The Scapegoat

‘SUBLIME’ A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024

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.

‘Lord Buckingham rockets off the page of this gloriously epic, seductively detailed biography’ OLIVIA LAING

‘This is the page-turner that Buckingham’s short, racy life deserves’DAILY TELEGRAPH

‘Vivid, erudite and sympathetic … The Scapegoat shows that [Hughes-Hallett’s] eye for the seamy realities of an extraordinary life is as sharp as ever’ THE TIMES

As King James I’s favourite, Buckingham was also his confidant, gatekeeper, right-hand man 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 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 Francis Bacon’s empiricism 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.

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'The Scapegoat brilliantly dramatises the complex and glittering Duke of Buckingham and the political and sexual intrigue of the court of James I. Hughes-Hallett combines the instincts and talents of a novelist with a historian's vivid sense of period and social change’ COLM TÓIBÍN

‘This is an absorbing, even thrilling journey through the dark and tangled networks of Stuart England … outstanding’ DIANE PURKISS

‘A flamboyant character, an epic rise and tragic fall, brought to life with intelligence, tenderness and profound scholarship’ ADAM ZAMOYSKI

‘Buckingham’s rise and fall is as old as Tiberius’ love for Sejanus and as contemporary as a celeb crash-and-burn. Hughes-Hallett is a matchless historian with an unfailing eye for the revealing detail’ SUE PRIDEAUX

‘A true Jacobean drama, except bloodier and sexier. Lucy Hughes-Hallett writes with gusto and insight’ PAUL THEROUX

‘Compulsively readable and elegantly written … [Lucy Hughes-Hallett] has brought Buckingham gloriously alive’ FINANCIAL TIMES

‘Crisp and vivid … The story is a tragic one, no less so for being told here with verve, erudition and empathy’ NEW STATESMAN

‘Richly multilayered … Hughes-Hallett proves herself alive to the nuances of gender and sexuality in the early seventeenth century…refreshingly light and contemporary, while at the same time suited to the seventeenth century’ TLS

‘A captivating study of the psychodrama of power’ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY