Bestselling Tudor and Stuart history writer, Leanda de Lisle talks about her new book The White King, a biography of Charles I and his loss of three kingdoms.

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After Elizabeth: The Rise of James of Scotland and the Struggle for the Throne of England
The White King: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr
Tudor: Passion. Manipulation. Murder. The Story of England’s Most Notorious Royal Family
The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: Mary, Katherine, and Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Tragedy

Transcript of Leanda de Lisle on Charles I

Heather:
Welcome back to day two of the Tudor Summit. I am super excited to introduce our first speaker today, Leanda de Lisle. She was born in Westminster, in London, and read history at Somerville College, Oxford University before taking up national newspaper and magazine columns, and later publishing best-selling Tudor and Stuart history books. After Elizabeth the death of Elizabeth and the coming of King James was runner-up for the Saltaire Society’s first Book of the Year award. Her next book, the New York Times best-selling biography The Sisters Who Would Be Queen (the tragedy of Mary Katherine and Lady Jane Grey), provided the nonfiction basis for Philippa Gregory’s 2017 novel The Last Tudor and was described by Professor John Guy as gripping and an unrivaled account. Tudor: The Family’s story (1437 to 1603) is a biography of the dynasty and a Sunday Times top 10 bestseller, and her latest book The White King is a biography of Charles I and his loss of three kingdoms. Based on her new manuscript discoveries, with many never-before-seen royal letters, it describes a brave king who like the tragic heroes of Greek myth falls not because of wickedness but because of human flaws and misjudgments and it reveals the true role of his remarkable and maligned Queen. She regularly writes and speaks on matters for historical TV, radio, and a number of publications including: The Times, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Daily Express, BBC History Magazine, History Today, The Literary Review,  The New Criterion, and The Spectator. 

So welcome to Leanda de Lisle who is going to share with us lots of new information about Charles I. I think that’s one of the first things I want to ask you about. There’s this idea that Charles is a bit of a failure, we just kind of remember him for his ending and your book dives into a lot more the human part of Charles I. Can you share with me a little bit about why you chose him and as a subject and kind of how you feel about him?

Leanda:

Well, obviously I love the Tudor period. I’ve written three books about the Tudor period, but a lot of the drama and the stories of the Tudor period only really find resolution during the reign of Charles I. So doing the Tudors without doing Charles is a bit like not reading the end of the story in a way. It’s an incredibly exciting and moving story and one that’s got some fascinating women in it who have been overlooked and while Charles himself, as you say, he’s had this reputation, he’s the failed King who was executed at the hands of his own subjects, but there was a story before then. All our lives take different paths if we had turned left instead of right, if we’d done this instead of that how different our lives might have been. Charles wasn’t destined to failure. It happened in the end and it was a tragic story for him and for his kingdoms.

Heather:

Can you talk a little bit about the continuation of the Tudor story. It does seem like they’re the themes around the questions of where the power is with Parliament or the King it reaches, obviously, it’s culmination with Charles. Can you talk a little bit about that struggle and how it started during the Tudor period and then kind of what Charles inherited then?

Leanda:

Gosh, well there are two aspects to this, one of which is religious, the Reformation, and the other which is political, the relationship with Parliament. And, of course, they are linked. So each of the Tudors changed the religion of their country, each of the later Tudors that is. From Henry VIII who created a kind of particular Henrican Catholicism. Then you had Edward VI. who introduced a kind of Calvinist Protestantism. Then you had Mary Tudor Catholicism and so forth. Each of them brought in their own. When Charles came along he also wanted to define the Church of England in a particular way, a way actually that would have suited Elizabeth I very well. Although we think of Elizabeth as a very strong queen, she was also in a very weak position. She was a woman and she was childless and so she wasn’t able to impose her particular vision for the Church of England on the kingdom in the way that Charles felt he could. He liked what we would think of as a kind of high church form of Protestantism rather than a more stripped-down form. That angered many of those who preferred the more stripped-down version. So that’s religion and then you’ve got politics. 

