Micah Clarke

One of Doyle’s earliest historical novels sends its young narrator into the doomed Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, when a Protestant claimant rose against the Catholic King James the Second. Micah Clarke, a stout Puritan lad from Hampshire, leaves home in search of adventure and finds it in the ragged rebel army marching across the West Country toward the slaughter at Sedgemoor. Told years later as the old soldier recounts his youth to his grandchildren, the book mixes battle, comradeship, and a boy’s hard schooling in loyalty and defeat. Doyle poured real research into its seventeenth-century world, and the result is a rousing, unillusioned account of a rising that history remembers chiefly for how badly it ended. Free to read as a PDF and EPUB edition.