Refusing the protection of a personal bodyguard, William Gladstone habitually disappears into the murkier corners of 1880s London. There he seeks out the fallen women of the capital. Is he guided by Christian principles and reforming zeal? Or does he have more earthbound motives?
Britain gets its first Labour Party prime minister in 1924. Ramsay MacDonald is a Scot of humble origins, which the establishment never lets him forget. During a Red scare, MacDonald discovers the lengths to which his enemies will go to bring him down.
World War I leader David Lloyd George faces a bloody war of attrition in Flanders and a submarine campaign that threatens to starve Britain into submission. But the Welsh Wizard knows he is battling English middle-class values as much as the German military. When a crisis arises within his own household, it may be more than even he can surmount.
War hero and scourge of Napoleon, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, becomes Britain's new peacetime prime minister. While the Iron Duke dismisses the murderous threats of his estranged nephew, he fears the issue of Catholic emancipation will be his real Waterloo.
In 1908, Herbert Henry Asquith moves into No. 10 from the chancellor's residence next door and faces a Commons-versus-Lords battle of historic proportions. Outside Downing Street, suffragettes chain themselves to the railings and demand the vote. Inside, an already liberated Mrs. Asquith exercises her freedoms with abandon.
Raised a Christian but born a Jew, Benjamin Disraeli has always felt like an outsider. Prime minister late in life, he struggles to keep Russian ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean in check. He also contends with his own passion for three women - one married, one a widow, and one at the very highest levels of Victorian society.
Rigorously groomed for leadership since boyhood, William Pitt the Younger has given his very lifeblood in the service of his country. But the prime minister hides a dark secret. More terrifying to him than the Napoleonic armies massing across the Channel is the Pitt family curse, which threatens to destroy him and drive away the woman he loves.