Reviled as a tyrant and canonized as a martyr, Charles I remains one of the most controversial of English monarchs, and he polarizes historians to this day. Drawing on previously unseen royal correspondence, Leanda de Lisle’s carefully researched history charts the tragic career of a flawed king, sets the Civil War in the context of the wider European conflict of the Thirty Years' War, and highlights the crucial and often underestimated role of Charles’s wife Henrietta Maria. Felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.