Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot (Antonia Fraser)
Apparently I forgot to ever review
God's Secret Agents; since it covers some of the same territory as as
Faith and Treason, I guess I might as well talk about them both.
Not knowing anything about either one of these books, I lucked out by reading
God's Secret Agents first; this book is much larger than the other, and happily it does a lot of scene-setting. It mostly covers the Elizabethan age, with James coming in at the epilogue.
Faith and Treason is much smaller, and picks up about where
God's Secret Agents leaves off, dispatching Elizabeth in the introduction, and is almost exclusively about James assuming power and the Gunpowder Plot itself. I recommend both books, as they really do work well together, and the story they tell is quite interesting (if incredibly grim at times). That being said, Fraser assumes enough knowledge that I'd probably feel lost without having read
God's Secret Agents first. My only caveat is that both these books go into gory detail about the caught Catholics getting tortured; reading about them getting dismembered was no less wince-worthy the second time, unfortunately. Still, I recommend both books, although you might want to slip a palette cleanser in between.
Grades:
A