Buckingham

(Hardback)

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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. Jamess son, later King Charles I, equally enthralled by Buckinghams 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 and power. When he travelled to Paris to fetch home Charless bride, Queen Henrietta Maria, he wore a pearl-encrusted suit worth enough to pay and equip a sizable army. By the time he was thirty-three he had been first minister to two successive kings.

He lived in dangerous and complicated times, an era where witch hunts coexisted with Descartian rationality. Buckingham stood at its centre both culturally and politically. To the House of Commons Buckingham was the chief cause of all the evils and mischiefs with which the country is afflicted. When he was assassinated in 1628, at the age of thirty-six, King Charles said that he himself, and the monarchy he represented, had been wounded through the Dukes sides.

All of Lucy Hughes-Halletts books have explored the interface between actual events in the world of politics, war and international relations, and the operations of imagination and desire. Buckingham will, first and foremost, be a compelling story, but it is also story rich in significance, with deep resonance for today.

Reviews

Praise for The Pike: Gabriele dAnnunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War

Hard to beat a biographical tour de force a rich, voluptuous treat a triumph, the biography of the year Robert McCrum, Observer, Books of the Year

[The Pike] dramatically extends biographys formal range to encompass a daunting theme TLS, Books of the Year

This is a magnificent portrait of a preposterous character deplorable, brilliant, ludicrous, tragic but above all irresistible, as hundreds of women could testify. His biographer has done him full justice Francis Wheen, Daily Mail

A cracker of a biography, an extraordinary story of literary accomplishment, passionate war-mongering and sexual incorrigibility In less skilled hands this could have been a disaster; in fact it works wonderfully well Spectator, Books of the Year

Beautiful, strange and original an extraordinarily intimate portrait New Statesman

Hugely enjoyable Hughes-Hallett has a great talent for encapsulating an era or an attitude That almost 700 pages flew by bears testimony to how pleasurable and readable those pages were Sunday Times

Author Bio

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike, a biography of Gabriele d'Annunzio, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction, the Costa Biography Award, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Paddy Power Political Biography of the Year Award. Her other books are Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions which was published in 1990 to wide acclaim, and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen, published in 2004, which garnered similar praise. Cleopatra won the Fawcett Prize and the Emily Toth Award. Lucy Hughes-Hallett is also a respected critic who has reviewed for all the major British newspapers, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in London.