download the last kingdom bernard cornwell for free

Aethelstan has grown very religious and taken Lord Ingilmunder as his advisor who uses the Bible to help dictate the prince’s actions. Uhtred gathers his friends to move on Ælfweard before he can cement his power so as to let Aethelstan take the throne, leaving his son Osbert to train Edmund. In Bebbanburg, Ingrith prophesizes that “seven kings must die and the woman you love” before England is united while Uhtred, now an old man, dismisses the prophecy as he isn’t a king and has no wife.

“I was forever phoning him and saying things like, ‘John, go up the Rue de Montreuil and look left and tell me what you can see’,” he laughs.With King Edward’s death of illness, Danes under King Anlaf invade Northumbria and Prince Ælfweard moves on the throne with the backing of the ealdormen of Wessex and mercenaries, forcing Queen Eadgifu and Prince Edmund to flee to Uhtred for refuge. While unable to travel there this time (thanks, Covid) for his usual on-the-ground research, the author has explored previously and leaned on a Paris-based friend for last-minute extras.

“It is an extraordinary landscape,” says Cornwell. It also features a number of well-known locations around the Somme, an area sacred to Australians familiar with the WW1 Anzac experience but with a history of warfare stretching much further back.

Sharpe’s Assassin features smugglers’ tunnels under the city walls and a Guy Fawkes-style Parisian gunpowder plot that really happened and sees our not-especially-woke hero helping to repatriate artworks plundered by Napoleon from across Europe. Bernard Cornwell shines an interesting light on Napoleon Bonaparte’s plundered art collection and on moves, after the emperor’s defeat, to repatriate it – an issue that modern museums grapple with to this day.

Download the last kingdom bernard cornwell for free