Fiction

I knew very little about the English Civil War, and had never heard of the Act of Oblivion. While Charles II had pardoned most of the people involved in the Civil War, he was unforgiving about the 59 men who had signed his father’s death warrant. Parliament passed an Act condemning them to be drawn and quartered — the most horrific death sentence in the English system. They went so far as to dig up the bodies of Oliver Cromwell and two others, hang their bodies, and then behead them.

The novel largely focuses on two of the regicides who fled to New England, and the obsession of one man to find them.