[In the following review, Yoder comments on Fraser's portrayal of her subject in King James: VI of Scotland, I of England.]

Having bracketed the fascinating figure of James I in previous biographies of his mother, the Queen of Scots, and of Cromwell, the nemesis and executioner of his son, Antonia Fraser seemed destined to write about him. And this she has done [in King James: VI of Scotland, I of England]—but strangely. She finds James an abler king than is commonly portrayed—Trevelyan, who is typical, calls him "comic." But she has written a cameo, a sketch, which in its elegant way features the unusual and has the perverse effect of rendering James a stranger figure than he was. And he was quite strange.

James, while in some ways sympathetic, lacked qualities usually deemed essential to a prince. He was a coward, a physical wreck, and a man of unorthodox sexual predilections. At the age of 13 he fell madly in love with a male French cousin, Esmé Stuart, sent to his court as emissary of the Guise family. Years later, by now Queen Elizabeth's successor on the English throne, his unseemly mooning over the royal favorite, Buckingham, stirred the ridicule of the court. But he could always explain—he had a penchant for explanations: "Jesus Christ," he told the Privy Council one day in 1617, "did the same and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had his John and I have my George." Lady Antonia believes, in fact, that James's aberrations stemmed, like those of his descendant George III, from porphyria. But contemporary glimpses were not so sympathetic. According to one, written by Anthony Weldon, his tongue was too big for his mouth; his skin "as soft as taffeta sarsnet"; he never washed his hands, and he walked only with the support of others, "his fingers ever in that walk fiddling about his codpiece."

James's eldest son, the doomed Prince Henry, found him professorial. And indeed, crammed with learning from childhood, he took an eager (but often self-defeating) scholarly interest in almost everything, from the nature of kingship to tobacco and witchcraft (which he resoundingly denounced in royal pamphlets). For a king, he had a strange sense of humor. Told that the English people would like to see more of him, he blurted: "God's wounds, I will pull down my breeches and they shall also see my arse."

The circumstances of his birth (hard) and youth (harrowing) make him seem, all told, a specimen barely snatched from oblivion. Scotland was a nest of feudal intrigue when he was born there in June 1566. By the time of his baptism, his father, the doomed intriguer Lord Darnley, had vanished. And since his mother insisted on the Catholic rite, Queen-Elizabeth, though she was the royal godmother, bade her representative "lurk … outside the chapel … like a bad fairy to signify the firm protestantism of her mistress."

Scotland's extreme instability was perhaps the result of generations of child-kings and child-queens. There had been no adult successor to the Scottish throne since the fourteenth century. Mary had become queen when six days old; James himself was only 14 months of age when turbulent courtiers forced Mary's abdication in his favor. And with the high assassination rate, the kingdom ran through regents like tissue. James "grew to manhood wearing a padded doublet against the steel of assassination" and "his neurotic fears concerning his safety were the talking point of his generation." The start was not auspicious.

Yet if English monarchs were measured by the state of literature in their reigns—and under the eye of eternity perhaps there is no better measure—this curious cripple would surpass all others. Every schoolboy knows that "the most high and mighty Prince James" after succeeding Elizabeth in 1603 presided over the richest burst of genius in our literature—not only the translation of the great King James Bible, which he encouraged, but the great tragedies and later comedies of Shakespeare (Macbeth, Lady Antonia suggests, was a nod at James's fascination with witches, while The Tempest was partly a pièce d'occasion for the marriage of his daughter, Elizabeth). And there was the sublime prose and poetry of Dr. John Donne, James's favorite preacher, whom he made royal chaplain and then dean of St. Paul's.

Lady Antonia also tries to make the case, however, that James I was a reasonably good administrator. If so, Scotland, where order was a thin crust indeed and where contention over church governance was murderous, was no school for monarchs. It was Robert Cecil who decided that James would be king of England, although his claim was not "incontrovertible." Had the crown not fallen to him, was it in his character to fight or intrigue for it? One doubts it. Yet his theoretical views on monarchy were extreme. His advocacy of divine right was of a piece with his dogmatism on religion (at once Calvinist and Arminian, an odd combination). A king was God's anointed; and if he were a bad king? "Even a bad king, he argued, had his inalienable rights over the people, on the grounds that he had been sent by God to punish the people …"

Given that James, like all the Stuarts, was a free spender this was not congenial doctrine to lay before an English Parliament increasingly Puritan, self-assertive, and affected by Coke's queer notion that kings—even kings—were under common law. These political tensions, as we know, were to reach a snapping point only after James's death. But James, pedantic and doctrinaire, brought to England the fatal virus of princely prerogative that was to be his second son's undoing. Its psychological sources, in the misty realm of feudal Scotland, seem obvious: where government is strong and settled there is far less theorizing from first principles about right than where it is shaky. And in Scotland it was very shaky.

Conceivably, a larger and more leisurely portrait of James VI and I would also be a soberer one. Lady Antonia, his new-found friend, focuses not only on the warts but on all the tics, infirmities, complaints, and neuroses—her narrative constantly threatening to ignore all else for what is bizarre, arresting, diverting, and faintly scandalous. Had such a profile appeared in the press of James's day—had such a press, indeed, existed—it would qualify as yellow journalism. Since it is obvious that James I stirs the author's sympathy, she must plan to redeem him with a longer, more considered biography. Otherwise, it would be a mercy to leave James to his familiar enemies, the old Whig historians.