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The White King: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr
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Review
"Engaging.... Charles had many virtues, and Ms. de Lisle does justice to them.... Ms. de Lisle's account of the Revolution and the war is excellent-clear, fair, sympathetic and detailed.... she grants him the stature of a tragic hero."―Allan Massie, Wall Street Journal "Leanda de Lisle has approached one of the great icons of history with understanding and compassion. She takes her readers through the twists and turns of the English Civil War so that they understand the enormity of the regicide and the foolishness and courage of the king."―Philippa Gregory, author of The Other Boleyn Girl"The reign of King Charles I of England is perhaps best known for its bloody end, when the monarch was beheaded on January 30, 1649.... The polarized nature of the debate concerning Charles's execution, however, has advanced a simplistic understanding of the Stuart king's legacy, one concerned chiefly with his abuses of power and attachment to the doctrine of divine right of kings. Leanda de Lisle's new biography of Charles, based on existing scholarship as well as newly discovered letters from the king's own hand, promises to challenge this legacy."―The New Criterion Critic's Notebook"Charles I (1600-1649) has always received bad press....veteran British historian de Lisle delivers a more generous portrait.... De Lisle's parliamentarians are an irascible group, resembling not so much freedom fighters as the tea party; on the other hand, the author's Charles often seems the voice of reason. Recent elections in Britain and the United States have produced surprisingly dysfunctional governments. De Lisle's fine, revisionist view of Charles may arouse nostalgia for a time when national leaders, elected or not, looked out for the nonzealous majority."―Kirkus Reviews"De Lisle paints a sympathetic portrait [and] skillfully places Charles's story within the context of religious, international, and domestic political rivalries.... Misogyny, religious prejudice, and prurient propaganda.... This fascinating look at a society in turmoil and the resilient, principled leader who tried to remain true to his religious and dynastic responsibilities will leave readers to determine for themselves the meaning of 'The White King,' .... An engrossing read."―Library Journal"Charles I has long eluded even the most scholarly of biographers; his personal contradictions, attractive qualities and ludicrous blunders require a writer of rare talent to let us appreciate the long-hidden character of the king."―Andrew Roberts, visiting professor, King's College London, and author of Napoleon: A Life"Leanda de Lisle uses hitherto unknown manuscripts to offer a sympathetic interpretation of the character of Charles I that is more nuanced than previous treatments thanks partly to a highly original account of his much-maligned queen, Henrietta Maria. The White King interweaves personal, national and international events in a vividly written account of his downfall and eventual execution in 1649."―Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy, professor of history, University of Virginia, and author of The Men Who Lost America"This new balanced biography of Charles I, Leanda de Lisle's The White King is so marvelous It blows away the partisan fog and presents such an immediately recognizable human that all previous tellings look like caricature.[The book] renders sufficiently broad strokes of macro history but is also microscopically filled with careful archival detail only the best historians can dig up and make come alive almost effortlessly.... incisive, razor-sharp writing...a polished biographical gem ....[de Lisle] carefully integrates reliable new source documentation - including lost letters from a previously closed private archive at Belvoir Castle - and capable critical analysis about Charles. It will be definitive for a long time."―Patrick Hunt, author of Hannibal, for Electrum Magazine"By the end of the book, I was sure that this was one of the best books on Charles I yet written. De Lisle certainly does know how to write strong, compelling narratives....Her best - and vital - talent, is perhaps her commendable ability to see the whole picture, the shades of grey."―Andrea Zuvich, author of A Year in the Life of Stuart Britain for The Seventeenth Century Lady"The White King paints a brilliantly balanced look at the tragic life and complicated reign of King Charles I. Vivid in detail, Leanda de Lisle's research is balanced and insightful.... Richly researched and engagingly written, you will gain excellent insight not only into the life of King Charles I and the lives of those closest to him, but also the religious and governmental strife that drove Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales into bitter religious and civil war."―Queen Anne Boleyn.com
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About the Author
Leanda de Lisle is the highly acclaimed author of The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, After Elizabeth, and Tudor. She has been a columnist on the Spectator, Country Life, the Guardian, the Sunday Telegraph, and the Daily Express, and writes for the Daily Mail, the New Statesman, and the Sunday Telegraph. She lives in Leicestershire, England.
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Product details
Hardcover: 464 pages
Publisher: PublicAffairs; 1 edition (October 31, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1610395603
ISBN-13: 978-1610395601
Product Dimensions:
6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.4 out of 5 stars
11 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#434,278 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
As with Nicholas II, the last ruling Romanov, how we view Charles I is largely set by how his days ended. And as with Nicholas, we have been further conditioned by generations of propaganda pumped out by the winners and their ideological allies, claiming that it was Charles’s own bad philosophy, coupled with incompetence, rather than mostly bad luck and choices only wrong in retrospect, that led to his death. Leanda de Lisle’s "The White King" rejects the fake news and offers an even-handed view.Charles’s appellation of “White King†is obscure and long forgotten. De Lisle resurrects it, in order to “inspire curiosity,†for it is double-sided and shows the split of views about Charles. To some, he was a saintly martyr. White is the color of innocence, and also the color of the pall of snow that covered Charles’s body as he was carried to his grave in February of 1649. Thus, it was an emotional term used by his supporters after his death. But during his life a “White King†was also the subject of an ancient prophecy of an evil king to come, and therefore his enemies also called him by that name, casting him as a malevolent presence, the “traitor†and “murderer†of the subtitle.The history here is straightforward, and begins with a brief account of the reign of Charles’s father, James I, who was also, and first, James VI of Scotland, and became King of England in 1603. James succeeded because Elizabeth I had no issue; he was the great-great-grandson of Henry VIII, and son of Mary, Queen of Scots, executed by Elizabeth in 1587. James died in 1625, generally regarded as not a bad king, who continued the middle way of the Church of England, rejecting Scots Presbyterianism and upholding episcopacy, but persecuting Catholics as Elizabeth had. He also oversaw the creation of the King James Bible, an example of his general focus on domestic concerns, avoiding foreign wars and, critically, not spending beyond his means. James lacked Elizabeth’s gift for public relations, although he was popular enough, and he communicated to his son (and to all his children—despite being rumored to be homosexual, he had eight children) a lofty view of the divine right of kings.As with so many things from that earlier age, though, the divine right of kings is not understood today, being seen merely as, in de Lisle’s terms, “ridiculous and perverse,†and Charles’s reputation is tangled up with the confused view we have of that political theory. It probably has more to recommend it than meets the eye, and in the English context never meant the complete supremacy of the king, rather that the authority he had was not derived from contract or consent. It meant a strong king, one who could stand above and control faction, using his power to benefit everyone, while Parliament also maintained considerable power; supremacy was “the king in Parliament.†(As de Lisle notes, the English franchise was broad. “Every freeman with property valued at over £2 had the right to vote—as much as 40 per cent of the adult male population.â€) Moreover, the king was “bound to make a reckoning to God for [his] subjects’ souls as well as their bodies,†an ancient principle among monarchs in the Christian West—for example, it was a major element of Charlemagne’s thought and actions. What is more, some elements of what we think of as divine right theory are purely fictional: for example, as de Lisle mentions, the idea that medieval English kings as children each had a whipping boy, a friend who was punished for the prince’s transgressions because the king could not be struck due to his exalted status, is a complete myth. The king got spanked like everyone else. But, like so many myths about medieval times, from prima nocte to the origin of “rule of thumb,†it’s an ideologically useful myth, in this case for those opposed to monarchy on principle and wedded to contract theories of political sovereignty. In reality, Charles did not think of himself, divine right or no, as an autocrat. He recognized the critical role Parliament had in government; his objection was that Parliament was trying to hobble him to a degree that made him unable to fulfil his own critical role. Given the other complexities of the age, this made conflict inevitable.Unlike his father, Charles quickly became involved in European conflict, raging since the beginning of the Thirty Years War in 1618. (This was the original sin of his reign, since without war, the English crown didn’t need Parliament to vote it money; it received enough money from its own lands and traditional fee sources of income.) Much of Charles’s reign turned on ever-shifting alliances and deals with France and Spain, as well as, more distantly, various Central European states, all of whom were embroiled in their own wars, which had (but were not purely determined by) a religious element. (His elder sister Elizabeth married Frederick, Elector of the Palatine, a German territory; she was called the “Winter Queen†since the Protestant Frederick was kicked out of his lands by the Catholic Habsburgs after only a few months of actual rule.) From the perspective of England, these alliances turned largely on a combination of complicated religious alignments and other national priorities, such as trade and the balance of power.Charles needed a suitable wife, and tried to but was unable to find an appropriate Spanish bride. That might not have been the best idea; the Spanish were on the wane, and anyhow demanded significant concessions to Catholicism. So quickly, in 1625 Charles turned to Spain’s enemy, France, and married Henrietta Maria, daughter of the assassinated French king Henri IV and Marie de Medici, the powerful mother of Louis XIII and sometime regent of France. As de Lisle is at pains to point out, for hundreds of years the Roman Catholic Henrietta Maria has been cast as a malevolent little simpleton. In de Lisle’s account, this is grossly unfair and merely more propaganda from the winners in the Civil War and their ideological descendants. She was little, true, but fierce and extremely competent, and a major asset to Charles. De Lisle, in fact, located a previously unknown cache of letters between the two, in the private archives of Belvoir Castle, and uses them to great effect to support her point, although I don’t know enough to have an opinion of my own. It didn’t help her popularity, however, that mostly England fought France and was allied with Spain, so between that and her religion, the queen was seen, even during her lifetime, by many as an alien and dangerous presence.Royalists and Parliamentarians drifted to war, tossed about by a confusing brew of religious conflict, class conflict, ethnic conflict among the three kingdoms now under one ruler (England, Scotland, and Ireland), and much else. Even “Parliament†wasn’t really an entity for war purposes; many of those who served in the Commons as the war began joined up with Charles, and most of the Lords did as well. For a very long time, both in America and England, Parliament has been seen as the righteous party in the English Civil War, and Charles as a benighted and sinister enemy of liberty (although the Irish think otherwise, due to their ill treatment by the Protestants, as shown by the modern song, by the Pogues, with the refrain “God rot you Oliver Cromwell, who raped our motherlandâ€). Again, this is history as written by the victors, through the prism of Enlightenment dogma, and ignores that much of Parliament, and most of England, was strongly opposed to a large portion of the actions taken in Parliament’s name during the war, and even more to the execution of Charles. And none of this can be comprehended without the backdrop of a complex set of Protestant groups (English Catholics as such played almost no role in the Civil War): Covenanters, Presbyterians, Arminians, and so forth, along with, as the war played out, increasingly radical sects such as the Levellers, Diggers, and Fifth Monarchy Men (the latter not mentioned by de Lisle, but they fascinate me), all in a giant kaleidoscope, collectively complicated matters in a way new in English history.One especially interesting fact about the war is that it was conducted in parallel in the media. It was the first English war where propaganda in the form of pamphlets and rapidly churned out books made a major difference in public opinion. Some of this seems silly to us but was important at the time—for example, parliamentarians accused Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Charles’s nephew and an essential Royalist general, of keeping a poodle that was a satanic familiar; Charles’s supporters wrote parody responses, like a seventeenth-century version of the Onion. More seriously, both sides wrote lengthy justifications for their positions, including Charles’s last work, the Eikon Basilike, posthumously published, which sold like hotcakes, undermining Cromwell’s Protectorate and paving the way for the Restoration.After several years of back-and-forth warfare, in which a greater percentage of Englishmen died than in World War I (although brutality was far less than in Continental wars), with Parliamentary progress made possible only by cooperating with invasions by the radical Scots Covenanters, and the rise of Oliver Cromwell, Charles was defeated. Even though he had lost, Charles’s execution was far from inevitable. English kings had more than once been murdered after defeat, but to execute a king after legal process was largely inconceivable. His death resulted from a combination of his obduracy and refusal to compromise, Scots and Puritan extremism, and much else. Certainly, the vast majority of Englishmen were interested not in his death, but in his restoration, perhaps