Baillie Gifford Prize winner Lucy Hughes-Hallett for 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.

‘The Scapegoat brilliantly dramatises the complex and glittering Duke of Buckingham and the political and sexual intrigue of the court of James 1. Lucy Hughes-Hallett combines the instincts and talents of a novelist with an historian's vivid sense of period and social change.' - Colm Toibín, author of Long Island

‘Buckingham’s rise and fall is as old as Tiberius’ love for Sejanus and as contemporary as a celeb crash-and-burn. Hughes-Hallett is a matchless historian with an unfailing eye for the revealing detail’ - Sue Prideaux, author of I Am Dynamite!

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.

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)