The year is 1614, and Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, still reels from the passing of Bethy. We know him as ‘Wrios’, the son of the Earl of Oxford and Queen Elizabeth, a man who should be king, but instead finds only disillusionment as a noble in the court of King James, fortyish, lonely, and bogged down completely by the weighty secrets of his past, especially the ancestral quest of his father, Edward de Vere. The Rose and the Sundry Grail builds upon book one, bringing back some of the great characters from the first, such as Wrios, Henry de Vere, Ben Jonson and Jack Swan and introduces a dynamic character with whom Wrios shares the ten-year span of the book, Lucy Morray, as well as the diabolical George Villiers, purported consort to King James. The work is exciting and tragic, heartfelt and adventurous, with characters that capture your imagination and allow you a glimpse of their souls. But it is also a story of love, betrayal, and redemption; the power behind those immanent truths arising from a quest for that which is greater than one’s present self. This quest eventually takes them to the brink of death and to a place immersed in the beginnings of Christianity itself.