When Elizabeth became Queen, because she was a woman, there was a very strong feeling particularly amongst Protestants that a woman couldn’t rule, that a woman had no right to rule over men, that they were biblical injunctions against it. So they argued that in fact it wasn’t really Elizabeth who was ruling, it was her with Parliament, that sovereignty lay with the monarch in Parliament. Stuart’s argued against that and said “No, sovereignty lay with the monarch.” One of the reasons they did that is that taking sovereignty away from the monarch had encouraged people to believe that they could be justified to assassinate any monarch or any ruler they didn’t approve of, whose religion they didn’t approve of in particular. So you had Protestants assassinating, or were trying to assassinate, Catholic Monarchs and you had Catholics trying to assassinate Protestant monarchs and Stuarts argued that actually Kings had a divine right to rule given by God and that no one had the right to just go around murdering them essentially.

Heather:

Then he had a hard time getting money from Parliament and funding everything, right?

Leanda:

Yes, he did, because from the beginning he had some difficult opponents and they are also very much linked to the Tudor period. So those of you who love the Tudor period will remember the Earl of Essex who was one of Elizabeth’s great favorites, but who died a traitor executed on the scaffolds when he revolted against her. Anyway, his nephews and nieces play a leading role in my book ‘White King’. Two brothers in particular, Robert Rich Earl of Warwick, who was one of the first who was a great sort of privateer against the Spanish and also very interested in the early colonists of that would later become came the United States. Places like Warwick, Rhode Island are named after him. He was involved in the Peirce payments with the Mayflower. He was involved in Virginia and Massachusetts and all these things. He was essentially a Puritan, or a supporter of Puritans and also a low Church form of Protestantism that Charles was trying to change, so he was a very strong opponent of Charles. If Charles didn’t do as he wanted or he felt Charles had policies that Warwick didn’t approve of then Warwick would encourage his supporters in Parliament not to give Charles the taxes he needed to, for example, pay for his armies who were fighting in Europe at one point. He had a younger brother, Henry Earl of Holland, who was actually the Kings closest body servant, but then betrayed him at the outbreak of civil war. Then they have a cousin, they were all nieces and nephews of Essex, the famous out of Essex called Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle. She was a great character as well and who was a great friend of the Queen’s but also then turns enemy.

Heather:

I’ve realized I’ve gotten a  little bit of myself and I was wondering if you could give me kind of a brief overview of Charles’s life and kind of how he was raised to be king? And also a little bit about his wife… just his life leading up to the mess that he got into. Then we can talk a little bit about how things turned so badly for him.

Leanda: 

Right yes okay. So he was born in Scotland when his father was still just King of Scots he was just a baby when Elizabeth I died and his father inherited the throne of England and became the first King of Scotland and of England. He was a very weak sickly baby and he’s got left in Scotland for a year and didn’t come down to England until 1604, a year after Elizabeth had died. He had sort of lingual deformity so he probably couldn’t eat or drink milk properly and he had weak legs and people often look back on this and they sort of use it as a kind of symbol of the weakness of character, and it’s funny how we still have these strange patterns of thinking where disability or deformity are seen as weaknesses of character. So if anybody saw the last Wonder Woman film for example, you’d have noticed that Wonder Woman the heroine is a beautiful perfect physical specimen, and her enemy doctor poison also a woman is disfigured. I mean it’s extraordinary we still think like that but we do. 

But anyway, so this is sort of used as a stick to beat Charles with, but in fact Charles was very determined to get over his disabilities. And I think what is more interesting than the fact that he had them when he was a boy is that he worked very hard to overcome them, and by the time he was a teenager he was an extremely strong runner and was becoming a very good horseman and was extremely fit. He taught himself to speak eloquently, with singing lessons, and pausing before he spoke so he wasn’t garrulous. He was quite concise and witty he was a funny man when he spoke, but he didn’t go in for long speeches because because he had childhood stutter. 

He had an older brother who died. In fact Charles was at his deathbed very pathetically and watched his brother die when Charles was, I think, just 12. And they were essentially, the doctors were treating this boy’s tuberculosis by tying a dead pigeon to his head which obviously wasn’t very effective, so he died. So Charles is still quite young, and we have to remember that Henry VIII was also a younger son,, so people make a lot Charles being a young son. Henry VIII was a young son it wasn’t a big deal. Elder brothers died, that’s what happened in those days and James then raised Charles to rule as a ruler and he inherited the throne when he was almost 25. He was very energetic, he wanted to take Britain into the 30 Years War in Europe to fight in the Protestant cause, and in the cause of his sister, who was caught up in the wars in Europe, the so called Winter Queen of Bohemia. 

