God's Traitors

Jessie Childs follows a single Catholic household, the Vaux family of Harrowden Hall in Northamptonshire, across the decades when England broke with Rome. The book begins with the Church of England's founding in the 1530s and carries the reader forward to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Through this one family, it examines how Catholics tried to hold on to their faith under a Protestant state.

The narrative is drawn from the lives of the Vauxes themselves, using a family's experience to show the wider pressures of religious loyalty and political danger in early modern England.