Explore "The Councillors of Falconhoe" by Fred M. White on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In a fold of the hills not far from Plymouth and overlooking the famous Sound stood the main seat of his grace the Duke of Fairbourne. There the race had been cradled since the days of Warwick the Kingmaker, and there they might have flourished prosperous and undisturbed for many more centuries had it not been for the ambition of a monarch who mistook his vocation and realised too late that every man who rules a great kingdom and has a weakness for playing at soldiers is not necessarily a Napoleon.
All the same, he had a sort of left-handed revenge upon the titular rulers of the country which he hated most and which brought his pride tumbling in the dust. The ravages of the Great War hit them almost as much as they had bankrupted his beloved junkers, and nobody had felt it more than the Duke of Fairbourne.