To this end he married a French princess because he wanted to use French armies to help Britain. Henriette Maria who was only 15 at the time a young girl, and their marriage is a bit like, I don’t know if you remember the old Mills and Boon novels that I remember as a teenager, there a kind of romance novels and in these kind of cheap romance novels the love affairs always start with a couple hating each other. There’s always quarrels, and they don’t even like each other.  And then one day they fall in love for whatever reason and that’s always how these romantic novels always used to work, these Mills and Boon romance novels. 

Charles and Henrietta Maria’s marriage was very like this Mills and Boon novel in that it starts with them quarreling just not really liking each other or getting on but then you have to remember they’re very young I mean this is a teenage girl Henrietta Maria, 15 years old, taken away from France surrounded by people who don’t much like her because she’s French and a Catholic, yeah, which is important of course. But Charles and Henrietta do fall very much in love, and have many children together it proves to be a very strong marriage. 

Charles has strengths as a king but also weaknesses and his weaknesses are that he lacks ruthlessness. He dislikes violence. At one point Charles says that only cowards are cruel, but he is in a cruel and violent age, so he lacks ruthlessness and dealing with his enemies. Whereas they are quite ruthless, more ruthless than he is, and also he’s a poor politician. He’s almost slightly autistic. I mean he doesn’t read people terribly well. He doesn’t have an instinct for  people. It takes him a while to learn to trust people. When he does his trust is complete and he tends to lump all his enemies together rather than saying oh well  they don’t have things in common, I can play them off against each other, or I can persuade them round. He doesn’t have that political sense really, which is definitely a weakness and it ends with him having terrible quarrels with his Parliament his leading Minister the Earl of Buckingham is murdered and then  he rules without Parliament for 11 years.

 This ends when he – and it’s all going reasonably well for him that stage – but it ends when he tries to impose his version of Protestantism, his,  more like a more ritualistic form of Protestantism on Calvinist Presbyterian Scotland. You don’t put out the Scots – it’s a small country, but you know it’s a small Kingdom, but they’re tough as nails the Scots, as we all know, and they didn’t take kindly to this and rebelled. And that was really the beginning of Charles’s downfall. 

Heather:

And can you tell me a little bit about his about his wife, because she was quite the strong character as well?  And after he was in prison she went and tried to fight for him and everything… can you tell me a little bit about her? 

Leanda:

Yes in fact she’s going to be the subject of my next book because and she plays quite strong role in this one, because she is a very remarkable character. Her father was the great warrior king of France who was murdered –  assassinated –  by a religious fanatic when she was just a baby. And so her first experience actually of rule, a ruler, was her mother, was a woman, her mother who ruled as regent for her brother. As I said she arrived in England when she was only 15, still very young and very so much so typical teenager. Strong tempered, very distressed you know when her husband decides to send all her friends back to France, as she was left all alone. And England, you know, and she would sort of cry and weep and be very annoyed. A strong character, a colorful character, but then she she matures and she’s a highly intelligent one as well. She’s had a bad press because because basically how history has been written largely by her enemies, by contemporary propaganda, one of which is that she led Charles astray.  

I think it’s very… this is a story that goes back to Adam and Eve that we the women, we are terrible seducers poor poor man.  We wander around looking a bit pretty and then they do terrible things that are best, but behind the pretty mask is  the double, you know like the witch and Snow White or something. 

Heather:

Like Shakespeare with Margaret of Anjou…

Leanda:

Absolutely exactly. Margaret of Anjou was treated very much the same way. I’m also a huge fan of Margaret of Anjou, yes absolutely, and whereas in fact she was extremely supportive of her husband, he wasn’t involved so much in English politics up to a point. Involved in English politics mainly she saw herself as a protector of the Catholic minority which was persecuted. She was after all a Catholic herself but as a civil war drew closer then she stepped up to the plate really because Charles needed her support at this stage, and she had to help him so she she left for Europe to raise money for him, to raise an army for him. She brought back an army from Europe. 

