KING CHARLES I

An intense scrutiny of both man and ruler, this biography is careful and thoughtful in its analysis of King Charles and the times in which he lived. Together with the family background, the problems of royalty and the court life under his father King James, there are the questions of Parliament, finance, international relations, and the overall tension of religious loyalty, all worked into the story of a man of unusual virtues (unusual that is for his day), of keen appreciation of the arts, of strange breaches of faith, of unhappy deliberations to the end that, beheaded, his last acts were of heroic mold. Serious and well researched, this offers a new light on an historical enigma, with enough personality to cover the scholarship with a patina of human value.