The Scapegoat

Description of book

From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, a stunning biography of one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic seventeenth-century Englishmen at the heart of political and royal life.

George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham, was loved by three monarchs.

King James I of England called him Steenie, after the angelic face of St Stephen, and was no stranger to his bed. James’s son, later King Charles I, equally enthralled by Buckingham’s glamour, made him his best friend and mentor. Anne of Austria, the Queen of France, confessed that ‘if an honest woman might love someone other than her husband’ then Buckingham would have been her choice.

Buckingham was a dazzling figure. On horse-back, or cutting capers, he displayed a figure whose grace bewitched even his worst enemies. A skilful player of the political game, he rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth and power. When he travelled to Paris to fetch home Charles’s bride, he wore a pearl-encrusted suit worth enough to pay and equip a sizable army. By the age of thirty-three he had been first minister to two successive kings.

But he lived in dangerous and complicated times, an era where witch hunts coexisted with Descartian rationality, and Buckingham stood at its cultural and political centre. To the House of Commons Buckingham was responsible for and representative of all the country’s wrongdoings. In a spectacular fall from grace Buckingham was assassinated in 1628 at the age of thirty-six, having greatly damaged the reputation of the monarchy.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett masterfully explores the interface between actual events in the world of politics, war and international relations, and the operations of imagination and desire. The Scapegoat is a richly compelling and deeply immersive chronicle that holds significant resonance for today.