Lucy Hughes-Hallett, 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. Lucy Hughes-Hallett will transport us into a courtly world of masques and dancing, exquisite clothes, the art of Rubens and Van Dyck, gender-fluidity, same-sex desire, and appallingly rudimentary medicine.

Thursday 12th June, 7.00pm

Venue: Anglia Ruskin University, Bishop Hall Lane, Chelmsford, CM1 1SQ

Tickets: £12 / £10 concessions (Students, Under 27s and Unwaged)

Box Office: essexbookfestival.org.uk or Mercury Theatre 01206 573948

The Scapegoat by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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.

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.

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, same-sex desire, and appallingly rudimentary medicine. Witch hunts coexisted with Francis Bacon’s empiricism and public opinion was becoming a political force.

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 kidnappings and murder plots to men weeping in Parliament over civil liberties, The Scapegoat navigates love, war-fever and pacifism in a society on the brink of cataclysmic change. In this richly compelling and authoritative account, Hughes-Hallett summons an era that still resonates today.

‘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

Order a copy of The Scapegoat by Lucy Hughes-Hallett at the Essex Book Festival online bookshop at bookshop.org

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s last work of non-fiction was The Pike: Gabriele D’annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War which won the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Political Biography of the Year Award and the Costa Biography Award. In 2020 it was named ‘biography of the decade’ in the Sunday Times.

Since then Lucy has written the novel Peculiar Ground (set largely in the seventeenth century) which was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, and Fabulous, a collection of short stories. Her earlier books were Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions, which won the Fawcett Prize (1990) and Heroes, (2004)