The Grand Design

IT IS impossible for an historical novel which includes such characters as an illegitimate son of Charles II, the King himself, James, Duke of York, Ashley of the Cabal, Louis IV, and Samuel Pepys to be uninteresting. The hero and heroine, Jamie and Snubs, are caught up into the great whirl of Catholic-Puritan, English-French-Vatican intrigue of their day, as is almost inevitable by their natures and their training. The conclusion is simplicity and decency, as it should be even amid the turbulences of the late seventeenth century; but the story itself is labored. The book contains extraordinarily good historical portraiture.

One might cavil with the title. Did not the Grand Design belong to Henry of Navarre and Queen Elizabeth?