This is why publishers are doing these authors a terrible disservice by packaging their books as something they're really not. I know bookstores want everything to fit into a comprehensive slot, and "historical romance" may be the closest slot, sometimes, to fit these authors into. But the cover art, at least, should clearly indicate the nature of the contents. I love the cover art taken from period artworks - to me, these suggest that the emphasis in a book is on the historical even when there is a strong love story.commenters on the romance board at Amazon who complain about authors like these because they're bored to death with the "endless pages" of historical details and facts.
The word "romantic" used to indicate a certain style of novel that had nothing to do with whether it included a love story. A lot of "romantic" war stories have been written in that sense, novels which glorify the heroic aspect of warfare and downplay the dirt and brutality of it. To me, that type of war novel has a great deal in common with the type of "historical romance" in which the women are all paragons of beauty and the men muscular brutes with more patience than anyone, male or female, has on this earth. They present the world as we wish it were rather than as it is.