The White King: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr - Leanda de Lisle

Written by Leanda de Lisle
Read by Graeme Malcolm
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

· Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins
· Release date: 11-10-17
· Publisher: Hachette Audio

Less than 40 years after England’s golden age under Elizabeth I, the country was at war with itself. Split between loyalty to the Crown or to Parliament, war raged on English soil. The English Civil War would set family against family, friend against friend, and its casualties were immense - a greater proportion of the population died than in World War I.

At the head of the disintegrating kingdom was King Charles I. In this vivid portrait - informed by previously unseen manuscripts, including royal correspondence between the king and his queen - Leanda de Lisle depicts a man who was principled and brave but fatally blinkered.

Charles never understood his own subjects or court intrigue. At the heart of the drama were the Janus-faced cousins who befriended and betrayed him - Henry Holland, his peacocking servant whose brother, the New England colonialist Robert Warwick, engineered the king’s fall; and Lucy Carlisle, the magnetic “last Boleyn girl” and faithless favorite of Charles’ maligned and fearless queen.

The tragedy of Charles I was that he fell not as a consequence of vice or wickedness but of his human flaws and misjudgments. The White King is a story for our times, of populist politicians and religious war, of manipulative media and the reshaping of nations. For Charles it ended on the scaffold, condemned as a traitor and murderer yet lauded also as a martyr, his reign destined to sow the seeds of democracy in Britain and the New World.

“…In 1647, after a bloody civil war, he found himself a prisoner of Parliament, the members of which wanted a negotiated settlement that might have happened if extremists under Oliver Cromwell hadn’t expelled that majority in 1649, leaving those willing to condemn the king. 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 non-zealous majority.”