In defence of a flawed king
WHITE KING: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr by Leanda de Lisle Chatto & Windus, £20
CHARLES I, who ruled Britain from 1625 until his execution at the end of the Civil War in 1649, has generally been portrayed as a martyr, monster or moron. The civil war he waged against his enemies in Parliament resulted in catastrophic bloodshed, arguably more in terms of percentage of the population than the First World War. For this Charles earned the damning nickname the “Man of Blood”.
Even for those inclined to see idiocy rather than malice, Charles was a weak king whose misrule resulted in 11 years of republican rule until the monarchy returned under his more pragmatic son Charles II.
However, to the royalist faithful, Charles I was a saintly victim of his opponents: deranged, fire-breathing, evangelical fundamentalists who drove two of the king’s advisers up the steps of the scaffold, humiliated the Crown beyond the point of endurance, tipped the nation into war and then organised Charles’s execution, even when the majority of the population was opposed to it.
Leanda de Lisle’s superb new biography of Charles I is more sympathetic than critical. There is no monster here, only a little bit of the moron and plenty of martyrdom.
Opening with the legend that snow fell to cover Charles’s coffin on the day of his funeral, De Lisle moves backwards to present a surprisingly sympathetic character. His determined struggle against his childhood disabilities, which included a speech impediment and physical weaknesses, is moving and even inspirational, as are De Lisle’s accounts of his diligence, his chivalry and his dignity as his regime unravelled.
De Lisle excels at providing memorable descriptions of those who knew Charles. His flamboyantly incompetent confidant the Duke of Buckingham was described by one contemporary as “the best-looking and best-built man in the world” and he had almost certainly been the lover of Charles’s late father King James I (who commissioned the King James translation of the Bible), although how much Charles knew about the extent of their intimacy is debatable.
Charles’s own sexuality was avowedly heterosexual and it is his wife, French princess Henrietta Maria, who emerges from White King as one of its true heroes. She was demonised by anti-monarchists in the 1600s as a meddling, extravagant, foreign shrew but De Lisle uses letters, which she uncovered in the archives of the current Duke and Duchess of Rutland, to show Charles’s queen as an elegant and heroically loyal woman. When she was forced to leave her husband to support the royalist cause in exile, De Lisle quotes a moving eyewitness account describing the queen as “the most woeful spectacle my eyes ever yet beheld”.
WHITE King is an impeccably researched and thought-provoking biography which reads as well as a fine novel. Charles I emerges from its pages as “courageous, resilient and increasingly hard-nosed”, personally heroic but still ultimately a political failure.
It also revives one of this country’s greatest stories: a blinkered king, a warrior queen, a war that turned brother against brother and scandals caused by money, sex, espionage and power, woven together in the life of this extraordinary but flawed king.
Gareth Russell is the author of Young & Damned & Fair: The Life And Tragedy Of Catherine Howard At The Court Of Henry VIII (William Collins, £9.99).