Born in exile, the illegitimate son of Charles II, James Scott, Duke of Monmouth (1642–85) suffered poverty as a child and as an adult experienced the libertine Restoration court and some of the most dramatic events in British 17th-century history, culminating in his own rebellion. Laura Brennan depicts Monmouth as a man living on the cusp of modernity, who personified that age: ‘so much more than a royal bastard and leader of the last rebellion upon British soil’.