All Things Do and Must Pass

The court favorite is a strangely overlooked subject in biography. Sarah Churchill’s near-sadomasochistic, co-dependent relationship with Queen Anne has been pored over by historians and gossipmongers alike, and it inspired the film The Favourite in 2018. But for every Sarah Churchill (or Piers Gaveston) there are half a dozen more shadowy types.

Favorites—with the exception of Churchill, they were virtually all men—earned their positions in their ruler’s lives without obvious qualifications. They were taken up, sported with, and then peremptorily discarded when they outlived their usefulness or ceased to be beautiful. The lucky ones were given titles and land and retired into peaceable obscurity, while the unlucky faced imprisonment or even execution, often on trumped-up charges brought by envious rivals.

Today most former favorites are only remembered, if they still are, in footnotes and marginalia, often compiled by courtiers who resented the once-favored gilded figures and recounted their inevitable falls from grace with gleeful schadenfreude. It took a hardy and ambitious personality to steer one’s way through the tempests of mercurial royal affection and open envy from one’s peers. Yet the rewards could be considerable, and the glamor of the position was unmatched. Little wonder that John Marston wrote in his play The Malcontent, “What a delicious heaven is it for a man to be in a prince’s favor!”

The seventeenth century proved an especially rich time for such favor. In the court of Charles II, there was the licentious poet-libertine John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, whom the king alternately indulged and banished until Rochester’s painful death from hard living at the age of thirty-three. James II had no such boon companion, probably because he was “the most unguarded ogler of his time,” as one historian put it. Yet his father Charles I and grandfather James I both fell under the charismatic, self-interested spell of George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, who has a good claim to being the most influential royal courtier of the early part of the century, at least until his assassination in 1628 at the age of thirty-five.

In her latest biography, following her award-winning life of Gabriele D’Annunzio in 2013, Lucy Hughes-Hallett delves into Buckingham’s giddy, gaudy, and brief existence with typical relish and pizzazz, even as she observes of Buckingham’s standing as a favorite, “we no longer use that word.” A shame, frankly. The book is told chronologically, in a series of brief chapters, alternating between narrative and thematic reflection: “Showers of Love,” “The French Match,” and, inevitably, “Assassination.”

The Scapegoat is too seriously presented to be described as a straightforward romp, but the reader knows that he will be in good hands from the “Note on Sources,” in which Hughes-Hallett introduces us to the characters from whom she has extracted information. We will meet John Chamberlain, “a confirmed bachelor and popular guest who lived more in his friends’ houses than his own”; James Howell, “a clergyman’s son who chose the footloose life of an author and traveller”; and Sir John Oglander, a royalist M.P. who was so deeply committed to writing his memoir that, when ink was not at hand, he would use his own blood.

The danger of having such charismatic and fascinating figures lurking on the periphery is that the protagonist might seem wan or prosaic by comparison. This is not a problem that The Scapegoat faces. The French ambassador to England in the early 1620s, Count Leveneur de Tillières, may have sighed that the court was “licentious . . . filthy and scandalous.” He had a point. In the declining years of the reign of James I, sexual excess and moral decay were intertwined to startlingly sybaritic effect, and those around the rotting king were caught up in the maelstrom of dirt and putridity that had come to define his character and throne alike.

One figure, however, was exempt from this squalor. Variously described as “a spotted monster,” “a comet that disrupted the natural order, scrambled social hierarchy and set the music of the spheres a-jangle,” and “one of the handsomest men in the whole world,” Buckingham was so desirable and charming that James I, who called him “my sweet Child and Wife,” sighed that he would rather die than be parted from him. Like Rochester, a self-described “blazing star,” Buckingham’s rise to prominence and power was meteoric, but he also possessed an apparently effortless glamor that left courtiers scheming to keep his extraordinary power and influence in check. Still, they may have picked the wrong person to victimize. As Hughes-Hallett writes in her introduction, “By all reliable accounts, George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, was really very nice.”

He also had an anomalous and precarious role as a “dear one” at court, which was common for royal mistresses but rare for men. Happily for handsome young fellows, however, James was a misogynist, believing women to be witches with designs on his body and soul alike. His bedroom inclinations lay elsewhere. “Buckingham was a man who lived a woman’s life,” Hughes-Hallett observes. “What makes Buckingham’s career exceptional is that, because he was male, he was able to convert the influence of a favourite into the power of a chief minister. And because he was male, the way his physical beauty carried him to the highest place at court—something that would seem unremarkable in a woman’s case—is rendered questionable.”

Compared with his lover, patron, and, in all senses, master the king, Buckingham was a near-angelic presence at court, and had been ever since he first arrived in the summer of 1614 at the age of twenty-one. By then, James I was an unappealing-looking forty-eight-year-old (“his nose was bulbous, his mouth small and pursed, and that . . . by the time he came to England his cheeks were already sunken and his jowls sagged”). The most powerful man in the country was in fact a paranoid drunken sot, obsessed with what he called “dissimulation” and perpetually infatuated with beautiful young men. He also had a disconcerting penchant for deadpan, scatological, and not especially funny jokes; the test was whether you laughed at something that was not intended to be amusing (punishment: excommunication from court, or worse) or if you failed to laugh at the king’s genuine sally (punishment: public humiliation). Being around him was not easy or pleasant.

