The match that sparked the Civil War

There are turbulent marriages. And then there are turbulent marriages in which the husband ends up getting beheaded on a stage. This book describes the latter. One doesn’t normally need to encourage publishers to hyperbole, but in the case of Katie Whitaker’s subtitle, there might have been a case for giving it a bit more welly.

The story begins with a prissy 15-year-old French princess being taken to England, to a husband whom she’d never seen. It ends with that husband losing his crown and his head to Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarian taleban. The sad coda is the princess living out her days back in France, estranged from most of her children: older, wiser, but not much happier.

The princess was Henrietta Maria, the youngest daughter of Henry IV of France and Marie de’Medici. She was rather pretty in her youth, although at 4’10” blessed more with sweetness than stature. She married Charles I by proxy in the doorway of Nôtre Dame in May 1625.