The Stuart monarchy brought England and Scotland into one realm, albeit one still marked by political divisions that echo to this day. More importantly, perhaps, the Stuart era was marked by the cruelty of civil war, and the killing of a king. Shrewd and opinionated, James I's attitude toward the English parliament sowed the seeds of the division that would split the country during the reign of his hapless heir, Charles I. Charles's nemesis, Oliver Cromwell, Parliament's great military leader and England's only dictator, began his career as a political liberator but ended it as much of a despot as the king he executed.

In Peter Ackroyd's Rebellion, England's turbulent seventeenth century is vividly laid out before us, but so too is the cultural and social life of the period, notable for its literature, including Shakespeare's late masterpieces; Jacobean tragedy; the poetry of John Donne and John Milton; and Thomas Hobbes's great philosophical treatise, Leviathan. Ackroyd also gives us a very real sense of the lives of ordinary English men and women, lived out against a backdrop of constant disruption and uncertainty.

1. A new Solomon
2. The plot
3. The beacons
4. The god of money
5. The angel
6. The vapours
7. What news?
8. A Bohemian tragedy
9. The Spanish travellers
10. An interlude
11. Vivat rex
12. A fall from grace
13. Take that slime away
14. I am the man
15. The crack of doom
16. The shrimp
17. Sudden flashings
18. Venture all
19. A great and dangerous treason
20. Madness and fury
21. A world of change

22. Worse and worse news
23. A world of mischief
24. Neither hot nor cold
25. The gates of hell
26. The women of war
27. The face of God
28. The mansion house of liberty
29. A game to play
30. To kill a king
31. This house to be let
32. Fear and trembling
33. Healing and settling
34. Is it possible?
35. The young gentleman
36. Oh, prodigious change!
37. On the road
38. To rise and piss
39. And not dead yet?
40. The true force
41. Hot news
42. New infirmities
43. Or at the Cock?
44. Noise rhymes to noise
45. The Protestant windFurther readingIndex