A Column of Fire (The Kingsbridge Novels)

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He managed to in nine hundred and six pages, to continue the story he started two books ago with The Pillars of the Earth and World Without End. Esses anjos negros fardados de clérigos violentaram a religião, desventraram-na e espezinharam-lhe o coração. Romance, family breakdown, plot and counter-plot, hopes and expectation and the dissolution of the same, political partisanship, religious warfare and uncontrollable egos all play their part in this blockbuster of a novel. A huge cast of characters, no character list provided, took quite a while to remember who was who, this is a very lengthy tome. Unlike the first two books which were centered around the characters and their struggles, this was about Catholics and Protestants, two decade long fight between Elizabeth and Mary for the throne.

What he doesn’t know is that this name is an alias: Jean Langlais is none other than Margery’s brother Rollo. A Column of Fire, is a historical novel about spies and secret agents in the sixteenth century, the time of Queen Elizabeth I. Ned conveys this advice to the Queen, who acts on it - and builds the ships which would eventually defeat the Armada. In the third book in the Kingsbridge series, A Column of Fire, I am again thoroughly exhilarated and awarding 5 stars.

Alfonso Willard - Bella's son by Barney Willard, eventually taken to England and becoming Mayor of Kingsbridge. He sailed upstream from Combe Harbour in the cabin of a slow barge loaded with cloth from Antwerp and wine from Bordeaux. Each of them was undermined: Elizabeth by repeated plots to assassinate her, Caterina by the ruthless Guise family, and Marguerite by her half-brother King Felipe II of Spain. Beginning in 1558, and continuing through 1605, the story chronicles the romance between Ned Willard and Margery Fitzgerald, as well as the political intrigue of the royal courts of England, France, and Scotland, and the oft-times violent conflict between supporters of the Catholic Church and the rising Protestant movement in the late 16th century. 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.

In an age of relentless bigotry, each of them tried to persuade people of rival religions to live in peace. Scotland for Loch Leven, the prison from which Mary Queen of Scots escaped; Belgium for Antwerp, then the banking centre of the western world; Spain for Seville, the richest city in Spain; Paris because it was the headquarters of those who conspired to assassinate Queen Elizabeth.

Margery Fitzgerald - Daughter of the mayor of Kingsbridge, a Catholic with loyalties torn between her religion and her love for Ned Willard, with whom she shares common ideals. Three great sixteenth century leaders understood the need for religious tolerance, and interestingly they were all women: our Queen Elizabeth I; Caterina dei Medici, who was queen of France and then Queen Mother; and Marguerite de Parme, governor of the Netherlands. Follett attributes to Ned Willard - working in the Queen's Secret Service as Francis Walsingham's deputy - the credit for having painstakingly uncovered the plot and intimidated Gilbert Gifford into becoming a double agent and delivering to the Queen's agents the letters sent to and by Mary. Meanwhile, in France, a young student named Pierre Aumande is caught trying to use the royal Guise surname and brought to the Cardinal and the Duke of Guise for questioning. He is depicted as manipulating the Guise Family, the King and his mother and the Mayor of Paris, getting the Paris militia mobilized on false pretexts and then made to start killing Protestants and making deadly use of meticulous lists of the names and addresses of Paris Protestants, which Aumande had compiled through previous years of systematic espionage.