The Scapegoat

From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, a stunning biography of one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic seventeenth-century Englishmen at the heart of political and royal life.George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628), was loved by three monarchs. King James I of England, whose bed-fellow he was, called him Steenie, after St Stephen whose face ¿was as the face of an angel¿. James¿s son, later King Charles I, equally enthralled by Buckingham¿s glamour, made him his best friend and mentor. Anne of Austria, the Queen of France, confessed that ¿if an honest woman might love someone other than her husband¿ then Buckingham would have been her choice. Many believed that he was her lover. Buckingham was a dazzling figure. On horse-back, or cutting capers, he displayed a figure whose grace not even his worst enemies could refuse to acknowledge. He was also a skilful player of the political game, who rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth