Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize Lucy Hughes-Hallett reveals the stunning life of the flamboyant and enigmatic Englishman at the heart of seventeenth-century court politics.

As King James I’s favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham was the King’s gatekeeper, right-hand man and lover. When Charles I succeeded his father, he was similarly enthralled and made Buckingham his best friend and first minister. 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.

But Buckingham’s story was part of a great political drama.

Falling from grace spectacularly, he came to represent everything that was wrong with the country.

From love letters and political intrigue to men weeping in Parliament, Lucy Hughes-Hallett joins us to illuminate a world of love, war-fever and pacifism in a society on the brink of cataclysmic change.

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Praise for Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s The Scapegoat:

‘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 Toibín, 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 The Garden Against Time