In A Royal Passion, author Katie Whitaker seeks to take her readers to that elusive and ephemeral literary junction where scholarly histories and popular biographies meet. While Whitaker does not achieve everything she aims for in this book, if scholarly readers are willing to narrow their focus exclusively on a description of the “turbulent” marriage of King Charles I of England and his queen Henrietta Maria of France, they may enjoy this highly readable, if insular looking, royal biography. In her research, Whitaker focuses on the correspondence between the royal pair, as she endeavors to reconcile the “passionate characters” of their letters with their conventional images of “a cold haughty king, weak, and irresolute, and … a queen who metamorphosed from a frivolous teenaged bride into a bigoted Catholic termagant” (xviii). Although this book does not exactly displace these conventional images, it does flesh them out emotionally as Whitaker takes us behind closed doors for a look at the family life of a pair noted for intensely guarded privacy. Numerous quotations from their correspondence allow Charles and Henrietta Maria to do much of the talking in the book’s narrative, giving the book a historical fiction-like urgency and creating a sense of intimacy that is at times both hypnotic and captivating. But that is all that is new in a book that makes no mention of the various schools of Stuart-era historiography, while the really big issues of the day (king vs. parliament, Puritan vs. Arminian, and the role of Ireland and Scotland in the civil wars) only receive scant attention.

What Whitaker lacks in contextual complexity, she makes up for in the dramatic intensity that punctuates her narrative. In the introductory chapter, Whitaker displays her rhetorical chops as she entices her readers emotionally, by bracketing a brief description of the eternal love between Charles and Henrietta with the final days of the doomed king’s life, making his final tearful good-byes to his children as he prepared himself for his execution. For the rest of the book, the turbulence of the ups and downs of this marriage is recounted with descriptive detail: the early misunderstandings and traumas, followed by the tranquil 1530s, as the pair raised their royal brood, oblivious to the ferment developing in their kingdoms, and the fatal decisions of the 1540s that led to both war and separation. Following a harrowing account of their final moments together before Henrietta departed for her exile in France in April 1544, the book swiftly becomes an epilogue, as it quickly wraps up its description of Henrietta Maria’s two-decades-long widowhood in the book’s final twenty pages. As Whitaker recounts Charles and Henrietta’s marriage in detail, her lack of historical contextualization seems to make it harder for the reader to develop any empathy for their plight, as this insular approach posits a king and queen at odds with the world, besieged by menacing forces they neither understood nor could control. Indeed, what spills out of the pages of their correspondence is the ugly truth that both were ill equipped for the demanding public roles hoisted upon them. Indeed, the plain and massive revelation that arises from this book is that the only thing Charles and Henrietta Maria ever did right was to love and remain devoted to each other, a case Whitaker proves beyond a reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, and despite the author’s best intentions, both Charles and Henrietta Maria fail to elicit the reader’s sympathy, even within the narrow strictures of this book, as they emerge from the narrative neither likable nor understandable. If Whitaker was aiming at creating an interior-like portal for the reader to glimpse into their marriage, she succeeded all too well. We may admire their love and devotion, but only from a distance.

While general and casual readers will find much to enjoy in this book, scholars will have much to quibble about here. In her introductory pages, Whitaker makes some rather bold claims for her book, referring to her topic as “a love that shaped the course of British and World History” (xxi), as she ranks the effects of the marriage among the “big causes” of the English Civil War. But Whitaker never bothers to try to prove these points in the body of her narrative. Similarly, Whitaker makes statements that general readers might accept at face value, such as that the republic that emerged after Charles I’s execution was “governed by the people, for the people” (xvi), which is enough for scholars to take pause concerning Whitaker’s grasp of both the historical and the historiographical complexity surrounding Charles I’s reign and the subsequent civil wars. For readers looking for a more contextualized discussion of Henrietta Maria and her relationship with her husband and her English subjects, look for Michelle White’s Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars (Aldershot, 2006). But for fans of narratives of passionate but doomed love among the high and mighty of history, this book is a definite must read.