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’. James’s son, later King Charles I, equally enthralled by Buckingham’s 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 Charles’s 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 Duke’s sides’.

All of Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s books have explored the interface between actual events in the world of politics, war and international relations, and the operations of imagination and desire.