The Scapegoat
The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Plutarch Award
Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
Shortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize
From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, an extraordinary history of the meteoric rise and fall of George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham.
As King James I’s favorite, Buckingham was also his confidant, gatekeeper, advisor and lover. 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 skillful 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 authoritative account, Hughes-Hallett summons an era that still resonates today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
