The Unfortunate Posset

For Mendoza​ , the ambitious courtier in John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603), being in favour is ‘delicious heaven’; he is quite ‘drunk’ with it. Walter Raleigh pined like a spurned lover when Elizabeth I turned her attentions to the Earl of Essex. George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more affection than between lovers in the best kind’. Lucy Hughes-Hallett wonders, in her biography of Buckingham, if chiefs of staff or special advisers can be understood as favourites, but really there is no modern equivalent. The royal favourite flourished at the early modern European court. Amphibious creatures, they slid easily between the council room and the bedchamber, crouching close to or shielding the monarch, a kind of human buffer. He (the favourite was usually, but not always, a ‘he’) could sometimes be found in the royal bed, but our preoccupation with the playful language of love used by kings and queens with their favourites, and with the notion of the favourite as an erotic toy, often means we overlook the significant sway of royal favourites in the volatile, factional and increasingly complex arena of early modern governance. Royal intimacy might have been delicious and intoxicating, but it came with real power.

Francis Bacon – who had known a few favourites and was himself a favourite of Buckingham’s – knew it was an office to be discharged carefully. ‘You are his shadow,’ he warned Buckingham, and since ‘the king himself is above the reach of his people,’ his shadow could be stamped on instead. Few favourites lasted a reign, let alone a regime change. As Sir Henry Wotton said, ‘the state of a favourite is at the best but a tenant-at-will.’ Favourites could find themselves out of favour, they could overreach or be pulled down by envy. That astute observer of Stuart monarchs, John Milton, has his Satan describe Adam as God’s ‘new favourite’.

Buckingham defied the odds – perhaps thanks to his long and shapely legs – by successfully straddling the reigns of James and his son Charles I. For more than a decade, he was the most powerful man in England next to the king. While some described him as a ‘rising star’, others reached for the more ominous image of a comet, ‘drawn out of the dross of the earth’ and a harbinger of disorder. Surprisingly, there hasn’t been a full-length biography since Roger Lockyer’s in 1981, but the 400th anniversary of James I’s death next year has given Hughes-Hallett her opportunity. At more than six hundred pages, The Scapegoat is long, but Buckingham’s rise and fall is told in a succession of short, vivid chapters. The style is relaxed, sometimes playful. It is a book, Hughes-Hallett says, about big things, such as ‘peace and war’, and smaller things – ‘babies, jewels, anemones’. It moves from the complex power struggles and religious conflicts riddling Europe to the domestic details of the Stuart court and the ‘web of love stories’ being spun there. The effect is to locate Buckingham, who at the end of his life could be described as ‘the greatest and most remarkable favourite’, firmly in his material and emotional worlds.

Buckingham began as ‘nobody special’, born George Villiers in Leicestershire in 1592. He was the second son of Sir George Villiers, a successful sheep farmer, and his second wife, Mary. There was property, but little prospect of a courtly career. Mary, however, was ‘pushy’, and knew she had a good-looking boy. A well-connected third husband enabled her to send George and his elder brother, John, off to France to be civilised. There, at Blois and Angers, Buckingham learned how to speak French, fence and ride: the skills of a courtier. On his return, he found a mentor in Sir James Graham, a gentleman of the privy chamber (and a former favourite himself). While away from court on progress, James stopped at Apethorpe in Northamptonshire. Buckingham, then 21, was also there. This was no coincidence. Buckingham was smooth-faced and perfect from top to toe – ‘the handsomest-bodied man in Europe’ – and the 48-year-old king’s liking for beautiful young men was well known. Buckingham was dangled before the king like a ‘piece of sexual bait’, and James bit. The current favourite, Sir Robert Carr, a flaxen-haired Scot, prevented Buckingham from being immediately parachuted into intimacy as a gentleman of the bedchamber. Instead, Buckingham became one of James’s cupbearers. He stood at James’s elbow, kept his glass topped up with wine and bent his ear close to hear him talk. James drank and talked a lot at mealtimes. Buckingham was, as the balladeers soon had it, Ganymede to James’s Jove.

