Especially affected were the monks and nuns persecuted by the wholesale dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. One of these cast-out monks, a Carthusian of the dismantled priory of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, was Robert Fletcher, the hero of this novel.
The story of this strong, vulnerable man is told in counterpoint with the story of one of the most interesting men in the whole of English history, Reginald Pole, a nobleman, scholar and theologian who was exiled in Italy for twenty years. He was a Cardinal, papal legate at the Council of Trent, and as Archbishop of Canterbury, with his cousin Queen Mary Tudor, they tried, in too short a time, to renew Catholic England. Pole, in the tragic last months of his life, becomes in the novel the friend of Robert Fletcher, now conde