basil maddox

The year is 1678 AD. Simon Maddox, a graduate student at Christs College Cambridge, receives from his tutor a subject for his thesis in History: “A Century of England and Wales through the Eyes of One Unusual Man.” That man, his uncle Thomas, who has disappeared but may still be alive, has left Simon with adequate research material in a cottage in Grantchester. He must make sense of a Phoenician Symbol described by Ptolemy a thousand years earlier and its connection to the Welsh Prince Madoc who sailed to America three hundred years before Columbus. His legacy was a colony of Welsh-speaking ‘Indians’. Thomas aims to prove that the Maddox family, now living in London, are his descendants. Throughout his lifelong quest, providing encouragement and guidance, is a mysterious and timeless ‘grey lady’ who needs the answers that only Simon can now provide. To complete ‘The Century’ Simon must reach back to the year 1578 AD, to Thomas’s grandparents long before he was born. His grandmother Katherine, part of the Queen Elizabeth’s ‘Virgin Court’, is banished to Wales following a pregnancy and suspicion of her involvement in a plot to assassinate the Queen. Meanwhile his grandfather manages to capture a Spanish treasure ship and after a harrowing confinement in the Tower of London marries Katherine. Her dowry is a small estate in Wales under which lies a forgotten Roman gold mine. This first volume, which ends with Thomas’s birth, traces the family’s early lives in Wales.