By the time Buckingham arrived at court, James’s relationship with Carr, newly created as the earl of Somerset, was vulnerable. Carr was married to Frances Howard, and the Howards supported James’s pacifist foreign policy on Europe, then teetering on the brink of the Thirty Years’ War. James favoured friendship with Catholic Spain and a fairly tolerant attitude towards Catholics in England. A more militant Protestant faction, led by George Abbott as archbishop of Canterbury, and including James’s wife, Queen Anne, saw an opportunity to push their own anti-Spanish agenda by toppling Carr and elevating Buckingham. After a year of cupbearing, Buckingham was made gentleman of the bedchamber, knighted and given an annual allowance of £1000. In early 1616, when Carr and his wife were found guilty of having poisoned their former friend Thomas Overbury, Buckingham became James’s master of the horse. No post in the royal household guaranteed greater proximity or influence. Buckingham was now the ‘man by whom all things do and must pass’.

James called Buckingham ‘Steenie’ – short for St Stephen, who, it was said, had the face of an angel. Buckingham called James his ‘dear dad and husband’, and himself ‘Your Majesty’s humble slave and dog’. James, who had exalted ideas of his divinity, believed he and Buckingham were like Christ and ‘his John’. Their relationship was almost certainly sexual, as James’s with Carr was probably not – in one letter to the king, Buckingham reminds him of ‘that time which I shall never forget at Farnham, where the bed’s head could not be found between the master and his dog’ – but Hughes-Hallett concludes that sex is ‘beside the main point’. The main point being that James had ‘intensely intimate relationships’ with men, and loved some of them.

More honours and offices followed for Buckingham: knight of the garter, Baron Whaddon and Viscount Villiers, lord lieutenant of Buckinghamshire, earl of Buckingham, privy councillor, marquis of Buckingham, and, in 1619, lord high admiral. This last office put Buckingham in control of England’s defences, and Buckingham did well in the job – until the country went to war. Eventually in 1623, this ‘nobody special’ was made duke of Buckingham, the only duke outside the royal family and therefore the highest-ranking nobleman in the country.

Buckingham accrued wealth, property, and, from the rents on his estates, more wealth. In one chapter, Hughes-Hallett, who is fond of a list, catalogues Buckingham’s houses: Dalby in Leicestershire, Wanstead and New Hall in Essex, Burley-on-the-Hill, Wallingford House and Chelsea House in London, as well as York House on the Strand, which he bought from Bacon. Buckingham renovated his homes at great expense and shared them with his wife, the heiress Lady Katherine Manners, daughter of the earl of Rutland. They had four children, three of whom survived. Buckingham invited Balthazar Gerbier, an architect and painter, into his household, and Gerbier began to amass an enviable collection of Italian and Dutch artworks (including by Titian, Tintoretto, Bassano and Rubens). John Tradescant was the gardener, sourcing extraordinary curiosities for Buckingham’s delight: an elephant’s head, Pocahontas’s father’s seashell robe.

Hughes-Hallett is clear that Buckingham ‘recognised, wanted and delighted in beauty’. He was an aesthete before his time. For her own part, she joyfully immerses her reader in the stuff of Stuart England: the clothes, canvases, rituals, masques, ballads, libels and medicines. Her novel Peculiar Ground is set partly in the 1660s, and her novelist’s eye lingers on a diamond-encrusted feather, dripping wax, candied fruit on the king’s table. She also takes a fresh, unusual and occasionally dislocating approach to narrative. The story of Buckingham and James is interleaved with short essays (the essay being a very 17th-century form). One-word titles usher in discussions of ‘horses’, ‘dancing’ and ‘magic’, among other things. Many of these provide contexts within which Buckingham and James’s relationship might be understood. A chapter titled ‘Sex’ discusses contemporary attitudes towards sodomy. A chapter on hunting explores an activity that both men loved and shared: halfway through, Hughes-Hallett adopts the early modern manual format, moving through the eight stages of the hunt. Other chapters use the diary form, particularly when things get stormy – and interesting – in the House of Commons. I sometimes yearned for a longer sentence and a steadier authorial hand, for more evaluation of motivations and consequences. And I would have liked precise references for the many telling primary quotations that have been filleted from secondary sources, so that I could chase them down for myself.

