Corporal Johnny Church is educated, well-born, and bows for his beliefs to no one man; with Cromwell at Naseby, he gradually becomes disenchanted with the great general's religious intolerance and, finally, the disastrous attempt to send the English army into Ireland to subdue the irascible Catholics. As an ""Agitator"" and petitioner for the soldiers, Church, as history tells us, lost his life, and Cromwell -- England's only dictator -- remains a mystery. The book is filled with endless religious conversations revolving around freedom of conscience, all in the Puritan idiom of the middle 17th century -- not exactly the most enlivening discourse in the world. This is a valiant and perhaps necessarily tedious effort to reconstruct the life of a man whose name we know only from the newspapers of the day.