Arbella: England's lost queen by Sarah Gristwood <br></br>The Cradle King: a life of James VI & I by Alan Stewart

Stephen Coote is moved and enthralled by a real-life Jacobean tragedy, but bored by a tale of Stuart sleaze

Just in case you were unaware of the fact, 2003 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Elizabeth I and the accession of the House of Stuart. The heroine of Sarah Gristwood's biography was deeply affected by both. It was her bloodline that ensured Arbella's painful and ultimately tragic proximity to these events for, as the niece of Mary, Queen of Scots, many feared that she had a legitimate claim to the throne. The mighty few were determined that she should not exercise it. As a consequence of this, the story Gristwood has to tell is one of almost unrelieved horror occasionally interspersed with moments of happiness that were only to contribute to Arbella's deepening woes.

The ageing Elizabeth saw the young Arbella as both a danger and a pawn. It is characteristic of this fresh, vivid and beautifully detailed biography that Gristwood's portrayal of their first meeting should be so effective, taking place as it did five months after the Scots queen's execution and while her "unburied body still lay stinking at Fortheringay". The glamour and danger of the Elizabethan court merge with its politicking as Gristwood shows how Elizabeth was perfectly prepared to display Arbella on the marriage market when it suited her and to keep her shut away with her formidable grandmother in distant Hardwick Hall when it did not. There, as for much of her life, Arbella was virtually a prisoner. Driven to the edges of sanity, Arbella proposed to make a life for herself by marrying the teenage Edward Seymour whom she had never met but knew to be descended from Henry VIII's younger sister through his grandmother, Lady Catherine Grey. The folly led to nothing, but Gristwood's picture of Arbella being examined by the authorities is as chilling as her use of Arbella's half-crazed and desperate letters is moving. Here in Derbyshire was a real-life Duchess of Malfi, and it only adds to the horror that the author skilfully encircles her heroine with various possible reasons for her extreme behaviour – mental illness, physical illness, ambition, frustration, naivety – rather than opting crudely for one explanation.

Arbella could only hope that life would be better for her after the accession of James I was an established fact. Gristwood describes James as "a middle-aged man with a sparse beard cut square and shrewd, slightly mismatched eyes, his manner an odd mixture of the pontifical and the pawky, reflecting a personality in which arrogance jostled with insecurity". Such deft characterisation is rarely found in Alan Stewart's The Cradle King. This is essentially a political biography of a man who, raised amid violence and appalling emotional deprivation, came into his inheritance in mid-life and generated controversies that have raged ever since. Stewart's approach to all these matters is scrupulous but bland. Every issue is dutifully touched on and assessed without ever really seizing the reader's imagination.

In particular, the politics is discussed as if it only or principally concerned those who orchestrated it. Stewart says, for example, of what his contemporaries saw as James's outrageous dealings with Catholic Spain that the king was increasingly isolated from public opinion which had been stirred up by preachers. This is true as far as it goes, but if the author has dredged through the sermon literature he has apparently forgotten to go to the theatre. It was said that 12,000 people attended the nine-day run of Middleton's luridly anti-Spanish A Game at Chess which was performed by no less a company than the King's Men while the king himself was out of town. The forty-somethings in the audience would have recalled the Armada and almost all shuddered at the "black legend" of the Inquisition's cruelties. No wonder that, in the words of the Spanish ambassador: "All of these people came out of the theatre so inflamed against Spain that ... my person would not be safe in the streets".

Stewart is somewhat dismissive of James's part in the cultural brilliance of the age: the fact that he spent £7,000 a year on world-class musicians, commissioned the Banqueting Hall from Inigo Jones and the translation of the Bible that carries his name. All of this was done while scandal rocked the court. James's notorious homosexual favourites milked the patronage machine for their own profit, but Stewart does not really do justice to the inadequacies of the fiscal and administrative weaknesses they inherited nor to the abilities of a man like Buckingham, complicit as he was in a world of sleaze. This was a world where there was murder and massive embezzlement in high places, a world where Lady Roos invented stories of her husband's impotence while sleeping with her own brother, and where the Countess of Exeter was found guilty of "adultery, incest, murder, poison and suchlike peccadilloes". It was in this world too that the second half of Arbella's life took place.

Her Elizabethan torment now became a Jacobean tragedy. Painfully short of money and deprived of both the comfort and the status a husband would have brought her, Arbella recklessly engineered a marriage with William Seymour, the brother of her previous would-be husband. The result was inevitable catastrophe. The quasi-royal couple were briefly happy, swiftly arrested and then wrenched apart for ever. Arbella's life now became that of an increasingly unhappy woman desperate to hold on to her hopes of a future and even an identity in a world where she could have no easy place.

Much of the narrative here is high melodrama, and Gristwood conveys it with exactly the right mixture of suspense and sympathy. All her details tell. Just as in the first half of her book she could turn the golden palace that is Hardwick Hall into a whispering gallery and a torture chamber, so a very precise knowledge of the Tower of London makes William Seymour's escape from there credible and Arbella's subsequent languishing inside its walls painful in the extreme. Arbella was once again at the limits of her sanity, if not her ingenuity.

Eventually Arbella persuaded the daughter of the Tower's governor to lend her a key, took a wax impression, had a duplicate key made, and sent it to the king in the hope that James would see that while she had the means to escape she chose instead to submit herself to royal mercy. This was not forthcoming and Arbella's despair turned to thoughts of death. "I dare to die," she had once written. Now slowly, painfully she wasted away from self-starvation, the victim of the anniversary we celebrate this year.