Crimson Empire Books in Order

Crimson Empire opens in the Jacobite Rising of 1745, when Charles Edward Stuart, better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, makes one last serious attempt to win the British crown for his father and restore the Stuart line. That alone gives the series its built-in tension. This is not a war on a distant frontier. It is a civil conflict inside Britain, shaped by old loyalties, clan interests, dynastic claims, and the growing weight of the British state.

The setting matters a great deal. The Highlands are not just backdrop, and neither is the long road south into England. Mountains, rivers, winter marches, and the pull of local allegiance all shape the conflict. One of the interesting things about this period is that people often fight for reasons that are messier than simple royal loyalty. Some are driven by clan bonds. Some by old grudges. Some by sheer survival.

This is a broadsword-and-musket story.

The first book, Broadswords over England, points toward a series interested in what happens when personal identity collides with state power. Highland fighters, government soldiers, and families caught between them all live under the shadow of a campaign that can end in glory, ruin, or both. The struggle is about a crown, but it is also about what kind of Britain is being built, and who gets pushed aside as that process hardens.

The tone is gritty and military, not romantic postcard history. You get battlefield movement, political stakes, and the sense that once the rebellion starts, ordinary lives are pulled along whether they are ready or not. That makes the series feel close to Mace's Roman work, even though the setting is completely different.

If you want to start here, begin with Broadswords over England. As the opening book, it lays out the Jacobite cause, the fractured loyalties behind it, and the human stakes of a campaign that ends up changing far more than the fate of one claimant.