One of the recurring elements in populist political mythology is the appeal to the “Last Great Conflict” – the decisive battle of a prior generation in which national honour was vindicated, and threatening foreign powers humiliated. It is an appeal that can be used to put pressure on contemporary governments, either to display them as craven and inept (and thus illegitimate) heirs of earlier victories, or, more dramatically, to push governments into new conflicts that will repeat the winning formula of the past.
What comes through with great clarity in Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s crisp and vivid portrait of one of the most prominent statesmen of the early Stuart era is how powerful a role this kind of discourse played in pre-Civil War England – to the extent that it indirectly helped generate the Civil War itself by creating a protracted and bitter stand-off between Crown and Parliament over public funds. George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, was at the centre of these debates for just over a decade; and as Hughes-Hallett’s title tells us, he was blamed, with increasing vitriol, for the disastrous failings of a foreign policy that was by no means his sole responsibility. But – again as this biography makes clear – he was conspicuously ill-equipped to respond effectively to the criticism he received. The overall impression is of a man who, for all his charm, cultivation and fluency, had very little real political intelligence.
This is hardly surprising, given his history. Born in 1592, the son of a Midlands gentry family, he was brought forward by a court faction eager to consolidate their influence with James I; something of a honeytrap. Exceptionally good-looking and physically graceful, Villiers became the object of the King’s devotion, rising meteorically in the social hierarchy, receiving eye-wateringly extravagant benefactions from James in the shape of houses, lands and titles (culminating in his elevation to a dukedom at a time when there were no other non-royal dukes in England). He enjoyed unique access to the King and a unique level of trust and affection – about which King James made no secret (he is famously said to have compared his feelings for Villiers with Christ’s love for the Apostle John). With some tutoring from Francis Bacon, among others, Villiers stepped up to the role of a proto-prime minister in his early twenties, taking on heavy responsibilities for diplomacy and the management of the legal system and the public purse.
And this is where the shadow of the Last Great Conflict began to fall. James I – unusually – had a vision of a European balance of power in which he could figure as a universal broker. He wanted, you might say, to be Queen Victoria: with some tactically important dynastic marriages, a number of warring royal houses in Europe would be allied through his family. Over-ambitious states would be deterred from aggressive adventures by a solid bloc of treaty commitments. And to achieve this, James was prepared to contemplate the unthinkable: a marriage alliance with the arch-enemy, Spain, for his surviving son Charles as a counterweight to his daughter’s marriage to the Protestant Elector Palatine, Frederick.
The prospect of a Spanish marriage caused panic in English Protestant circles, but James persisted with negotiations. When these stalled, Buckingham and the young Charles took the extraordinary step of making a secret trip to Spain in 1623 to see if the match could be settled (they travelled, in one of those couldn’t-make- it-up details, as the two “Smith” brothers).
Hughes-Hallett gives a finely detailed account of the slow-motion train crash that followed. The Spanish court was deeply embarrassed, various diplomatic niceties were overturned (Prince Charles behaved with great tactlessness on more than one occasion, and Buckingham was not much better). It dawned on the Smith brothers after a while that they had effectively made themselves hostages in Madrid. Pressured daily to agree to terms for the marriage that included the Prince’s conversion to Roman Catholicism and the lifting of legal sanctions on Catholics in England, they made reckless promises that could never have been kept. It was evident that the marriage plans were a very long way from being finalised. Eventually, the Smiths were allowed to make their way back to London – where, in a supremely ironic turn of events, Buckingham found himself hailed as a Protestant champion for having frustrated the plans for a Spanish alliance (the commitments made in order to escape from Spain were quietly buried).
It was a significant turning point. The Spanish debacle reinforced the furious anti-Catholic sentiment prevailing in England – and especially in the House of Commons – and the King was urged to follow the Elizabethan example of noisy aggression against Spain. Wildly provocative and ambitious naval raids (almost amounting to state-sponsored terrorism) were undertaken, and ended in humiliating failure. But the parliamentary appetite for war against more or less any Catholic neighbour remained strong. James’s son-in-law Frederick had been ejected from his position as King of Bohemia by Catholic nobility, and the Thirty Years’ War was under way; the restoration of Frederick to the Bohemian throne became an iconic Protestant cause in England, and frustrated all attempts at a rapprochement with Spain and other Catholic powers. Despite Charles’s eventual marriage to the French princess Henrietta Maria, war with France proved an appealing alternative to war with Spain, and in 1627 English forces supported the Protestant garrison at La Rochelle in resisting the siege being prosecuted by Cardinal Richelieu (although Buckingham had earlier given support to Richelieu).
Behind this chaotic story lies a consistent pattern of parliamentary pressure for war (King James remained reluctant, his successor less so), efforts by Buckingham to organise convincingly glamorous military adventures for English forces, parliamentary refusal to provide the necessary subsidies that would have given any of these efforts a chance of success, and Buckingham being blamed for the series of appalling military disasters in 1627 and 1628. Increasingly seen as either a corrupt incompetent or (by conspiracy-minded Puritans) a closet Catholic agent, he became the most hated man in England – with criticism of his record a veiled way of criticising King Charles, after James died in 1625. In 1628, he was fatally stabbed by a disgruntled soldier, leaving England’s European policy in disarray and an ominously polarised relation between King and Parliament in England. Hasty peace-making produced a lull of about a decade; but the ground had been prepared for the internal war to come.
A scapegoat, but not an innocent; Hughes-Hallett is clear about this. Buckingham went on making the same elementary mistakes in his final years, learning nothing from the inexorably repetitive pattern of events. The collusive attempts to conciliate a parliament with more than its share of xenophobic nitwits, the ludicrous Micawberism that was practised in place of financial planning, the humiliations of military expeditions that ended in totally unnecessary casualty figures, mostly from disease – Buckingham bears the responsibility. Earlier in his career, he had as lord high admiral overseen some useful and overdue reform of the navy; but his administrative capacity dwindled into a desperate round of botched measures in pursuit of a chimerical revival of the good old days of successfully ruthless pirates like Francis Drake.
As Hughes-Hallett observes, all this arises from Buckingham’s status as “favourite” – the object of James’s passionate love, the trusted friend, familiar and bed companion. She is sensible and judicious about the erotic element in the relationship: James may not have been simply hypocritical when he wrote words severely condemnatory of “sodomy”; the term had a meaning in medieval and early modern moralising that is both looser and more precise than its more recent uses. James and his male favourites may well have avoided indulgence in “sodomy” as understood at the time (anal intercourse), but that did not mean that a great deal of physically intimate stimulation did not go on.
Hughes-Hallett rightly sets this alongside James’s gushingly sentimental and occasionally voyeuristic delight in Buckingham’s marriage and family life. Starved of affection and emotionally volatile, James deeply wanted to be the loving patriarch of a family: Buckingham himself was a substitute child for James before his own children became substitute grandchildren. Not for nothing did the King sign his letters as Buckingham’s “dad”.
James in fact comes across rather sympathetically in this account. Genuinely loathing the violent masculinity of much of the culture around him (as a child and as an adult), eager to nourish and instruct, hungry for companionship, shy to the point of paranoia, usually cleverer than his companions yet less able to secure what he wanted, privately or publicly. It is not surprising that the compliant attention and flirtatious tenderness offered by a dramatically beautiful young man produced the emotional dependence that made him shower Buckingham with resources and dignities he was poorly equipped to use.
The duke was a discriminating patron of the arts and quick to pick up the manners and currents of the court; beyond this, there is not much evidence that he was very bright, let alone that he had any deeply held convictions. His Elon Musk-like wealth and extravagance was almost entirely consumed in display (though he did attempt to subsidise some of his later military ventures out of his own pocket). He loved the theatrics of power that Elizabeth had exploited and that James disliked, but his strategic sense was minimal, and his attention to suffering or vulnerable groups (including the soldiers left diseased, maimed and destitute by his reckless war games) was never much in evidence. He profited hugely from acquiring Irish estates and selling titles, and also encouraged creating “plantations” in Ireland of Protestants from Scotland, leaving a bitter and still unresolved legacy.
James needed someone who could be for him what Richelieu was in contemporary France or Olivares in Spain – a minister of acute strategic intelligence and iron will. Buckingham came off badly in encounters with both. But since the death of Robert Cecil in 1612, James had no such professional to hand. Buckingham was a courtier with an amiable personality, but it’s hard to see him as a true statesman. Perhaps if he had been one, he would have been better equipped to do what William Cecil had done for Elizabeth, perhaps even Cromwell for Henry VIII – to create a new mythical story that did not depend on reworking the material of the last generation but one.
Regressive and repressive political or national narratives are driven out not by rational argument but by newer and better narratives. James had a narrative, but Buckingham was not the man to make it credible. The story is a tragic one, no less so for being told here with verve, erudition and empathy.
The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
4th Estate, 640pp, £30
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[See also: The fraught history of Christianity and sex]
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This article appears in the 02 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The fury of history