Tower and Town, September 2025 (view the full edition)Lucy Hughes-Hallett - The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham
My own next book, on the Tudor theatre, covers much of the same era and there's some crossover, so I found the author's eye for detail fascinating and never irrelevant. I bet you don't know why the donkeys on the Ile de Ré wear trousers. I do now, yet the book had me thinking of Shakespeare's line: "Yet Nature [ie the author] as she wrought thee fell a-doting." I thought the word 'Brilliant' in the title was publisher's hyperbole, but Hughes-Hallett seems to believe it of Buckingham, although much of what he touched turned to dust. A belligerent member of the war-party, as Lord High Admiral, he supported a naval expedition against Spain that turned into the Armada in reverse. She does recognise his astonishing ability to make the same mistake twice: in this case a second expedition, this time against France, which led to the annihilation of the force and the collapse of the Protestant cause in La Rochelle that it was sent to support. In this he stands in contrast to the King who promoted him - James VI and I, who like Nature, doted upon him, an obsession he was quick to exploit. If he was brilliant at all, it was in the outward trappings: handsome to excess, an exotic dresser full of the charm that he regarded as a substitute for diplomacy and a genuine connoisseur of art and artists. He'd certainly get a job at Sotheby's. Despite the playing-down of its (anti?) hero's flaws, the book is set against a gripping backdrop: a very good read. Lucy Hughes-Hallett will be in the Town Hall at 11.30am on Sunday 28 September. Nick Fogg |
This is a very good book by biographer Lucy Hughes-Hallett. It says a lot that I was disappointed to finish it after working my way through its some 600 pages.