Charles I emerges from its pages as "courageous, resilient and increasingly hard-nosed", personally heroic but still ultimately a political failure. White King is an impeccably researched and thought-provoking biography which reads as well as a fine novel. When she was forced to leave her husband to support the royalist cause in exile, De Lisle quotes a moving eyewitness account describing the queen as "the most woeful spectacle my eyes ever yet beheld". She was demonised by anti-monarchists in the 1600s as a meddling, extravagant, foreign shrew but De Lisle uses letters, which she uncovered in the archives of the current Duke and Duchess of Rutland, to show Charles's queen as an elegant and heroically loyal woman. Charles's own sexuality was avowedly heterosexual and it is his wife, French princess Henrietta Maria, who emerges from White King as one of its true heroes.
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