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

"This year, two books were selected to share the Plutarch Award, an international literary prize whose winners are selected by a committee of notable professional biographers. Those books were Candy Darling (see above), which they praised for its “emotional pull and sensitive handling of its subject,” and Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham . The judges admired The Scapegoat ‘s “innovative structure and engaging, intelligent style.” Hughes-Hallett—who previously won the Baillie Gifford Prize for The Pike — has “a novelist’s eye for the extraordinary,” they added. The Scapegoat conjures “an entire bygone world: the masques, dances, art, food, and attitudes” of Jacobean-era England; altogether it’s “stylish, vivid, and frequently surprising.”"

"The Duke of Buckingham was the great favorite of King James I of England (and VI of Scotland), the king who came down from north of the border and took over in England. James seems to have been, on the whole, attracted to men rather than women. He had a very difficult childhood, and one of the only human beings he trusted and loved growing up was his glamorous cousin Esmé Stewart. Esmé Stewart was the first of many handsome young men who culminated with Buckingham. Buckingham was not only the most staggeringly glamorous man of the lot—he was said to have won the heart of the queen of France as well, and features in The Three Musketeers —but also, to an even greater extent than any of the previous favorites, he amassed real executive power because of the level of captivation that he exerted. Partly because things didn’t turn out very well for Buckingham—whether through incompetence or bad luck or a bit of both—he’s tended to have a very negative reputation in British historiography. He’s viewed as a corrupt, evil counsellor, a wicked and depraved man who led the king astray. What Lucy Hughes-Hallett locates is why the king loved him, and what made him such an affectionate and personable friend. He was a genuinely decent man, in many ways. His wife loved him, and he was the product of a warm, cultivated, feminized family, harmoniously united to his mother and sisters. There’s his sheer charm (that word again!), his ability to behave well a lot of the time. When you’re first getting into this book, it’s reminiscent of, say, Antonia Fraser’s relationship to Charles II in her biography , which, at times, feels very close. Lucy Hughes-Hallett has this sympathy for King James and for Buckingham and their friendship. She’s very openly, honestly drawn to them. That makes her all the more devastatingly able to see where they and their policy went hopelessly wrong, headlong into delusion and disaster. I’ve been more convinced by her account of the situation than by any other. So often previous historians have had some kind of axe to grind—they hate Buckingham, they hate Catholics, they hate King James, they have a complex about Scotland. Perhaps we can ignore everything they say. Maybe Buckingham wasn’t as bad as all that. But because I can trust that Lucy Hughes-Hallett really does see everything good that’s going for Buckingham and for King James, she’s all the more able to get across why and how, despite often very attractive intentions, their policy was doomed from the outset. She’s also exceptional at materialising the world in which they lived. She does this partly by means of very brief, formally experimental chapters, for example lists of Buckingham’s houses or discussions of his paintings and other possessions. At one point, she has a hilarious, all too timely short chapter on how not to conduct a diplomatic negotiation. A previous winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, she is the wielder of a very beautiful, personal, confident style. He was assassinated. He was a man so loved by the king and so hated by the public at large that his doctor, who was guilty of a terrible sexual crime, was lynched in the street. Eventually the assassin’s knife came for Buckingham himself. The murderer was a depressive officer passed over for promotion, prone to religiously and politically charged melancholy, with anti-Buckingham material emanating from the last Parliament sewn into his hat. He stabbed Buckingham to death with a very cheap knife, and he was hailed by at least half the country as a national hero. His execution led to outrage. So, yes, a very dramatic assassination."