Hughes-Hallett is interested in seductive, exceptional and paradoxical men, and in the cultures that make them. Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen (2004) was followed by her innovative biography of Gabriele D’Annunzio, The Pike, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2013. D’Annunzio was a poet and politician who could both attract and repel; he spoke for beauty and for war. In The Scapegoat, Hughes-Hallett’s Buckingham is irresistible, charismatic and subservient, looking for a father figure. James, too, is paradoxical: an intellectual, experienced and wily monarch, ‘the best tutor in Europe’ for Buckingham, but also cowardly, paranoid and needy. He had been a king since he was barely a toddler, and Hughes-Hallett convincingly argues that this, along with a murdered mother and a lonely marriage, made him ‘emotionally ravenous’. He wept a lot. So did Buckingham.

Buckingham could also be wily – at least once his master had made him so. James shared everything with Buckingham, and the intimacy of their working relationship is well drawn here. But Buckingham soon moved beyond being the king’s dutiful protégé, becoming a power in his own right. As Bacon had instructed, a favourite was expected to grant favours himself: a job, a title, some land, a well-paid monopoly. Buckingham’s family and relatives were given positions at court. His mother became a countess. His half-brother Edward was knighted and given the monopoly on the manufacture of gold and silver thread. His cousin Giles Mompesson held the patent for regulating inns. The sale of titles increased rapidly under Buckingham, swelling the House of Lords. In 1615 there were 81 peers; by 1628 there were 126. Hughes-Hallett does not consider Buckingham’s influence in Ireland, yet his trade in Irish titles and lands – which again largely benefited his own family and connections – not only brought him great wealth but transformed the Irish peerage and Anglo-Irish politics. He enabled a relation by marriage, Oliver St John, to become lord deputy of Ireland in 1616, an appointment that surprised many on both sides of the Irish sea. Charges of corruption began to mount. The lord chancellor, Bacon, who also kept young men in his household, was made the fall guy. Hughes-Hallett interprets this as motivated by homophobia, which could not be directed (yet) at Buckingham, and certainly not at the king, despite allegations that the ‘sin of sodomy’ was infecting England. But to think only in these terms is to skim over what were, for many, real concerns about Buckingham’s abuse of his position.

The turning point in the book, and for Buckingham, is his ‘risky and peculiar’ trip to Spain in 1623 with James’s son and heir, Prince Charles. James was persuaded to let his ‘sweet babies’ travel incognito to Madrid as Tom and Jack Smith, to bring home the Infanta Maria as Charles’s bride. It was a match that James and the count of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, had been negotiating carefully for years. Gondomar hoped that the marriage would benefit English Catholics and keep England out of Spain’s conflict with the rebellious Dutch in the Netherlands. James – unlike his MPs – believed that an alliance with Spain would restore the Palatinate to his daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Elector Frederick, who had been ousted by Philip III of Spain. Frustrated by the slowness of diplomacy – the pace of 17th-century politics frustrated everyone – Charles believed that a surprise arrival would provide a romantic solution to the deadlock. In reality it was an undignified pantomime that astonished Europe. Charles and Buckingham even wore false beards. And it was a failure. The infanta was not bowled over, count-duke Olivares (Philip IV’s favourite) delayed, and the pope’s conditions for allowing the marriage would not be accepted at home. Charles and Buckingham departed.

