Now and again I like a good bit of creep but it is so hard to find, the more books you read, the less creepy they are but his story had atmosphere. This is your typical gothic horror novel that has been done to death over the years - it has supernatural elements, a grieving widow, a crumbling mansion, hereditary insanity, villagers that won't go near the big house and a mysterious 200 year old diary written by a witch in the mid 17th century. What puts it above the others for me are the 'Silent Companions' themselves. They remind me strongly of the weeping angels in Doctor Who - take your eyes off them for a minute and you're a gonner.

This book does a fairly good job of doing what it sets out to do: describing the fates of the 'men who dared to execute Charles I'. If that wasn't exactly what I was expecting, despite the fact that it states it right there on the cover, the deficiency is clearly mine. I picked up this book to expand my study of British history beyond the Tudor era, but this was probably not the best introduction to the English Civil War.

Instead of looking at Charles I and why the people decided to rise up and kill him, this book details the punishments that were meted out or avoided at great cost when Charles II came to the throne. Since I knew little or nothing about the people involved, it was difficult for me to remain interested in their stories. I really needed more background and broader knowledge in order to appreciate these individual stories.

I was impressed by the demonstrations of deep faith on the part of the men who were methodically hunted down and executed employing the most violent methods. They had dared to kill a king and were still certain that God was on their side. The hunters are more difficult to sympathize with as they spend years and valuable resources tracking down men, even once they are silenced and aged, so that they can be brought to 'justice'.

I received this book through NetGalley. Opinions are my own.

Today The Fens is largely a misnomer, as the region of East Anglia is a flat, dry land studded with farms. Yet a few centuries ago it was a name that referred to the marshland environment of the area, one often inundated with water from the sea or from the rivers that fed into it. While these conditions was hardly conducive for growing crops, the grasses that flourished in the wetlands were ideal for animal husbandry, which was practiced as far back as the Roman occupation. During the 17th century, however, a number of parties began a decades-long project to drain The Fens that turned it into the environment which we know it as today.

Eric Ash's book describes how this occurred. He traces the beginnings of the project to the 1570s, when environmental changes that worsened the flooding convinced some in the royal government of the need to intervene. Until then flood management was the responsibility of sewer commissioners, prominent locals who sat on boards that were empowered to maintain flood control measures but whose resources and remit were limited to maintaining existing conditions. Now, however, the crown began to consider ambitious projects designed to drain The Fens and convert the pasture land to more desirable farmland.

The inhabitants of the Fens quickly objected to the government's proposal. Ash spends a good part of his book describing the various challenges to the projectors, which included political pressure, legal challenges, and even violence against the "projectors" and their employees. While efforts by the crown to secure a consensus proved elusive, it was not until first James I and then Charles I took the throne that the state grew more aggressive in its approach. Nevertheless, one of the virtues of the area of the first major drainage project, the Hatfield Level, was that the crown controlled most of the land in the area, thus forestalling much of the opposition encountered elsewhere. Work on the even larger Great Level drainage began soon afterward, and while it was disrupted by the civil war that broke out in 1641, the work continued intermittently until it was complete by the 1670s.

Synthesizing political, social, technological, and environmental history, Ash's book provides an excellent account of the efforts to drain The Fens in the 16th and 17th centuries. From it emerges an account of greed, environmental change, government power, and local resistance that has echoes in some of the debates over public projects and environmental regulation in our own time. Perhaps the most salient point to emerge from the book is how the efforts by people to utilize and shape their environment have long reflected their views of their relationship to it. This is true even today, for while the ongoing effort to restore The Fens embodies a very different set of assumptions and goals, they share with the drainage projects of the 17th century the idea that it is our goals which should determine its condition, even if our objectives today have brought us full circle to embracing the wetlands role The Fens had served for so long in the past.

I had several reasons for picking up this book, and my high expectations were not disappointed. This was an enjoyable adventure into the Stuart court with all its gilded surface and dirty underbelly. Lucy St John is in a unique position as the daughter of a prominent family but a younger sister with an unsympathetic guardian. Her coming of age takes place in an environment where no one allows their true self to be exposed. Being more honest and naive than those around her, Lucy learns some difficult lessons in courtly love and betrayal, but these experiences set her upon the path to find faith, true love, and happiness