She actually was with this army under shellfire – there’s an amazing description of her with with men being blown to pieces yards from her you know, and  she was with this army when it won battles, she was an extraordinary woman and then when she had to leave England and had a baby while she’s out there saying Charles, really she had to abandon this baby to go back to France where she continued to work for her husband’s and cause right up until the restoration of her son. So she was an amazing woman well worth reading about. 

Heather:

They were very much devoted to their family and their children, and it seems like so much of your book talks about the way the the children were, again because they were separated then, and some of them were kept prisoners, I suppose. And can you talk a little bit about kind of how how they functioned as a family, and and there’s that moving scene with, before Charles is executed, when he’s saying goodbye to his children, and can you talk just a little bit about him as a father? 

Leanda:

He was obviously an absolutely devoted father. It’s very touching so before the Civil War you know he, and there are descriptions of of Charles and Henrietta Maria taking their children to the park, and playing with them. He measured them, you’d measure their growth on a sort of staff. He kept pictures of them paintings of them by Van Dyck all around him in his personal quarters. He was also devoted to his children, then as you say during the Civil War they were… he was with his two elder sons at the beginning, they were still tiny James was nine I think Charles was 12, the future charles II this was. And they were accompanied to him in battle, I mean they were Edgehill with him, the only battle. So again you know it’s shot going over their heads, and so the two younger boys were actually with the King the others often, and particularly the youngest ones imprisoned by Parliament. Then when Charles himself became a prisoner he was able to see his younger children, his youngest children again, and Parliament let him see them, and there are clearly moving descriptions of him playing with them, with them sitting on his lap. His daughter, his little daughter Elizabeth who later died when she was still young in Parliament’s care, and as you’d say then there’s a horrendous description of his last meeting with the younger ones which I don’t think I can even speak out loud now, I’ll start blobbing.  

Yes so it’s so awful, and so moving him talking to these children the day before he’s executed, and he’s got these sort of pathetic sort of last gifts for them, and he’s and he’s tells his youngest son Henry that they’re going to chop off his head, and that and that he mustn’t – they will try and make him a king and that he must be loyal to his elder brother, who’se right it is – who had escaped by this stage in Europe, and and whose right proceeds, you know Henry’s right. Little boy’s about five years old, he sort of says that he’d die first, well the Parliament says anyways. 

Heather:

Yeah very very moving, and that kind of then takes me to his his trial, or the that he was found guilty what he he didn’t put up any kind of defense did he? He just said that he didn’t recognize the the court, and how how on earth did Parliament… how did they justify trying a king? 

Leanda:

Well it’s interesting, they had tried one monarch before, very different circumstances and that was Mary Queen of Scots. Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded for treason against Elizabeth I. Now the fact was that she was Queen of Scots, she wasn’t an English subject. and therefore they had no right to chop off her head for treason because she couldn’t commit treason against another Queen. But so they had twisted, history and facts, and the law ready to argue that, Oh Scotland was a subservient nation, and so that in some way with Charles it was a bigger problem he was England’s ruling monarch. 

Treason wasn’t act against the king, not by the king in English law, so again they changed they changed they just sort of changed the law. They just said that actually no treason was something you commit against the people, and against Parliament, and that sovereignty lay with the people. And so they just basically changed the law and also did abolish the House of Lords which was the highest court in the land, and the Commons have made themselves essentially a court to make it retroactive, so that it was I think what they hoped, was they hoped. Because actually the New Model Army was really in charge. 

It wasn’t really a proper Parliament in any normal sense, it was really some managed by some military dictatorship essentially, but they still hoped what would happen would be that Charles would recognize the court, that he would probably be found guilty of treason against the people, whatever, and but then Parliament would be able to pardon him. He would have, by having recognized the court he would recognize the superiority the sovereignty of of Parliament and of the Commons in particular and then they could put him on the throne essentially as a puppet King as a constitutional monarch – you might say that’s where they hoped, but Charles would not recognize the court, and because he wouldn’t recognize the courts they were left with no option really but to chop off his head. That’s why Charles argued that he had died, he was dying as a martyr for the law and for the people as well as for his religious beliefs, because he said that Parliament, the court were breaking the law and that he was standing for the law. That’s why he came to be a martyr for the people.

Heather:

It was kind of a game of chicken that got out of hand for them… 

Leanda:

I think that’s exactly right. It was it was definitely I think, and I think Charles misjudged as he often did misjudge things, he misjudged their ruthlessness, and yes, and and their game of chicken didn’t work, no.

