Halloween 1636: sightings of the ghost of an old woman begin to be reported in the small English coastal town of Minehead, and a royal commission is sent to investigate. December 1640: a disgraced Protestant bishop is hanged in the Irish capital, Dublin, after being convicted of an 'unspeakable' crime. In this remarkable piece of historical detective work, Peter Marshall sets out to uncover the intriguing links between these two seemingly unconnected events. The result is a compelling tale of dark family secrets, of efforts to suppress them, and of the ways in which they finally come to light. It is also the story of a shocking seventeenth-century Church scandal which cast its shadow over religion and politics in Britain and Ireland for the best part of three centuries, drawing in a host of well known and not-so- well-known characters along the way, including Jonathan Swift, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Walter Scott.
The Reverend Dr. Peter Marshall was a Scottish-American preacher, and twice served as Chaplain of the United States Senate.
Born in Coatbridge (North Lanarkshire), Scotland, Marshall heard a strong calling to the ministry at a young age. Despite having no money, he nevertheless migrated to New York in 1927 when he was 24. He graduated from Columbia Theological Seminary in 1931, when he became the pastor of First Presbyterian Church, a small, rural church in Covington, Georgia. After a brief pastorate, Marshall accepted a call to Atlanta's Westminster Presbyterian Church in 1933. It was in Atlanta that he met his future wife, Catherine Wood, a student at Agnes Scott College whom he married in 1936. Marshall became pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. in 1937 and was appointed twice as U.S. Senate Chaplain, serving from January 4, 1947 until his sudden death just over two years later. He was 46 years old.
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