THE SCAPEGOAT

The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham

(Fourth Estate, UK and HarperCollins USA)

From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Costa Biography of the Year Award - the extraordinary story of the meteoric rise and fall of King James I’s favourite, George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham.

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, brutal warfare and appallingly rudimentary medicine. These were dangerous and complicated times, an era where witch hunts coexisted with the beginnings of empirical science. Buckingham stood at its centre until his spectacular fall from grace.

Ranging from tempestuous scenes in Parliament to the emergent political force of public opinion, The Scapegoat is a rich and compelling story about sex, misogyny, diplomacy and power, 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.

‘Dazzlingly unconventional … she never loses sight of the personal tragedy at its heart. This is a stunningly good book, and should be a contender for every prize going.’ Dominic Sandbrook Best History Books 2024 - The Sunday Times

'Compulsively readable and elegantly written... In her sparkling, engaging biography Lucy Hughes-Hallett has brought Buckingham gloriously alive.'  Jane Shaw The Financial Times

'This biography is a prodigy, an almost bewilderingly skilful portrait of James I's reign in all its glittering strangeness.' Lisa Hilton The Spectator

'In this sparkling, witty book Hughes-Hallett paints a vivid, erudite and sympathetic portrait of a man who lived, as Alexandre Dumas put it 'one of those fabulous existences which survive, in the course of centuries to astonish posterity’.'  Dan Jones The Times

'‘Crisp and vivid …The story is a tragic one, no less so for being told here with verve, erudition and empathy.'    Rowan Williams The New Statesman

'This fabulous biography is long overdue'.  Lucy Moore The Guardian

‘A delightfully fleet-footed double biography of Buckingham and the topsy-turvy Jacobean era he helped shape…. Scenes of complicated diplomacy are matched by vivid vignettes of courtly life which Hughes-Hallett’s cinematic prose brings to life…The page-turner that Buckingham’s short, racy life deserves’ Francesca Peacock The Telegraph

‘Richly multilayered … Like the ideal courtier described by Castiglione, Hughes-Hallett possesses the quality of sprezzatura (“doing difficult things and making them look easy”). Ophelia Field Times Literary Supplement

‘Buckingham and Charles’s absurd escapade, running off to Spain in false beards to woo the Spanish infanta, has seldom been told with such brio.’ Nicola Shulman Books of the Year - Spectator

‘A delicious, grippingly paced tale of rogues, riotous sex, regicide and realpolitik’ Best Books for Christmas -The Independent

‘Brilliant.’ Cressida Connolly Books of the Year - Spectator

‘Her prose is sublime.’ Tomiwa Owolade. Books of the Year - The New Statesman

‘This delightful book casts its net wide, giving a lively in-depth portrait of the early Stuart era overflowing with telling detail and written with compelling pace and verve. One to get stuck into. One to savour.’ Books of the Year - Daily Mail

‘Written with such verve and invention … a fascinating book’ Tom Sutcliffe BBC Radio 4 Front Row

'A delicious account of English politics in the decades after Elizabeth....History at its best." Kirkus Reviews 

‘A glittering portrait of 17th-century court life… a captivating study of the psychodrama of power." Publishers Weekly

Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s astute, piquant biography luminously spins the story… a wordsmith’s lightness of touch… the historian’s sense of context and the novelist’s sense of character. The Stuart psychodrama is astonishing. a fascinating insight into a formative and strange period of English history. All the impulses it traces—the pursuit of glory, love and resentment—transcend the historical moment. A dazzling performance. Catherine Ostler The Wall Street Journal

‘The Scapegoat brilliantly dramatises the complex and glittering Duke of Buckingham and the political and sexual intrigue of the court of James 1. 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 

‘Buckingham rockets off the page of this gloriously epic, seductively detailed biography: 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 The Garden Against Time 

‘A triumph of historical storytelling, sharp, clear and brilliantly structured.’ Jenny Uglow, author of A Gambling Man  

‘A flamboyant character, an epic rise and tragic fall, brought to life with intelligence, tenderness and profound scholarship’ Adam Zamoyski, author of Napoleon, The Man Behind the Myth  

‘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 The English Civil War: A People’s History  

‘This superb chronicle of power and passion unfolds like the most improbable fiction – a true Jacobean drama, except bloodier and sexier.  Lucy Hughes-Hallett writes with gusto and insight.’  Paul Theroux, author of Burma Sahib: A Novel of George Orwell

'An enthralling reassessment of his extraordinary career'     Anne Somerset, author of Queen Victoria and her Prime Ministers

‘The spectacular rise and fall of gorgeous George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, pearls in his ears, in the arms of the king, enthrallingly retold 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, author of Albert & the Whale

‘Hughes-Hallett’s atmospheric new biography 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

‘Lucy Hughes-Hallett has spun the results of meticulous research into a compelling narrative about the personalities and passionate relationships that led inexorably to the English Civil Wars’ Sheila Hale, author of Titian: His Life

'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, rumour, and display' Daniel Swift, author of Bomber Country

‘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, author of I Am Dynamite!

‘She’s a wonderful writer’ Monty Don