The book gives an account of the extraordinary life of Sir James Lyon who was born posthumously on board a transport ship returning to England after the Battle of Bunker Hill (1775). The greater part of it deals with his participation as an infantry officer in several of the campaigns of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Egypt (1801), the Peninsula (1808-11), North Germany (1813-14), and Waterloo (1815). Most of the remainder looks at his involvement in the post-war political and social unrest in England around the time of the Peterloo Massacre (1819), and in the West Indies immediately prior to the passing of the Abolition of Slavery Act (1833).