The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham
From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, an extraordinary story of the meteoric rise and fall of George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham.
As King James I’s favourite, Buckingham was also his confidant, gatekeeper, advisor and bedfellow. When Charles I succeeded his father, he was similarly enthralled and made Buckingham his best friend and mentor. A dazzling figure on horseback and a skilful player of the political game, Buckingham rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth and power. He became one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic Englishmen at the heart of seventeenth-century royal and political life.
With a novelist’s touch, Lucy Hughes-Hallett transports us into a courtly world of masques and dancing, exquisite clothes, the art of Rubens and Van Dyck, gender-fluidity, same-sex desire, and appallingly rudimentary medicine. Witch hunts coexisted with Descartian rationality and public opinion was becoming a political force. Falling from grace spectacularly, Buckingham came to represent everything that was wrong with the country.
From kidnappings and murder plots to men weeping in Parliament over civil liberties, The Scapegoat navigates love, war-fever and pacifism in a society on the brink of cataclysmic change. In this immersive and multifaceted account, Hughes-Hallett summons an era that still resonates today.
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‘Lord Buckingham rockets off the page of this gloriously epic, seductively detailed biography: a man of impossible contradictions, at once hubristic warmonger, tender lover and brilliant power-broker to two kings’ OLIVIA LAING
‘This is an absorbing, even thrilling journey through the dark and tangled networks of Stuart England. Perhaps you think we have sunk to new lows in the 21st-century? Read this outstanding work of biography, and learn’ DIANE PURKISS
‘Lucy Hughes-Hallett combines the instincts and talents of a novelist with an historian’s vivid sense of period and social change’ COLM TÓIBÍN
'Lucy Hughes-Hallett opens a spyhole into the dark, strange world of the Stuart kings, with its masques and superstitions, where a beautiful boy could rise to become the most powerful man in Britain' Olivia Laing, author of The Garden Against Time -
”'The spectacular rise and fall of gorgeous George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, pearls in his ears, in the arms of the king, enthrallingly retold here by Lucy Hughes-Hallett in a book which is so full of gripping detail that I am sure the subject himself would find it impossible to put down” - Philip Hoare, author of Albert & the Whale
'Endowed with a glamour and magnetism that secured him the love of two kings, Buckingham rose to power and magnificence before becoming the most hated man in the country who did much to set in motion the Stuart monarchy’s ruin. This is an enthralling reassessment of his extraordinary career' Anne Somerset, author of Queen Victoria and her Prime Ministers -
‘The Scapegoat brilliantly dramatises the complex and glittering Duke of Buckingham and the political and sexual intrigue of the court of James I' Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island -
”'This electric life of Buckingham captures the splendid weirdness of the Stuart age in all its treasures and corruptions, its richness and squalor” - but it does so, like all great histories, with a subtle glance at our own time, of venal rulers, celebrity, rumour, and display' Daniel Swift, author of Bomber Country
”'Hughes-Hallett’s atmospheric new biography of the Jacobean high-flier George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, cuts through centuries of disapproving historical hearsay and brings us up close to the man behind the pearl-encrusted doublet” - Charles Nicholl, author ofThe Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street