Thanks!
Christie Dickason's The King's Daughter was the whinefest--the heroine, Elizabeth of Bohemia, spends most of the first third of the novel complaining about how she's a political pawn, how she can't trust anyone at court, etc., etc. I made allowances for a while because the heroine's at a whiny age, but enough was enough--particularly when other narrators, who didn't have the excuse of youth, began to have their turn at whining as well.
The other book was Pamela Hill's Lady Kate, about Catherine Gordon, wife of Perkin Warbeck. This is a sample of the dialogue from the first few pages:
At this point poor Mr. Kindle began to fry, and I had to turn him off."He was a widower as you know, and needed a son. Queen Joan was long in having one after all the daughters, and James II was only six years old when he became king after his father's murder, when the queen fled with him to Edinburgh after avenging her husband's death. James II they called Fiery Face because of his great birthmark. The other prince--there were twins, when it happened to be boys at all--had died at once. No doubt Admiral Bothwell remembers that, also that his great-grandfather Hepburn of Hailes took Queen Joan prisoner at last in her own castle at Dunbar, and within a few days they carried out her coffin."
