At the beginning of his diary, on 1st January 1660, Samuel Pepys noted that ‘Lawson lies still in the River’. A mere two weeks before, amid rioting in the streets of London and with Parliament under the control of the army, Vice‑Admiral John Lawson had taken a fleet of twenty-two warships into the Thames and, in defence of Parliament, blockaded the city.

Despite being a staunch republican, Lawson would later aid the Restoration of Charles II, and died from wounds received in battle during the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1665.

This biography charts the tumultuous life and times of an ordinary seaman born in Scarborough who would come to play a major role in the English Civil War, the Restoration, the Anglo-Dutch Wars and the start of the transformation of England into a global political and economic power in the seventeenth century.