After​ the humiliating failure of the Spanish match the tone and pace of The Scapegoat shifts. Hughes-Hallett’s narration of the trip reflects its farcical quality (one chapter, ‘More Advice on Bargaining’, is a paragraph long; another offers two imagined versions of an all-night conversation between Buckingham and Charles). But it is once we’re back in England that the political consequences of Buckingham’s actions – and of his relationship with the young heir – are most keenly felt. The return of the two knights minus a Catholic bride was initially cause for celebration at home. English Puritans’ hatred of Spain and Catholicism – or anything that looked like it – was not fully appreciated by James, and his self-curated role as Rex Pacificus was seen, by an increasingly Puritan Parliament, as unheroic, even iniquitous. Buckingham shifted his loyalties towards Charles, and away from peace towards war. He was, by this point, the country’s leading politician, on a par with the powerful ‘minister favourites’ of the two European superpowers: Olivares in Spain, Cardinal Richelieu in France. Buckingham knew how to negotiate, administrate and strategise. Hughes-Hallett finds his politics ‘baffling’, but he was attempting to keep everything in play: by appeasing the young heir (who now sought war with Spain) and encouraging a militant Parliament to trust him and raise taxes, while still treading carefully with his ‘dear dad’ James. Simultaneously, Buckingham began to push for a risky alliance with Catholic France, as a means of stemming the Habsburg tide: Charles should now marry Henrietta Maria, Louis XIII’s sister.

In March 1625, James died. Buckingham, no longer the dancing prodigy, stood to be inaugurated as the experienced, trusted adviser to a young king – which is the way Charles saw him. But he began to hurtle towards his fall. A disastrously underfunded expedition to Cadiz in the autumn was followed by Buckingham’s refusal, at a conference held at his house, to condemn Arminianism, a newly influential crypto-Catholic strand of Protestantism best represented by another of his creatures: William Laud, the future archbishop of Canterbury. It is an episode about which The Scapegoat is curiously silent, but it cemented MPs’ suspicions of Buckingham as the cause of all ills: casualties in war, the dishonour of defeat, ‘no money’, the country’s slide towards popery. Parliament drew up a list of the ‘Particular Misdemeanours of the Duke’, which included the extraordinary accusation that James had perhaps been poisoned by the ‘unfortunate posset and plaster’ supplied by Buckingham’s doctor. Charles defended his favourite to the end.

After a series of failed campaigns to Île de Ré and La Rochelle to defend French Huguenots, and the imposition of a forced loan on the public, the Commons decided to challenge Charles and remove the man they now saw as the ‘evil spirit that walketh between a good master and loyal people’. In a brilliant scene Hughes-Hallett recounts how ‘grave men of dignity and substance … dissolved into floods of tears’ – John Pym and Edward Coke among them – as they agreed to print a remonstrance naming Buckingham as ‘the chief cause of these evils and dangers to the king and kingdom’.

In the summer of 1628, John Felton, a wounded soldier who had served in both the Cadiz and Île de Ré campaigns, picked up a copy of the remonstrance at a London bookshop. He bought a dagger and made his way to Portsmouth, where Buckingham was staying in advance of another expedition to La Rochelle. On the morning of 23 August, after Buckingham had eaten his breakfast in the parlour of the Greyhound Inn and was making his way through its crowded hall, Felton stabbed him in the heart. When Charles heard that Buckingham was dead, he wept. But others celebrated. An anonymous ballad declared that Buckingham’s ‘name shall be/For ever hateful to posterity’.

As its title suggests, The Scapegoat is a largely sympathetic portrait of a brilliant man who was deliberately ‘paraded before a homosexual king’, catapulted to wealth and privilege, and then made the lightning rod for Parliament’s constitutional grievances. In time, those grievances would be directed at the proper target: the monarch himself. Hughes-Hallett acknowledges that Buckingham is not blameless but maintains that he was ‘really very nice’ and saw himself as an ‘obliging subordinate’, whose great gift to his royal masters was culture. His fall, in this telling, anticipates the loss of the Stuart court Hughes-Hallett has so lovingly depicted: the art, passion and beauty soon to be destroyed by ‘the Puritans’. In fact, not all Puritans were like this, and Hughes-Hallett lets Buckingham off too lightly. He was more than an accidental casualty of serious political and religious fragmentation. He was a deeply controversial and, by the end, unpopular figure, loathed by many for corruption and extravagance. While his military failures and their resulting horrors can partly be blamed on Parliament’s refusal to raise adequate funds, the policy decisions rested with him and Charles. Being a favourite was a precarious business, but surely, as Marvell wrote of Oliver Cromwell, ‘Much to the man is due.’