I don’t really do book reviews anymore, I leave them to Tudor Society book reviewer Charlie Fenton, but when one of your favourite historians asks you if you’d like a review copy of their next book then you just don’t say no, do you?! Saying no would be rather silly.

Let me start by saying that I haven’t studied Charles I and the English Civil War since History A’ Level and that’s quite a long time ago now [cough, cough, splutter, splutter]. I hadn’t read a book on his reign since then, so my ideas about Charles I were rather dated, to say the least. I knew that the traditional view of Charles as weak and stupid was probably an unfair one so I was looking forward to reading Leanda de Lisle’s take on this man, particularly as her book on the Grey sisters, “The Sisters Who Would Be Queen”, is one of my all-time favourite history books. If anyone was going to challenge the myths, peel back the layers of propaganda and bad history, and reveal the real man then I was sure it was going to be Leanda.