The court favourite who became the most hated man in England

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The Duke of Buckingham, wrote Alexandre Dumas, lived ‘one of those fabulous existences which survive… to astonish posterity’. In the summer of 1614, a young man from a modest gentry family was invited to a hunting party in Northamptonshire to meet a very special guest. George Villiers was affable, not terribly bright and superlatively beautiful. His mother Mary, a practical and ambitious woman, knew what his looks could do for the family, and she aimed high. The mark was King James I, a monarch who openly loved men. The king had lavished his then favourite, Robert Carr, with titles, wealth and great offices, but the finest pair of legs in Europe extinguished his star. James was to remain utterly enthralled by Villiers for the rest of his life, so ensorcelled that it was believed the author of Daemonologie had himself been bewitched.

The period between 1603 and 1625 hovers on the brink of modernity, its mores both recognisable and elusive; if the Jacobean age were to be personified in a masque, the bizarrely beautiful art form it created, it would dance as Janus, the god of duality and transition, looking simultaneously forward and back. As ‘a man who lived a woman’s life’, Buckingham (as he became) is its alien familiar, the unique creature of a unique time.

Clever, coarse, suspicious and passionate, James I had endured an emotionally starved and frequently terrifying childhood, shadowed by the fate of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots. The precise nature of his physical relationship with Buckingham remains uncertain. More relevant, as Lucy Hughes-Hallett observes, was the king’s need to make a whole family of his favourite. ‘God bless you, my sweet child and wife,’ runs an early letter, ‘that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.’ Buckingham was nicknamed ‘Steenie’ by the king, after St Stephen, who was said to have had ‘the face of an angel’. In return, he happily described himself as James’s ‘dog’.

The contest between parliament and royal prerogative, which would ultimately end in civil war, had its roots in James’s reign; but Buckingham benefitted from a monarchy which was still almost absolute. Knighted in 1615, he was a marquess by 1618, aged 25, and Lord High Admiral a year later. In 1623, James made him a duke, the first time the title had been granted outside the royal family since the beheading of the Duke of Norfolk in 1572.

The Puritan writer Lucy Hutchinson sniffed that Buckingham had risen to ‘a pitch of glory… upon no merit but that of his prostitution’. Yet, unlike a royal mistress, he was able to translate his position into one of genuine political influence, maintaining his domination into the next generation after James’s death in 1626 with Charles I. The son may have loved Steenie almost as much as his father had, but Buckingham’s career as the most powerful man in England, after two kings, can best be described as mixed.

An avid collector and genuine connoisseur of art, he was instrumental to the cultural flowering of the Caroline court (though Hughes-Hallett points out that James’s neglected Danish Queen, Anne, who was mocked for spending so much time among her pictures, was the true founder of the Royal Collection). Aided by his dealer, Balthazar Gerbier, Buckingham amassed works by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Raphael, Giorgione and Correggio, and employed Orazio Gentileschi as an interior decorator. A lost work by Rubens, ‘The Apotheosis of the Duke of Buckingham’, designed as the centrepiece of his London palace York House, can be seen in a sketch in the National Gallery, vast, magnificent and, inevitably, ‘splendidly hubristic’.

As a diplomat and military leader, however, Buckingham was swiftly exposed as an amateur. His ‘incognito’ gallop to Madrid with Charles in pursuit of the Infanta Maria as a bride was a flamboyant fiasco, described by the Venetian ambassador as ‘an abyss of marvels, a monster among decisions’. A second wedding mission produced a wife for the prince, the future Queen Henrietta Maria, but failed to secure the French alliance that was the object of the match. While James’s diplomatic policies were directed at maintaining peace to preserve lives and money, Charles and Buckingham squandered both. A conscientious but incompetent commander, Buckingham became a positive liability in action. When he arrived at La Rochelle to ‘liberate’ the Huguenot city from Catholic oppression, the mayor met him at the gates and begged him to go away. Nor did he seem so splendid to the 5,000 (out of 8,000) men who lost their lives at the disastrous siege of the Île de Ré.

If Buckingham’s ascent was due to the magic of the divine right, his fall may be attributed in part to a far more modern phenomenon: the press. The early 17th century witnessed a vast rise in publications for an increasingly literate and news-hungry public, which focused its discontents on the favourite. Rumours of sorcery, and even the murder of James I with a poisoned posset, gathered such force that parliament moved twice to impeach Buckingham on 13 charges, which included corruption, conspiring with the Pope and attempting to convert Charles to Catholicism. Buckingham implored Charles to allow him to answer the accusations, but the young king impetuously dissolved parliament to protect him. In 1628, Buckingham was stabbed to death by a disgruntled army officer, John Felton. Hailed as a hero before he was hanged, Felton had deprived the nation of the one man to whom Charles I listened.

Francis Bacon had warned Buckingham that royal favourites might be ‘offered as a sacrifice to appease the multitude’. Scapegoat is a largely sympathetic portrait of a man trailed as sexual bait before the throne. Hughes-Hallett proved her exceptional scholarship with The Pike, her 2013 biography of Gabriele d’Annunzio, but this balanced, brilliant book is even more ambitious. Pacing is dramatic: punchy, factual round-ups move along in tense, shifting montage, interspersed with disquisitions such as ‘Advice on Bargaining’ or dealing with ghosts. The author revels in the oddities and excitement of Jacobean language – the newsmart of St Paul’s cathedral is ‘the ears’ brothel’; Buckingham on trial is the ‘causer of causes’. Like its subject, this biography is a prodigy, an almost bewilderingly skilful portrait of James I’s reign in all its glittering strangeness.