with strict limitations (many of which were proposed to be time-limited even by his opponents). But the tiny remnant left of Parliament, purged successively until only Puritan fanatics sat there, combined with the strength of will of Cromwell, meant that Charles was sentenced and executed. He died well, thus cementing his reputation and providing a rallying cry for future royalists. Even so, generations of historians have seen praise of Charles as a criticism of Parliamentary supremacy, and maintained a dim view of his reign.What is there for us to learn? Charles’s biggest strategic error, as with so many Christian men of power who base their actions on what God wants, not on what they want, because they fear judgment for going too far, was the inability to punish his enemies as they needed to be punished. He shared much of what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle said of King Stephen (reigned 1135–1154), “He was a mild man, and gentle and good, and did no justice.†In the same manner, he too often would not follow through; as Robert Tombs said in his "The English and Their History,†“He could be persuaded to plunge into reckless actions, but repeatedly drew back ‘amazed’ when things went wrong.†Under Charles, political and religious executions were zero, and he knuckled under to Parliament killing one of his chief ministers, the Earl of Strafford, through a bill of attainder coerced by mob violence, a decision he bitterly regretted to the end of his life. (And one with resonance today; “MPs who had abstained from the attainder bill against Strafford were publicly named and shamed, with news-sheets and pamphlets driving the verbal assaults on them as ‘enemies of their country.’ â€) Like Nicholas II Romanov, Charles might have done better mowing down his enemies at the right moment; instead, like Nicholas, driven in part by fear for his family, he took half measures such as, in person, trying and failing to seize his major opponents, thereby being publicly humiliated, and then absented himself from London at the wrong moment, letting his enemies consolidate their power.Another fact to learn, or reinforce, is that the role of women in medieval and Renaissance England was much different than what “feminist†propaganda claims. It is not that de Lisle shoehorns women into her discussion, and she certainly does not offer history through a distorting and infantilizing lens. Rather, women simply had far more power in medieval and Renaissance Europe than we are often told. This was true at all levels of society and for centuries (during the Crusades, Muslims in the Holy Land were appalled at the power and liberties the women of the Franks had), but most visible in the upper classes (as with most historical matters). In fact, women get nearly as much print in this book as men, because they were nearly as relevant to the events at hand. One is Marie de’ Medici, mother of three kings and critical support at times for Charles (although de Lisle probably has a more favorable view of her than most historians). Another is Henrietta Maria, intimately involved in moral and logistical support for the war. Plus, of course, the Winter Queen, key player in European wars and mother of Prince Rupert. Also important were many non-regal women, too, such as Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle (whom de Lisle does frequently insist on calling “Lucy Carlisle,†even though that was not her family name, married or unmarried). Anyone who actually reads history realizes that the so-called patriarchy is a myth, although sadly this book, or any book about this era, probably gets a lot fewer readers than any given lying Twitter feed using the hashtags #toxicmasculinity and #smashthepatriarchy.Finally, and turning aside from power politics, de Lisle points out a key different perspective of the time, and one that is better in some ways than what we have inherited from the radical Protestants with their atomized view of human responsibility. “The hierarchical society Charles imagined was underpinned by Christ’s example of self-sacrifice. Everyone owed service, both to those above them (commoner to noble, noble to king, king to God) and to those beneath them, to whom they owed a duty of care. This included protecting the weak, and promoting the talented and the brave.†This in contrast to a pure meritocracy, which suggests “that those who are not successful have less merit than those who excel.†True, the less successful may in fact have less ability, or they may be ridden with vice, but they do not necessarily have less merit, and they have no less human dignity. But this is forgotten today, by many conservatives as well as by our ruling classes, which is a major cause of the division of our society into a preening, globalized ruling class dwelling in glittering palaces on the coasts, and those increasingly left behind. And that division is, of course, a major cause of the political turmoil today—turmoil that, in many ways, resembles the ferment of 1640s England. You may draw your own conclusions.
As a Tudor historian, it is nearly impossible to review works set during the time period without seeing the content through the jaundiced lens of your own biases. More often than not, there is room for multiple interpretations of the documented evidence, but it can be hard to overcome the instinctual gut-reaction humans experience when faced with an opinion that differs from one they wholeheartedly embrace about historical figures they have come to cherish. That uncomfortableness is invaluable when we seek academic growth, but it makes reading for pleasure a challenge. Thankfully, I had few preconceived notions about England’s first Caroline king, and when I was offered the opportunity to review the latest take on his life, I leapt at the chance. Few things can compare to the joy I feel when introduced to a new historical subject and this beautifully crafted biography did not disappoint.The subtitle of Leanda De Lisle’s The White King calls the monarch a traitor, murderer, and martyr, but upon completion of the book, I have come away with the impression that the only fitting descriptor used is martyr. The other titles seem far too subjective for this oft-misunderstood king.Though Charles’ reign came many years after the death of the ginger-haired tyrant at the head of the Tudor court, the spectre of Henry VIII looms large throughout this biography. His reign and personality are held against those of Charles I to show how vastly different they were and just how much the world had changed in the intervening years. The charges of tyranny lodged against the latter monarch pale in comparison to the actual tyranny perpetrated by Henry VIII and his children, yet none of their reigns ended with the humiliation of the scaffold, as Charles’ did. Even more striking are the parallels De Lisle makes with our current political climate – where “populism meets religious justifications for violence†and “the rise of demagogues, who whip up mobs by feeding off ethnic and religious hatreds.â€De Lisle brings the figures surrounding Charles I to life with the strident confidence that accompanies the historian who fully understand their subject. All of their graces and foibles are fully explored; their ever-changing allegiances reported without a hint of sentimentality. If their motivations are not revealed in the primary sources, they are left unexplained here, preserving the jarring atmosphere Charles must have felt during his reign. Even the most historically savvy reader is never quite certain where loyalties lie or how often the tides will turn. In the hands of a less experienced historian these twists would be rendered into a confusing mess, but De Lisle deftly navigates the murky waters with expert precision.My favorite part of The White King was the focus on Robert and Henry Rich and their cousin, Lady Lucy Carlisle. Having spent the better part of the last decade researching Catherine Carey, Lady Knollys, it was refreshing to see the role her descendants played during this tumultuous time in English history. The fealty they showed their monarch was far from the devotional loyalty Lady Knollys was known for in her lifetime, but the Puritan proclivities of their great-grandfather, Francis, remained un-diluted. I often found myself wondering what their grandmother, Lettice, would have thought of their intrigues. Lady Carlisle appears the most like her ancestor. Like Lettice, she even bore an uncanny resemblance to the queen she served.I thoroughly enjoyed De Lisle’s inclusion of the correspondence between the king and his wife, Henrietta Maria, recently unearthed from the Belvoir archives. Through their words, the unjust depictions of the queen fall apart at the seams, and Henrietta Maria is finally given the recognition she deserves. The emphasis on Charles family life is most touching here. The love and devotion they showed to him speaks volumes about his character.A well-written and impeccably researched biography, The White King seeks not to revise the history of England’s Civil Wars, but uncover the truth hidden beneath the grime of centuries of propaganda and myth.
Nice treatment of a complex topic. I learned a lot about King Charles and his puritan opponents. The author portrays the puritans as extremists who would stop at nothing to inflict their vision of society on the people... and yet King Charles was obviously flawed with his inability to work with parliament and his failed military campaigns. I was particularly struck by what a tolerant and in some ways liberal court King Charles created with his Catholic wife and his love of art. A truly iconic figure, and this book certainly does justice to him.
Clearly history, not historical fiction but written in a very readable almost fiction like style. Almost every sentence referenced. Really enjoying this one. Makes 17th century European events much clearer for an American .
Very good book. Draws on some correspondence that has not been available to other writers.
same
Loved it all!!
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