He relocated to the United States in 1980 after marrying an American. He then joined Thames Television as editor of Thames News.

He then joined BBC's Nationwide and was promoted to become head of current affairs at BBC Northern Ireland. He attempted to enlist in the British armed services at least three times but was rejected on the grounds of myopia. After he left them, he changed his name to his birth mother's maiden name, Cornwell.Ĭornwell was sent away to Monkton Combe School, attended the University of London, and after graduating, worked as a teacher. He was adopted and brought up in Essex by the Wiggins family, who were members of the Peculiar People, a strict Protestant sect who banned frivolity of all kinds and even medicine. His father was a Canadian airman, and his mother, who was English, a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force.

But when Iseult, a powerful sorceress, enters Uhtred’s life, he is forced to consider feelings he’s never confronted before-and Uhtred discovers, in his moment of greatest peril, a new-found loyalty and love for his native country and ruler.Ĭornwell was born in London in 1944. Uhtred has always been a Dane at heart, and has always believed that given the chance, he would fight for the men who raised him and taught him the Viking ways. The Danish Vikings quickly invade and occupy three of England’s four kingdoms-and all that remains of the once proud country is a small piece of marshland, where Alfred and his family live with a few soldiers and retainers, including Uhtred, the dispossessed English nobleman who was raised by the Danes. This is the exciting-yet little known-story of the making of England in the 9th and 10th centuries, the years in which King Alfred the Great, his son and grandson defeated the Danish Vikings who had invaded and occupied three of England’s four kingdoms.Īt the end of The Last Kingdom, The Danes had been defeated at Cynuit, but the triumph of the English is not fated to last long. The second installment of Bernard Cornwell’s New York Times bestselling series chronicling the epic saga of the making of England, “like Game of Thrones, but real” (The Observer, London)-the basis for The Last Kingdom, the hit television series.

The pale horseman series