The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham
(By Lucy Hughes-Hallett)
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| Author | Lucy Hughes-Hallett |
As the king’s lover, Buckingham was one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic seventeenth-century Englishmen at the heart of royal and political life. A dazzling figure on horseback and a skillful player of the political game, he rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth and power. By the time he was thirty-three he had been first minister to two successive kings.
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, sex, and appallingly rudimentary medicine. These were dangerous and complicated times, an era where witch hunts coexisted with Descartian rationality, and Buckingham stood at its center--until his spectacular fall from grace.
From tempestuous scenes in Parliament to the political force of public opinion, The Scapegoat is a rich and compelling story with deep resonance for today’s world. Hughes-Hallett’s extraordinary recreation of the period delves into love, war, and pacifism in a society on the brink of cataclysmic change.”
