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, 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

'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

'This electric life of Buckingham captures the splendid weirdness of the Stuart age in all its treasures and corruptions … but it does so, like all great histories, with a subtle glance at our own time' DANIEL SWIFT

About the author

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Political Book Awards Political Biography of the Year and the Costa Biography Award and was chosen by The Sunday Times as the biography of the decade. Her novel Peculiar Ground was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Her other books include Fabulous, a collection of short stories, and the cultural histories Cleopatra and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen.

She is a widely respected critic and was chair of the judges of the 2021 International Booker Prize.