Buckingham had no illusions about what his role would be when he was brought into James’s presence; like any royal mistress, or well-paid whore, he had to do as he was bidden. As Francis Bacon, an early mentor, made clear to him, it was a job, not a sinecure. (The king was wed to the unfortunate Anne of Denmark, but nobody seriously pretended this was anything other than a lavender marriage, albeit one both consummated and, eventually, resulting in progeny.) Buckingham was the replacement for the “fierce and gentle” Robert Carr, earl of Somerset, who had previously occupied James’s affection but whose influence had waned. Buckingham, therefore, would be used, as George Abbot, the archbishop of Canterbury, explained, “to drive out Somerset, as one nail drives out another.”

That his relationship with the king was what we would now recognize as sexual seems possible, although Hughes-Hallett allows some ambiguity as to whether sodomy took place. Buckingham himself described how there was “more affection than between lovers in the best kind, man and wife,” and one letter exists in which Buckingham teased James about “that time which I shall never forget at Farnham, where the bed’s head could not be found between the master and his dog.” Buckingham would sign himself “Your Majesty’s humble slave and dog”—but this was hardly unusual for an association between a powerful older man and a comely younger one. James, meanwhile, relished the frisson that the disparity in their circumstances created, ending his own letters to his “sweet and dear child” “your dad and husband,” although Hughes-Hallett’s observation that “If Buckingham is both a child and a wife, then incest is implied, and so is pedophilia” seems an unusually obtuse reading of what is clearly intended as an affectionate, if erotically charged, statement of affection. Others were less impressed, and anonymous pamphlets denigrated the king as a “buggerer” and the likes of Buckingham and Somerset as catamites or “butt-slaves.”

In any case, the new favorite established himself so swiftly and so definitively in his position of influence that, by the end of 1615, he could be described by the poet Sir Edward Sherburne as “the man by whom all things do and must pass.” And he felt some affection towards his king and keeper, even if a certain degree of artistic license must be allowed for sentiments expressed in a letter calling him “my purveyor, my good fellow, my physician, my maker, my friend, my father, my all.”

He made enemies along the way. When Buckingham was murdered by a disgruntled army officer, John Felton, in the Greyhound pub in Portsmouth on August 23, 1628, he was unpopular enough that when Felton declared to the public that “In your hearts you rejoice at my deed,” he was only speaking the truth. His original protector and lover had died three years before, but Buckingham’s influence and power were already waning before James’s son Charles inherited the throne. The two men had traveled together to Spain in 1623, at times wearing false beards, in an attempt to bring about the union of Charles, then still a prince, and the Infanta Maria, and thereby unite Protestant England and Catholic Spain. Despite the fraternal amity between Charles and Buckingham—and Hughes-Hallett is amusing on the psychological incongruity of one’s father’s lover becoming a surrogate uncle of sorts—the attempt failed, and Buckingham was doomed. Felton was cheered to the heavens on his way to the gallows. Sic transit gloria.

Hughes-Hallett is a thoroughly modern chronicler of the mores of the Jacobean and early Caroline courts. Even as she knowingly cites L. P. Hartley’s dictum that “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” she can be censorious at times: “For George Villiers’s mother to have agreed that her boy should be paraded before a homosexual king, with a view to his becoming that king’s erotic toy and intimate companion, was also ordinary enough to their contemporaries, but it is likely to make modern readers feel morally queasy.” It may, but most of her readers will also understand that the milieu that she depicts is not one directly comparable to our own. But there are also good laughs to be had from her thorough research. Referring to James’s consistent impecuniousness, one M.P. asked “if it shall daily run out thence by private cocks.” The pun was outrageous, and intentional.

The Scapegoat is a witty, hugely readable, and elegantly written book, which is why the occasional lapses in stylistic felicity jar. (“When James fell in love, he fell hard.”) Hughes-Hallett has a pleasing line in sly juxtaposition—referring to one sycophant, she writes, “In one pamphlet he compared King James not only to King Solomon (which was conventional), but also to David, Josiah, Constantine the Great, Moses, the prophet Hezekiah and the Emperor Theodosius. In 1611 he became archbishop.” And she keeps her story pacy, which is just as well. Despite its subtitle, this is not a “brief” book; at least a hundred pages could usefully have been cut. There are some minor but irritating factual errors, as the historian John Adamson has noted elsewhere. (In the year of his ascension to the throne James I did not create eighty-three earls, for example, which was more than the total number of peers in England, but rather two.) Hughes-Hallett is a biographer rather than a Jacobean historian, but this does not excuse their presence. And the occasional authorial side-eye to the reader, offering exasperated commentary on these absurd people, can irritate as much as amuse.

Yet it is a considerable achievement to have produced a major work about the Duke of Buckingham—the first in forty years—that will make its readers laugh as much as think. Most fair-minded people will conclude that this particular slice of bawdy picaresque enlightened and enthralled, even as they wonder whether becoming the sexual plaything of “dead Dad” was worth it, after all.