A Column of Fire (The Kingsbridge Novels)

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The shrewd, determined young monarch sets up the country’s first secret service to give her early warning of assassination plots, rebellions, and invasion plans. These historical novels present "as comprehensive an account of the building of a civilization - with its laws, structures, customs and beliefs - as you are likely to encounter anywhere in popular fiction. There were large transition periods between the characters’ lives that we seemed to miss and the story never fully came together as it needed to. Now I've finished it, it's easily one of the best I've read and it will always have a place in my heart. From his merchant cousin, based in Antwerp, Willard hears of the Hellburners, fireships employed against the Spanish during the recent Siege of Antwerp.

With the paperback review copy weighing in at over a kilo (I couldn’t resist), this is not a novel for dropping on your nose. As the times and the story continue many characters both real and imagined by Mr Follett create a wonderful telling of the Elizabethan Age. When the Spanish Armada attempts to invade England and overthrow the queen, Ned’s brother Barney, a sailor and now a key player in the English Navy, witnesses the English counterattack. Persecution in the name of religion truly happened, and while some find this book taking advantage of history to present drama. As depicted in the early chapters, the city of Kingsbridge is ruled by an oligarchy of rich merchants, who sit on the city council, with the most powerful family holding the position of the city's Mayor.The story is as brutal as it is historical with characters the reader will recognise and some they will not, facts they will know and others they will not. To Ned Willard is attributed the role of uncovering the conspiracy and averting it at the last moment. They get Philbert Cobley burned as a heretic for conducting a Protestant service and drive the Willards virtually bankrupt by strictly enforcing anti-usury laws which are usually regarded as a legal fiction (since in fact all merchants take interest on loans). The Willards and The Fitzgeralds fortunes rose and fell with the Catholic and Protestant rivalry, which came to a climax when Elizabeth I took England’s throne. I so wanted to like it, especially since I loved the first two books in this trilogy, The Pillars of the Earth and World Without End, but this story fell flat.

It’s the third book in Follett’s Kingsbridge series and serves as a loose sequel to his other novels, The Pillars of the Earth and World Without End. While I found this to be the weakest of the three novels in the series, I still enjoyed it a great deal. The death of King Henry II of France in a jousting accident - a traumatic event setting the stage for the decades-long French Wars of Religion. The Babington Plot (1587) in which Queen Elizabeth I's agents got hold of secret correspondence in which Mary, Queen of Scots explicitly assented to the conspirators' plan to kill the Protestant Queen Elizabeth and place the Catholic Mary on the throne - the evidence which led to Mary being executed for treason. The reader learns of these struggles and waits to see how the numerous spheres will come together and eventually meld into a single storyline.With numerous monarchs who flex their muscle throughout to show how Catholicism is the only way, I can easily find justification to have this work for my reading challenge and I can only hope that others will find the thread of my argument and agree. Like the other two novels in the series, A Column of Fire follows a pair of star-crossed lovers from the village of Kingsbridge through a period of significant historical events; in this case, through the religious strife between Catholics and Protestants before, during, and after Queen Elizabeth’s reign.

The familiar history of King Henry’s break with the Catholic church and the chaos that introduced into what was then a provincial and unimportant country is the enabling event that sets the plot in motion. The plot skips forward several years: Ned is now married to the widowed Margery, and the two are finally happy. In 1989, Ken’s epic novel about the building of a medieval cathedral, The Pillars of the Earth, was published. Bartholomew's Day massacre (1572) in which Catholic mobs massacred thousands of Protestants in Paris. A Column of Fire is a 2017 novel by British author Ken Follett, [1] first published on 12 September 2017.

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