Heather

I also want to ask you, there were some other very strong women involved in this period like you talked about Lucy Carlisle, and can you share a little bit about who she was and some of these other people who were kind of on the on the periphery around him when he was in prison, and playing playing their roles? 

Leanda:

oh yes well okay well Lucy Carlisle is a great character. She is also descendant of Mary Boleyn, a direct descendants of Mary Boleyn, and she is sort of, when I call her the last Boleyn girl she is quite amazing. She’s a very sexy woman, very attracted to power, and to be attracted to power means you have to be near powerful men of course in those days. So when Henrietta Maria first comes in England she’s told that Lucy Carlisle is hoping to be Charles’s mistress. Anyway Charles isn’t interested in having a mistress, so that doesn’t work out, but she is the mistress of his most powerful minister, the Duke of Buckingham, but she becomes very close to the Queen. 

At first they start off with sort of not liking each other but they become very close. She’s good company, Lucy Carlisle. She was great fun at dinner parties, she’s not – Henrietta Mariah doesn’t like people who are a bit snobby and dull and snooty, she likes to relax and have fun and gossip and do things like that. Lucy is great at that and both of them are interested in political players, and Lucy is very much that she’s Protestant who although she lives at what’s a naughty lifestyle and then Duke of Buckingham is a married man, she’s having an affair with, but she is also a Protestant to her sympathies with the Puritan calls and his anti Spanish, and in fact she has … that’s what she has in common with Henrietta Maria at the beginning is they’re both anti-Spanish because she’s French. Later on she becomes close to Charles’s other powerful minister called Thomas Wentworth of Stratford, and she’s very close to him. 

And she then becomes close to the King’s enemy, John Pym. He was a an MP in Parliament she begins having been the Queen’s closest friend, she starts shifting, and it’s actually comes very close to Parliament and just before the Civil War she basically becomes a spy for Charles and Henrietta Maria’s enemies, and they only realize this on the point when they have to flee London just before the Civil War. And during the Civil War when Henrietta Maria’s writing letters in code, she uses as her own code name the name Lucy Carlisle really as a sort of mark of contempt for her former friend during the Civil War. 

The the revolution moves leftward and eventually Lucy Carlyle feels she doesn’t want to be part of this revolution anymore and she becomes a royalist again and during what’s called the Second Civil War she is a spy for the king, and so when the king is executed she is in fact in the Tower of London like her great-great great-great aunt Anne Boleyn before her, but unlike Anne she isn’t beheaded. I won’t say what her fate is but it is really quite as a classic moment her ultimate fate so I’ll leave readers to discover. 

Heather:

I have two more main questions actually,  maybe there’s three here –  they kind of go together of his name, why he was called the White King, and also the idea of kind of propaganda… the propaganda around them. I wanted to see if you could talk a little bit about these myths around him, in the propaganda against him was the one kind of area that I wanted to touch on, and then the other one, you talked about these players who were also involved in the Americas and this is interesting because we actually see some role that the the New World in the politics of England at this point with some of the colonies being involved in supporting the different players. I wondered if he could talk a little bit about that too. So those are the two main other areas I wanted to ask you about.

Leanda:

Okay yes so the White King so Charles was crowned, he was wearing a white satin suit with a purple mantle but a myth grew up that he’d been entirely dressed in white and that he was the first King of England ever to being crowned in white, but some wise a question why would a and why would this become invented and again I think was a part of the propaganda. so during the Civil War Charles, his enemies said he was the White King of of prophecy that there were prophecies of a white king who would be a tyrant who would be destroyed by his own people, and that’s what they said he was, the white king of the prophecies of Merlin. But then his supporters said no, that’s not true, he’s the white king because these white robes represent his innocence his purity his goodness, and the fact that he was prepared to die as a martyr for his people, and then when he is, after he’s executed he’s buried at Windsor Castle in the chapel, and there’s supposed to be a snowstorm as he’s carried at the Hall of Windsor Castle to the to Sun George’s Chapel, and the white snow covers the black velvet pall turning it white, and a witness who’s there says, and so you know the white king went to his grave. 

