The Scapegoat by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham

By Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Harper 2024

The centerpiece of Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s adorable and frankly adoring big new biography was also the adored centerpiece of his own lifetime: George Villiers, who was Duke of Buckingham and court favorite to both King James I and King Charles I. The Scapegoat tells the story of Buckingham’s life and world in 600 pages filled with more flash and color and undergirded by more research than any other popular biography of this oddly misreadable figure that’s ever appeared. Readers may not understand Buckingham at the end of this big book, but they’ll know him at least as well as all the mystified denizens of his own time. 

In part, his role was easy to see and grasp: he was blazingly handsome in a world where most people, ravaged by the poxes of childhood or adulthood and by poor nutrition, were decidedly not. James I, always easily distracted by a man’s pretty face or shapely shoulders, first noticed the 21-year-old Villiers in 1614 and quickly acceded to every bit of Court advancement either he or Villiers could ever want. In front of the dazzled or envious eyes of all the other hangers-on surrounding the King, Villiers rose through the ranks to his dukedom, established homes and patronages, and occupied one high-profile state office after another. 

One of the many refreshing elements of Hughes-Hallett’s book is her steadfast refusal to assume that the only thing Buckingham brought to any of these positions was sterling good looks. Steadfastly throughout her book, she refuses to condescend and scorns the easy route of pretending that she’s writing about anybody’s mere pretty boy. Instead, everywhere, in almost every capacity, Buckingham’s oddly game broad-band capability often forces itself to the front of the narrative. There’s grounding for it; “In his twenties he had been taught statecraft by Francis Bacon and by wily, learned, disputacious King James,” she insists. “He was sneered at as an empty-headed fop, but not many scions of the great aristocratic families were so well-educated.”

Not that she ignores the pretty boy, nor did anybody at the time. It hardly matters whether Hughes-Hallet is quoting scullery maids or deans of the Church, and it hardly matters whether those people are talking about the night’s venison cuts or a generous pew endowment – in every single case, literally everybody takes a second out of their crowded memorandum to mention how gorgeous Buckingham was, how fine his leg, how compact his muscles, how resplendent his face. Granted, much of this was at least partly performative, if the King could read it. But reading The Scapegoat, you get the strong impression Buckingham’s pouty mouth was mentioned in banker shareholding meetings, or that a housewife would turn to her nightcapped husband on the pillow at night and sigh, “His Grace’s pecs are so dreamy.” 

But more surprising and far more interesting is this author’s propensity to find Buckingham both genuine and appealing. She follows him through the many civic duties and largely doomed military adventures of his short life with the energy of a writer whose subject is always surprising her. “Busy as he was,” she notes at one point, “he found time to fossick around with antiquarians.” He was a dilettante and an amateur, she allows, but “not in the derogatory modern sense of those words, but in their original meaning – he was one who delighted in and loved beautiful things.” 

(James himself was definitely not one of those beautiful things, and yet in Hughes-Hallett’s account, there seems to have been a complicated but very real bond of affection between King and favorite)

Buckingham was assassinated in the press of visitors in his own home at the age of 35. Neither he nor anybody else saw the man coming, and the knife-strike was directly to the heart, and Buckingham knew enough about the world to know instantly that the wound was fatal. He pronounced it so and almost immediately died.

But he’s a marvellously living figure in these pages, thanks to Hughes-Hallett’s unfailing gift for capturing the odd combination of pomp and play that was the essence of the man. “He played bowls and tennis and cards, recklessly placing large bets and losing as often as he won,” she writes. “He took part in tournaments, his armour and accountrements all intricately decorated with mother-of-pearl and precious metals. When he ate, he did so to the sound of trumpets or of fiddles. When he rode into town, he liked to be greeted with peals of bells.” 

The Scapegoat is extremely well-researched and never balks from the many darker or seedier aspects of 17th-century life. But it’s persistently, almost weirdly a happy book. It’s the biography of a climber and a royal favorite, often a duplicitous and always a dangerous place for those daring enough to hold it. And yet, somehow, the book itself arrives accompanied by fiddles. 

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News