The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham
From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, an extraordinary story of the meteoric rise and fall of King James I’s favourite, George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham.
As the king’s lover, Buckingham was one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic Englishmen at the heart of seventeenth-century royal and political life. A dazzling figure on horseback and a skilful 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 centre 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-fever and pacifism in a society on the brink of cataclysmic change.
‘Lord Buckingham rockets off the page of this gloriously epic, seductively detailed biography … 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
‘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
'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 -
”'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
Praise for The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War -
”'Hard to beat … a biographical tour de force … a rich, voluptuous treat … a triumph, the biography of the year” - Robert McCrum, Observer, 'Books of the Year’
”'[The Pike] dramatically extends biography’s formal range to encompass a daunting theme” - TLS, '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” - Francis Wheen, 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’
”'Hugely enjoyable … Hughes-Hallett has a great talent for encapsulating an era or an attitude …That almost 700 pages flew by bears testimony to how pleasurable and readable those pages were” - Sunday Times