The Scapegoat

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, the Duke of Buckingham was also his confidant, gatekeeper, advisor and bedfellow. When Charles I succeeded his father, he was equally 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 tempestuous scenes in Parliament to pearl-studded suits and aristocratic murder plots, 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.

Reviews

'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 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

'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

Praise for The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War

‘A rich, voluptuous treat … a triumph, the biography of the year’ Observer, ‘Books of the Year’

‘This is a magnificent portrait of a preposterous character … deplorable, brilliant, ludicrous, tragic but above all irresistible, as hundreds of women could testify. His biographer has done him full justice’ Daily Mail

‘A cracker of a biography, an extraordinary story of literary accomplishment, passionate war-mongering and sexual incorrigibility… In less skilled hands this could have been a disaster; in fact it works wonderfully well’ Spectator, ‘Books of the Year'