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Whitaker Katie. A Royal Passion: The Turbulent Marriage of King Charles I of England and Henrietta Maria of France. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. Pp. 374. $26.95 (cloth).
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...