The fourth volume of Peter Ackroyd's enthralling History of England,
beginning in 1688 with a revolution and ending in 1815 with a famous
victory.
In Revolution, Peter Ackroyd takes readers from William of Orange's
accession following the Glorious Revolution to the Regency, when the
flamboyant Prince of Wales ruled in the stead of his mad father, George
III, and England was--again--at war with France, a war that would end
with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.
Late Stuart and Georgian England marked the creation of the great
pillars of the English state. The Bank of England was founded, as was
the stock exchange; the Church of England was fully established as the
guardian of the spiritual life of the nation, and parliament became the
sovereign body of the nation with responsibilities and duties far beyond
those of the monarch.
It was a revolutionary era in English letters, too, a time in which
newspapers first flourished and the English novel was born. It was an
era in which coffee houses and playhouses boomed, gin flowed freely, and
in which shops, as we know them today, began to proliferate in towns and
villages. But it was also a time of extraordinary and unprecedented
technological innovation, which saw England utterly and irrevocably
transformed from a country of blue skies and farmland to one of soot and
steel and coal.
Ackroyd is the author of the first, second, and third volumes of his
History of England, Foundation, Tudors, and Rebellion.