John Inglesant is a celebrated historical novel by Joseph Henry Shorthouse, published in 1881, and set mainly in the middle years of the 17th century.

He also spends some time at the Little Gidding community in Huntingdonshire, where he falls in love (the girl soon dies).

As a result of his role in negotiations on the King's behalf in Ireland, he is tried and condemned for treason; he only narrowly escapes execution.

Even by the standards of its time, it is a wordy book, and at the opposite extreme from the preferred all-action mode of the 21st century.

Holly Ordway notes that Tolkien remained interested in Shorthouse's "strange, long-forgotten" novel, and suggests that John Inglesant's "moral conflict and competing loyalties" and its "providentially freeing climax consequent upon the exercise of pity" are reflected in "perhaps the key theme" of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.