Lucy Hughes-Hallett

As King James I’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham was also his confidant, gatekeeper, right-hand man - and lover. When Charles I succeeded his father, he was similarly enthralled and made Buckingham his best friend and mentor. 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 becoming one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic characters at the heart of seventeenth-century royal and political life.

With a novelist’s touch Lucy Hughes-Hallett - acclaimed author of The Pike - 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.

'The Scapegoat brilliantly dramatizes the complex and glittering Duke of Buckingham and the political and sexual intrigue of the court of James I. Hughes-Hallett combines the instincts and talents of a novelist with a historian's vivid sense of period and social change.’ COLM TÓIBÍN