‘Comet’, ‘meteor’, ‘shooting star’: to his contemporaries only the prodigies of nature came close to matching the brilliance and disruptive power of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628), the dazzlingly handsome royal favourite who, for more than a decade, was the most powerful figure in early Stuart England. But the analogy was also double-edged. For prodigies – so astrological theory held – were also portents of disaster in the state. Here, as in so much else, the duke did not disappoint.

Athletic, well-educated and strikingly fair-faced, Villiers was introduced to the royal court in the summer of 1614, aged twenty-one, by an anti-Catholic clique within the Privy Council in the expectation he would catch King James I’s eye. James, though the father of several children, was notoriously attracted to decorous young men and had gone through a series of glamorous and sometimes influential ‘favourites’. After the self-destruction of the most recent in a scandal involving witchcraft and murder the previous year, Villiers’s godly backers hoped that he would fill the vacancy, informing them on and perhaps even guiding the thinking of their dangerously Hispanophile king.

Villiers, however, became a favourite like no other, gifted with what seems to have been preternatural ‘emotional intelligence’. The relationship of intimacy and trust he established with King James was unlike anything that had been witnessed hitherto. To the scandal of the court, the monarch’s devotion to Villiers was openly homoerotic and in private almost certainly sexual: James, one courtier reported, would ‘tumble and kiss [him] as a mistress’. The new favourite even won over James’s son and successor, Charles, just eight years his junior; and if this relationship was virtuously chaste, it was no less emotionally close than Villiers’s relationship with Charles’s father.

On these foundations of royal intimacy, Villiers, still in his early twenties, built an edifice of offices, personal wealth and political patronage that towered over every contemporary rival. Two key appointments registered his arrival at the pinnacle of power: as Master of the Horse, which placed him at the king’s side whenever he travelled or hunted, and as Lord High Admiral of England, in charge of the defence of the realm. 

With office came a vertiginous rise in wealth and social status. Within a decade, the plain ‘Master Villiers’ had acquired a series of palatial residences and risen through every rank of the peerage to become England’s only duke. The new Duke of Buckingham now outranked every other nobleman in England. Moreover, his seemingly unassailable place in the royal affections fireproofed him against every criticism (and there was much), whether from courtiers, Parliament or the press. Only an assassin’s knife, wielded in Portsmouth one morning in August 1628, would succeed in bringing Buckingham’s dominance to an end.

How did he do it? If baffled contemporaries ascribed his ascendancy to sorcery or to a malign alignment of the stars, professional historians have been equally nonplussed. No full-length scholarly study of Buckingham has been attempted for almost half a century. The sheer complexity of the political background and the disappearance of the duke’s private archive have proved major deterrents. 

Biographers, however, are a pluckier bunch. They skydive where professional historians fear to tread, and Lucy Hughes-Hallett – winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and Duff Cooper Prize – is among the most fearless. She has parachuted successfully into terrain as varied as ancient Egypt (for a study of Cleopatra) and Fascist Italy (for a biography of Gabriele D’Annunzio), so a drop into early Stuart England comes with high hopes.

Her explanation of Buckingham’s political dominance focuses closely on the psychological needs of the monarchs he served and, even without evidence from the consulting couch, it mostly rings true. James – locked in a chilly dynastic marriage and disappointed in different ways by both his male progeny – found in Buckingham both the physically exciting companion and the perfect son that fate had hitherto denied him. Charles – physically frail until late adolescence and brought up in the shadow of an athletic and charismatic elder sibling who had died in 1612 – found in the duke something he, too, had lacked: a confidence-encouraging and affectionate elder brother. 

Hughes-Hallett sometimes makes heavy weather of the conventions of Jacobean letter-writing. It is not the case that ‘incest is implied, and so is paedophilia’ in the playful phrase ‘your dad and husband’ with which James signed off his letters to the duke. It’s a joke. But her analysis of emotional relationships is almost always plausible, and offers probably the best explanation thus far for the otherwise baffling durability of Buckingham’s place in the affections of two kings.

Equally sure-footed is Hughes-Hallett’s account of the international crisis that dominated the entire decade of Buckingham’s ascendancy: the opening phase of the confessional conflict known as the Thirty Years’ War. In the Holy Roman Empire, a newly militant Catholic alliance had dispossessed James’s son-in-law, the Elector Palatine, and seemed to threaten the very survival of Protestantism. English involvement in that war, however, required funding on a scale that could only be supplied by Parliament, whose meddling in government James was determined to avoid. Yet non-involvement also came at a cost, leaving the king open to the charge of betraying a religious duty, as Europe’s most powerful Protestant prince, to intervene in defence of God’s cause.

James chose diplomacy over godly duty and, to the outrage of many English Protestants, redoubled his efforts to move closer to the Catholic powers. He revived an earlier proposal for a marriage alliance between Prince Charles and a daughter of the Spanish king, Philip III. Ignoring a barrage of criticism from the pulpit, he left Buckingham to be the public advocate – and the would-be scapegoat – for this highly unpopular royal scheme. Yet not even a visit by the duke and the prince to Madrid in 1623 to woo the king’s daughter Infanta Maria in person – like something ‘from the pages of a chivalric romance’ – was sufficient to overcome Spanish objections to the match. The return of Prince Charles unwed and the ruination of James’s strategy of a Catholic entente were greeted with wild rejoicing across a nation in which the Armada was still in living memory.

This humiliating diplomatic demarche was the turning point in Buckingham’s career. Now looking to secure his future in the next reign, he broke with the old king and, posing as the defender of Prince Charles’s slighted honour, recast himself as the leading advocate of an anti-Catholic war. Where before he had been reviled as a crypto-papist appeaser, Lord Admiral Buckingham now found himself cheered by his former Puritan critics – and popular as never before. Within weeks of Charles’s accession early in 1625, England was at war with Spain. Two years later, it was at war with Catholic France as well.

War held out to Buckingham the tantalising prospect of securing a place in the national pantheon beside the great naval heroes of the Elizabethan age. In his first foray into naval war – an attack on Cádiz in 1625 – he deliberately sought to replicate the Elizabethan raid on that same Spanish stronghold back in 1596. When this failed, he turned to defending the Protestant enclave of La Rochelle, on the French coast, against its Catholic oppressors. He sent naval expeditions to its aid in 1625 and 1627, though these, too, ended in fiasco. He was preparing to depart for a third, in August 1628, when his plans were cut short by his assassination.

Hughes-Hallett’s accounts of these campaigns form one of the strongest aspects of her book. Vivid and fast-paced, they reveal Buckingham as a courageous, if strategically inept, commander, constantly striving with inadequate resources for that elusive victory that would make him ‘loved’ again, as he had been in the heady, hopeful days of 1624. 

Her explanation for these successive failures is a simple one: ‘No money’ – a phrase that is repeated almost as a mantra in the last part of her book. Yet while she places the blame for failures in funding, not unreasonably, on Parliament, there is little detailed consideration of why Buckingham’s relations with the Commons and Lords had become so toxic. 

This takes us to a dimension of Buckingham’s power and durability that barely figures in this book: the vast network of patronage and control of appointment to offices that extended from his London palace, York House, to Whitehall, the law courts, the universities, the Church and every county of the realm. Hardly an office or honour was bestowed during this period without the approval of the duke or those acting on his behalf, and without a large backhander to the ducal exchequer. 

Nowhere was corruption more blatant, or for the duke more lucrative, than in the sale of peerages. During the years of his ascendancy, the duke and his agents disposed of so many noble titles that the House of Lords was expanded by more than 50 per cent, from 81 (in 1615) to 126 (in 1628). This (in the words of Lawrence Stone) was ‘one of the most radical transformations of the English titular aristocracy that has ever occurred’. Yet, curiously, it rates not a mention in this book.

So, too, with Buckingham’s no less extensive influence on religion – one of the most volatile flashpoints of the age. The York House Conference of February 1626, at which the duke presided, was a turning point in the history of the Church of England, marking the moment when Buckingham and the new king shifted their support decisively in favour of the rising anti-Calvinist ‘Arminian’ party among the clergy, with consequences that would affect every parish in the realm. Yet this, too, slips by unnoticed.

Other slips hint at further blindspots in Hughes-Hallett’s view of the period. There are muddles over topography (York House was not the ‘westernmost of the palatial houses lined up between the River Thames and the Strand’), over officeholders (Buckingham’s predecessor as Lord High Admiral was not ‘Sir Robert Mansell’), over titles (Sir Edward Cecil was never made ‘Earl of Wimbledon’), and in the frankly bizarre claim that ‘in the first year of his reign King James … created eighty-three earls’. Eighty-three is larger than the entire English peerage in 1603, when James came to the throne. The actual number of new earls created that year? Two.

Such missteps aside, there is still much to enjoy in this book. Brisk chapters (rarely more than four or five pages long) ably recount the tale of Buckingham in love and war, each instalment spliced with an equally short thematic essay on subjects ranging from Rubens to wizards. But the vast political network which he stood atop with such gravity-defying mastery is rarely glimpsed, let alone explained. The epitaph on Buckingham’s tomb in Westminster Abbey described him as ‘the riddle of the world’. Even after nearly seven hundred pages of lively, chatty prose, that riddle remains no closer to being solved.