White King: Charles I by Leanda de Lisle
MINOO DINSHAW White King: Charles I – Traitor, Murderer, Martyr By Leanda de Lisle Chatto & Windus £20 Oldie price £17.67 inc p&p
Charles I was a keen reader of Shakespeare’s comedies, an enthusiastic producer of and performer in court masques, and the possessor, as Leanda de Lisle suggests in her sympathetic biography, of a ‘cinematic imagination’.
Duke Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whom de Lisle’s Charles somewhat resembles, on hearing the rude mechanicals’ synopsis, exclaims: ‘Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief?/ That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow.’ You could say the same about this enthralling if sometimes frustrating book.
De Lisle’s slightly disingenuously calls White King ‘a sobriquet used by Charles’s contemporaries’. It is actually a puckish amalgam of three garbled myths, one about the king’s coronation outfit, one about the weather at his burial, and one a prophecy of Merlin transmogrified by Puritan demagoguery: ‘The White King and the Dreadful Deadman are all one.’ De Lisle boasts often and fairly of having unearthed archival titbits, but these finds can involve the exhaustive delineation of international royal courtesy-calling at the expense of more important matters. Many fascinating primary quotations are identified in de Lisle’s notes only as far as the secondary scholarship whence they came.
Enough of the tedious and brief: this increasingly absorbing royal life also offers the contradictory but poetic allure of ‘hot ice’. Throughout the book de Lisle renders her story’s physical background, glistening and bitter, feelingly present.
The prologue begins in ‘a winter of exceptional cold’, following Charles and Buckingham’s European escapade travelling the Continent unconvincingly incognito. There is a wonderfully unexpected glimpse of the Bohemian coronation of Charles’s sister Elizabeth, who would be dubbed the Winter Queen when her husband’s reign ‘vanished with the snows of winter’. Late in 1641, when Scots armies seize the coal supplies, Londoners shiver. Clarendon’s history called autumnal Edgehill, clear, cold, and bright, ‘as fair a day as that season of the year could yield’; de Lisle points out the role of the cold that day in polishing off some of the wounded even as its cleansing force preserved others.
So proceed the war’s long winters to the final tableau of the condemned king calling for his extra shirt on the scaffold.
We are shown that Charles and Henrietta Maria were, for their time and rank, exceptionally affectionate parents, excitedly measuring their children’s heights on morning walks. We follow the more extended walkies of Charles’s favourite dogs, Gypsy and Rogue. And few scenes in British history can contend for poignancy with Charles’s last interview with two of his younger children, the Parliamentary hostages Henry and Elizabeth. The Stuart princess bears witness to her little brother, on being warned by the king never to let their captors crown him as a puppet, declaring, ‘I will be torn in pieces first!’
If the theatrically chivalrous Charles seems a bit of a Theseus, de Lisle is in no doubt at all that his wife is a worthily Amazonian Hippolyta, her due long withheld by ‘a storm of sexist tropes’. She emphasises the queen’s physical frailty and political determination, but seems less interested in the calibre or consequences of her decisions.
De Lisle briskly dismisses as parliamentary propaganda the story that Henrietta Maria had an affair with her acknowledged favourite, constant companion, and rumoured second husband, Henry Jermyn.
Charles I’s rarely rehearsed sunset infidelity with the ‘loyal, flame-haired spy’ Jane Whorwood is, on the other hand, accepted and excused: ‘He still loved Henrietta Maria, but enjoyed sex.’
The ice’s heat flares from the unabashed fire of de Lisle’s revisionist partialities. The lovingly assembled perspectives of Charles and his French queen crowd out alternative angles. De Lisle weaves a subsidiary thread through the careers of two feckless schemers, the cousins Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, and Lucy Hay, née Percy, Countess of Carlisle. But though their stories offer scope for fresher treatment, these courtiers are not brought sharply enough into focus to compete with the often deeply affecting humanity of the king and queen.