In fact I suspect that story was invented by this man who was a parliamentarian who wrote it during the reign of Charles II and was keen to suck up to Charles II and was a professional liar, so whether there was actually snow we don’t know. That’s all apart again of as you say the propaganda that surrounds Charles. There’s the myth that he was controlled by his wife, there’s the myth that he was a sort of physically puny specimen, he’s always made to appear rather effeminate, but actually he produced a brood of children that Henry VIII who actually suffered from impotence could only have envied. As I said he was a physically strong healthy man who  loved women, and had mistresses before he married. He didn’t –  he actually did have a mistress after he married as well – he’d been separate when he’d been separated forcibly from Henrietta – number of years he had a liaison we know about with a red-haired royalist spy who he tried to meet actually in his closets. In his basically his bathroom lavatory he was shut up in Carisbrooke Castle and he writes letters about how he wants to  have sex with her, I mean quite  direct language, let’s put it like that. So yes so again that’s another sort of myth about Charles I think, that he’s sort of a weakling effeminate, that also that he didn’t have support, that he was unpopular. Yes he was unpopular some, but he was hugely popular with others. And also I think  he learned from his mistakes so he became he became a rather good leader in battle for example during the Civil War, and he was loved in a way when he died he was loved in a way that his son the Merry Monarch Charles II never would be, so I think that’s worth remembering about Charles. So what was your next question? 

Heather:

The role of the young, the new world in… 

Leanda:

This is is the first time you start to see that there’s this kind of link now, and the colonies take an interest in very much, so a lot of the opposition to Charles early in his reign are linked to the American colonies, the purest of the pure not surprisingly. As I said you have people like Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick who is  leading opponents to King in Parliament who’s a great investor in in the American colonies. When during the eleven years when Charles was ruling without parliament many of Charles’s opponents including Oliver Cromwell were thinking of emigrating to to the to the colonies, but then the wars with Scotland began and it’s just at the moment they’re all about to get on the boat basically and that changed, and instead what happened which I find quite fascinating it’s a number of people who had previously gone to the colonies came back, so you had, for example, one of the governors of Harvard College came back and became a leading figure. He became a leading chaplain of the New Model Army and I was there with Charles, his trial, and who gave sermons just before Charles’s execution, was a very important figure. And there were many others who were leading captains fighting in the war, and so forth. I mean and there were obviously Royalists to join. I unfortunately know less about those, I want to do research on those because of course Maryland is named after Henrietta Mariah, was known as Queen Mary. So I’m interested in studying more about Maryland actually in the future. Anyone wants to send me stuff about Maryland… 

Heather:

well you have answered all of my questions and I want to now also give you an opportunity to talk about where people can get your books and learn more about your work, and I’m sure everybody who’s watching this is at least seen your books, but if you can just share a little bit about the books that you’ve written and what you’re working on now and where people can catch more of you… 

Leanda:

Well I have a website rather simple website LeandadeLisle.com, and you can see all my books there and indeed as a podcast as well, Ten Minute Tudors if you’re interested in that. What else do I have on that website… Oh and I’ve got some link to a couple of lectures I think as well on YouTube there’s one on Lady Jane Grey you might like, which um I did when I was involved the BBC series about her, so yes the books, they’re there as I said there’s one there’s one on on the on Elizabeth’s rivals Lady Jane Grey and her sisters many people don’t know about Lady Jane Grey sisters and that seems to be a popular book with readers. That would be inspiration for Philippa Gregory, and the book on the whole dynasty beginning right back not at the back before the Battle of Bosworth right in the middle of the 15th century, so long before Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn called the Tudor Family Story, which focuses on all the all the family members really. I hope your readers might enjoy that there’s there’s one on the death of Elizabeth the accession of King James, and then there’s this latest one White King the tragedy of Charles I which is about Charles, and you can read some bits about them on on my website and you can buy them I think has links with Amazon of course obviously, but there are also lots of independent bookshops waterstones and many others and if they haven’t got one in stock I’m sure they can order it all these books are in print so yes… 

Heather:

I think that’s that’s perfect, and I’ll put links all around on the webpage where this is showing as well so people can look there’s probably gonna be links down here somewhere below the videos so everybody can look there perfect thank you so much for for being so generous with your time and for sharing so much with us about Charles I.