Elizabeth and Mary: cousins, rivals, queens by Jane Dunn <br></br>Elizabeth I by David Loades<br></br>Mary, Queen of Scots and the murder of Lord Darnley by Alison Weir

Gadzooks! Readers keen on Elizabeth and her dynasty deserve better than this antique kings-and-queens melodrama. Loraine Fletcher calls time on the platitudes of theme-park history

HarperCollins £20, 535pp £18 (plus £1.99 p&p per order) from 0870 8001122 / Hambledon & London £25, 410pp £23 (plus £1.99 p&p per order) from 0870 8001122 / Jonathan Cape £20, 621pp £18 (plus £1.99 p&p per order) from 0870 8001122

Books with royal titles overflow their shelves in Waterstone's. But it's hard to believe anyone keen to pay £20 for a Tudor history doesn't already know a lot of what it will contain. Familiarity is the charm. We're revisiting stalled bloodlines and the female regiment at a time of anxiety about nationality, genetics, feminism and monarchy.

Little new research is visible: the reader of the already-read meets the writer of the already-written in Tudorland, a site of agreed meanings. The grimmest narratives remain pleasantly picturesque, since beheading is unlikely to return to Britain – if it does, the chunky biogs could double as blocks.

The genre has favoured Scotland recently. Murders and blood-feuds merely squalid when perpetrated by chaps called Ali and Milosevic bond romantically on to our island story with chaps called Hepburn and Douglas. Tudorland language is reassuring, its pockets of archaism linking now to then. She learnt she was to die on the morrow. It was ever thus. She was but a girl. It keeps us in touch with our heritage.

These three books are comprehensive and beautifully illustrated. David Loades's sophisticated Elizabeth I lies outside Tudorland. He's conscious of the problems of narrative history, responsive to feminist perceptions. His Elizabeth puts together a shadow cabinet before her accession, recruits and retains capable men and women, excels in negotiation. The office-politics approach is engaging, the story crisply, often wittily told. As a child Elizabeth had good as well as bad luck; Loades admits the sovereignty of chance.

Two women in one story slip easily into a good girl/bad girl polarity; this structures Jane Dunn's Elizabeth and Mary. Dunn interleaves episodes in the lives of Elizabeth and her second cousin Mary Stuart, to show that adversity in youth is good for a Queen. Indulgence is disabling.

Young Elizabeth's disinheritance and exile from court taught her empathy with the "common people". Her encounters with her guardian Thomas Seymour taught her the dangers of sex. Mary, proclaimed queen at six days old, was flattered at the dissolute French court, relied on her Guise uncles and never developed political judgement. She failed disastrously when she returned at 19 to rule Scotland.

Generically, Elizabeth and Mary is an interesting cross between a female conduct book and Plutarch's Parallel Lives. I liked the way Elizabeth gave Mary a solid gold font for her son's christening, and Mary had it melted down. But she really needed the cash: the more it changes, the more it's a different thing.

The good girl/bad girl polarity kicked in enjoyably in Philippa Lowthorpe's recent BBC2 adaptation of Philippa Gregory's novel, The Other Boleyn Girl. Anne's older sister Mary was an earlier squeeze of Henry's, in this version reluctantly: her father and uncle were pimps. But she was beautiful, fair and kind, so she ended up happily married to an old admirer. Anne was sexy, dark and selfish, and her balcony bra couldn't save her. Lowthorpe put Mary on an Early Modern cusp of women moving from control by male relatives to autonomy and marriages of choice. This was Tudorland with an idea behind it.

My vague sense of an emergent national identity under the Tudors was solidly underpinned by Jonathan Bate's Radio 2 talk on the publisher William Caxton, who circulated the first maps of England and Wales in the 1490s. People could at last begin to see the shape of England, where they were in it, and where other people were. Simple – in hindsight. This should get a TV slot.

Like Diana, Mary Stuart wanted the Queen of Hearts title, a project wrecked by her venal Scotch nobility and her tendency to self-destruct. Alison Weir's book acquits Mary of foreknowledge of her husband's murder, unsurprisingly. However lacking in Elizabeth's sense, Mary would hardly have lingered late in the Kirk o' Fields house, chatting to her husband and friends, if she knew there was half a ton of gunpowder underneath. Weir's other theories, like Darnley's placing the gunpowder himself, are not new. She follows Antonia Fraser's Mary, Queen of Scots (1969), also a hagiography but a racier read, and concludes that Mary can "with justice be regarded as one of the most wronged women in history". Presumably she means in Queen history, the only type available in Tudorland.

On this worn patch, monarchy is unproblematic, obedience imperative. Mary's little faults, like having somebody hanged for failing to admit her to his laird's castle fast enough, are explained by the manners of the time. Even Lowthorpe's more feminist drama made Henry attractive, though thoughtless. Few popular historians argue that Henry was a crazy old monster who, shamingly, got clean away with it. That would be to admit what an abject lot we are when confronted with monarchy: not a topic for this market. But another popular denizen of Tudorland, Sir Thomas More, has at last had TV exposure for his habit of burning Protestants.

Elizabeth is seldom located far from Shakespeare. Dunn believes that "order" or "degree", the class hierarchy headed by a monarch appointed by God, was a concept shared by everyone. She quotes Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida – "take but degree away... and hark, what discord follows"– as if this was Shakespeare's opinion, rather than a politician flattering a thick king.

But Elizabeth knew that her grandfather Henry VII had done some fast creative genealogy to legitimise the Tudors. Would so intelligent a woman believe her own family's propaganda? Of course, she had to pretend. The premise that everyone, especially Shakespeare, believed in a divine monarchy is part of the deep conservatism of Tudorland.

Richard II is the only lineally legitimate English king in Shakespeare's history plays, and he is created as a murderer and thief, like his nobles. When Richard II was performed as a warm-up before Essex's rebellion, Londoners were expected to applaud Bolingbroke's deposition of Richard. Elizabeth got the point, as usual: "Know ye not I am Richard?"

Shakespeare gives his kings parodic doubles, who undercut the divine-right rhetoric. Like some of his contemporaries, he could see through 16th-century constructions of monarchy and femininity. The providers and consumers of Tudorland haven't seen through them yet. Against the odds, there is a largish general readership with an admirable capacity for absorbing scholarly detail. It is not well served by publishers cynically recycling the old kings-and-queens narratives.