in some ways the most successful novelist of his time." But his work bears selection and revival. It possesses the qualities of seriousness and interest; his best historical novels are faithful in setting and free in movement. His narrative is clear, his history conscientious, and his plots are well-conceived. English learning and literature are enriched by the work of this writer, who made vivid every epoch in the world's history by the charm of his romance.
The parodists of G. P. R. James have been quick to remark the sameness of his openings. He has established a kind of 'James-gambit' in historical fiction, and the present romance is no exception to the rule. Once more the irrepressible horseman is riding along the inevitable road, and once more the first chapter is devoted to a careful description of the traveller's accoutrements--material and moral. It is not inappropriately, therefore, that James selected as his motto for this chapter Dryden's conventional lines,
"In this King Arthur's reign,
A lusty knight was pricking o'er the plain."
Donne, Cowley, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Shakespeare, these are the authors to whom James has chiefly gone for his poetical headings to the chapters of this novel. The feature is a rare one in his works, nor can it truthfully be said that the literary flavour thus imparted is maintained by the text of the book. There is more familiarity, more banality, in its style than is common in James's writings. It is odd, for instance, to read the first paragraph of Chapter XVII.--"Oh, the man in the moon! the man in the moon! What a prodigious sackful of good resolutions you must have, all broken through the middle ...."--immediately after a solemn quotation from Macbeth; and a yet more flagrant example occurs at the beginning of Chapter XXXIX., where a couplet from Shakespeare is again used to usher in the following triumph of bathos: "And where was Osborne Darnley all this while? Wait a little, dearly-beloved, and you shall hear more." It should be added that the first sentence is not an intentional pentameter. But, however severely the shortcomings of style may be criticised in a writer who 'broke the record' for rapidity of production, James hardly ever fails to tell a good story, with plenty of adventure and accuracy of learning. "Darnley" does not fall behind the rest in these respects. The date is fixed in the first line, as well as in the sub-title, and the gorgeous festivities of Midsummer, 1520, as well as the character of King Henry VIII., are admirably conceived and described. The original picture of the scene in the Field near Calais, which is preserved at Hampton Court, should be visited by readers of this volume. Those curious in bibliography, by the way, will discover on page 372 a notable instance of want of skill in the abridgment of "Darnley" by James or his editors.
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