About this item
Highlights
- Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Randy Shilts Award for Gay NonfictionShortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper PrizeFrom 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.
- Author(s): Lucy Hughes-Hallett
- 688 Pages
- Biography + Autobiography, Historical
Description
About the Book
"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"--Book Synopsis
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.
Review Quotes
Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
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'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 21st-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)
"Like its subject, this biography is a prodigy, an almost bewilderingly skillful portrait of James I's reign in all its glittering strangeness." -- The Spectator