The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Overview

From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, an extraordinary story of the meteoric rise and fall of King James I’s favorite, George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham.

As the king’s lover, Buckingham was one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic seventeenth-century Englishmen at the heart of royal and political life. A dazzling figure on horseback and a skillful player of the political game, he rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth and power. By the time he was thirty-three he had been first minister to two successive kings.

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, sex, and appallingly rudimentary medicine. These were dangerous and complicated times, an era where witch hunts coexisted with Descartian rationality, and Buckingham stood at its center—until his spectacular fall from grace.

From tempestuous scenes in Parliament to the political force of public opinion, The Scapegoat is a rich and compelling story with deep resonance for today’s world. Hughes-Hallett’s extraordinary recreation of the period delves into love, war, and pacifism in a society on the brink of cataclysmic change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798874804060
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	12/03/2024
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of several books, which have won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Costa Biography Award, among others.

Editorial Reviews

09/23/2024

This rousing biography from historian Hughes-Hallet (The Pike) recaps the life of George Villiers, an obscure son of English gentry who skyrocketed from cupbearer to King James I in 1614 to near-absolute power as James’s (and his son Charles I’s) prime minister, Lord High Admiral, and Duke of Buckingham. He owed his rise to his intimate—likely sexual—relationship with James, who swooned over his good looks and elegant dancing. Hughes-Hallett’s colorful narrative highlights Villiers’s glamorous exploits—her account of his and Charles’s journey in disguise to Spain to negotiate Charles’s marriage is full of twisty intrigue—and his skill as a courtier and power broker who was charming, well-spoken, and ingratiating even to his enemies. She’s also insightful on Villiers’s undoing as a result of his ill-advised campaigns against Spain and France, which ended in bloody fiascos, partly because his forces fumed over lack of pay—it was a disgruntled soldier who assassinated him in 1628. By that time, Hughes-Hallett demonstrates, Villiers was the most hated man in England, accused of everything from witchcraft to killing King James; Parliament’s attempts to impeach him sparked the antagonism between Charles and Parliament that would lead to civil war. Hughes-Hallet paints a glittering portrait of 17th-century court life, where authority often flowed from intense emotional rapport with the king and could lead to stunning falls from grace. It’s a captivating study of the psychodrama of power. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

'A delicious account of English politics in the decades after Elizabeth....Great men and politics history at its best." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"I greatly enjoyed this superb chronicle of power and passion, which unfolds like the most improbable fiction, with the oddest cast of characters, the strange king and his favorite, and the court of enablers and plotters – a true Jacobean drama, except bloodier and sexier. Lucy Hughes-Hallett writes with gusto and insight." — Paul Theroux, bestselling author of Burma Sahib

"The Scapegoat brilliantly dramatises the complex and glittering Duke of Buckingham and the political and sexual intrigue of the court of James I. Lucy Hughes-Hallett combines the instincts and talents of a novelist with an historian's vivid sense of period and social change" — Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island 

"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. 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 Everybody

"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, award-winning author of The Sea Inside

"A flamboyant character, an epic rise and tragic fall, brought to life with intelligence, tenderness and profound scholarship" — Adam Zamoyski, bestselling author of Napoleon

"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, rumor, and display." — Daniel Swift, author of the Bomber Country

"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

"Lucy 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 of The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street

“A triumph of historical storytelling, sharp, clear and brilliantly structured . . . Hughes-Hallett brings the whole Stuart court alive, not only in its dynastic ambitions, chaotic politics and religious tensions, but in its masques, art collections, doomed loves and fatal disasters”  — Jenny Uglow, author of Sybil & Cyril

“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 21^st-century? Read this outstanding work of biography, and learn” — Diane Purkiss, author of The English Civil War: A People’s History

"A blazingly beautiful young man maneuvered into the bed of King James I by his ambitious mother: the story unfolds with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. Buckingham’s meteoric rise and fall is as old as Tiberius’ love for Sejanus and as contemporary as celeb crash-and-burn. Hughes-Hallett, matchless historian with an unfailing eye for the revealing detail, richly contextualizes the authentically loving relationship between King and favorite within the bigger picture of statecraft, religion, literature, theatre and portraiture of the time. Power politics and propaganda haven’t changed much over the centuries." — Sue Prideaux, author of I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche

"Hughes-Hallet paints a glittering portrait of 17th-century court life, where authority often flowed from intense emotional rapport with the king and could lead to stunning falls from grace. It’s a captivating study of the psychodrama of power." — Publishers Weekly

"A delightfully fleet-footed double biography of both Buckingham and the topsy-turvy Jacobean era he helped shape? — Telegraph (UK)

From the Publisher

10/01/2024

The enigmatic and flamboyant first Duke of Buckingham (1592–1638) is the subject of award-winning Hughes-Hallett's (The Pike: Gabriele d'Annunzio) new biography. The duke's mother was ambitious by nature and promoted the careers of all her children, especially her son. He rapidly moved up in the world, becoming a favorite of both James I and Charles I, eventually receiving the title of Duke of Buckingham. His eventual fall from grace was brought about through bad decisions including failed military expeditions and promoting the match of Prince Charles and Henrietta Marie, a Catholic, during a time period when much of the public favored a Protestant match. So unpopular was he that calls were made for his impeachment, which was prevented by Charles I himself. However, it was only a postponement of the fallout, as Buckingham was assassinated in 1628. VERDICT Hughes-Hallett vividly describes the politics and culture of the era in this fascinating biography for readers of British history.—Lucy Heckman

Library Journal