The unhurried fashion in which James VI of Scotland ambled south toward London to claim his crown in 1603, stopping off to hunt along the way and arriving six weeks after Elizabeth I died, suggests there was nothing terribly dramatic about the event. The man who would be James I of England, the first Stuart monarch, was in no big rush.
TUDOR: The Family Story, by Leanda de Lisle. Chatto & Windus, 2013, 560 pp., £20 (hardcover)
CROWN OF THISTLES: The Fatal Inheritance of Mary Queen of Scots, by Linda Porter. Macmillan, 2013, 424 pp., £20 (hardcover)
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