In August 1628, in a lodging house in Portsmouth, England, a disgruntled former army officer named John Felton stabbed George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, to death. Remembered as England’s most powerful courtier, Villiers was the favourite and intimate companion of King James I, and later the de facto chief minister of his son Charles I. He was a man who, in little more than a decade, had risen from modest gentry to dominate the politics, patronage and foreign policy of the Stuart monarchy.

Felton believed he was acting on behalf of the nation. England, it seemed, agreed. Church bells rang. Pamphlets circulated celebrating the assassin. Crowds treated the murder as an act of public justice rather than private crime.

Four centuries later, Buckingham remains one of the most reviled figures in English history: a corrupt favourite, a sexual deviant, a political parasite blamed for military failure, economic distress, and constitutional breakdown.

Yet as Lucy Hughes-Hallett shows in The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham (2024), this hatred was politically useful. “He was called a devil, a spotted monster, a comet that disrupted the natural order, scrambled social hierarchy and set the music of the spheres a-jangle,” Hughes-Hallett writes of Buckingham’s posthumous reputation. “He was accused of being a traitor to his country, an enemy of the people and a regicide who poisoned the king who loved him.”

These descriptions, she notes, sat uneasily alongside contemporary testimony that described Buckingham as “modest, courteous, kind, obliging, affectionate, generous, gracious, loving and, again (this is the word that recurs most insistently), modest.”

The contradiction is the point. Buckingham was not merely hated; he was made hateful. He became, in Hughes-Hallett’s framing, a scapegoat – a figure onto whom political anxiety, religious hostility, and cultural panic could be projected at a moment when direct criticism of monarchy itself remained dangerous.

Speaking to The Indian Express on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival, Hughes-Hallett said, “It was easier for anyone to blame Buckingham than to think anything wrong about either of the kings he’d served,” she said. “Because the king was God’s representative on earth. So to criticise the king was a kind of blasphemy.”

Buckingham’s career coincided with what she called “a very crucial moment in English history as a kind of watershed, a turning point.” “He died in 1628 and a decade later the English Civil Wars began, which would lead further 20 years later to poor old King Charles I being executed,” she said.

In Hughes-Hallett’s account, scapegoating the Duke of Buckingham allowed mutually opposed factions to preserve incompatible beliefs. “Even in Buckingham’s lifetime and certainly in the subsequent 20 years or so, it was said by a lot of people, the royalists, that of course there’s nothing wrong with the institution of monarchy, and there’s nothing wrong with our King Charles, we love him. But he was led astray by his evil advisers.”

By the end of his life, Buckingham was no longer merely a favourite. “By the end of his life, he was King Charles’s first minister. and sort of they ruled in tandem together,” said Hughes-Hallett.

Yet it “suited a lot of people to say that it was Buckingham who’d made all the bad decisions that led to trouble for the country.”

For Buckingham’s enemies in Parliament, the logic ran in the opposite direction but reached the same destination. “For the people on the other side, the parliamentary party, the republicans, Buckingham came to personify everything that was wrong with monarchy, with the idea of having a king as head of state,” Hughes-Hallett said.

In both cases, Buckingham absorbed blame that could not safely be directed at the crown.

Buckingham’s political usefulness was inseparable from his intimacy with King James I, under whom his meteoric rise began. James made him his favourite; Charles I, who succeeded his father in 1625, inherited him as his de facto chief minister. “That word ‘favourite’ can mean a lot of different things, but in this particular case it certainly meant that the king was madly in love with him,” Hughes-Hallett said.

The evidence is unusually direct. “We know that because his letters have survived. They’re very tender, very passionate,” she said.

James, she noted, was already middle-aged when they met and “not particularly attractive”. The imbalance between the two men was stark. “James was passionately in love with Buckingham. And Buckingham addressed him as ‘my dear old dad’ and was fond of him, I think, in a kind of filial kind of way,” Hughes-Hallett said.

She added that the relationship was also physical. “They shared a bed and it’s pretty clear from their letters that they had a sexual relationship of some kind. We don’t know exactly what kind.”

Benjamin Woolley, in The King’s Assassin: The Fatal Affair of George Villiers and James I (2017), describes the extraordinary allure Buckingham exercised over those who encountered him, writing of the “magic thraldom” he inspired.

Woolley preserves contemporary descriptions of Villiers as “a man to draw an angel by,” language that captures both the potency of Buckingham’s beauty and the near-supernatural terms contemporaries used to explain it. Fascination and moral alarm were inseparable responses to his presence.

Asked whether homophobia played a role in Buckingham’s vilification, Hughes-Hallett said, “Well, certainly there was a lot of homophobia, a word which, of course, they wouldn’t have recognised or wouldn’t have used,” she said.

Inside the court, she explained, James’s desire for men was often tolerated. “The people at court, the ones who saw the King regularly, seem to have accepted, perhaps very reluctantly, but they did accept that King James fell in love with men,” she said. “And Buckingham wasn’t the first, by any means. He’d had many favourite love objects before.”

The fiercest hostility came from outside the court. “The Puritan preachers, a lot of the most interesting documents for the time are sermons,” Hughes-Hallett said.

Attendance at church was compulsory, and “the pulpit… was a kind of political platform.” From it, preachers denounced Buckingham relentlessly. “For them, what the king was doing, engaging in an intimate relationship with Buckingham, was sinful and disgraceful and also politically corrupting,” she explained.

In The Scapegoat, Hughes-Hallett situates this hostility within a broader cultural assault on pleasure and sensuality. She quotes the Puritan polemicist William Prynne’s condemnation of “dancing, music, apparel, effeminacy, lascivious songs,” a catalogue of sins that maps closely onto Buckingham’s tastes and courtly persona.

Direct criticism of living monarchs remained perilous, so contemporaries spoke obliquely. “The story of Buckingham was very often discussed in terms of the reign of King Edward II,” Hughes-Hallett said.

Edward’s relationship with Piers Gaveston provided a historical proxy. “It was safer to do that than to talk about King James and Buckingham than the living people.” By invoking earlier kings who had loved men, critics found “a useful way of being able to express the way people felt about what was going on in their own time.” History became a coded language for dissent.

By the late 1620s, Buckingham had become, in Hughes-Hallett’s words, “the grievance of grievances.” When Felton struck, many contemporaries experienced the killing as cathartic. Buckingham’s death seemed to resolve tensions that no constitutional mechanism could address.

Woolley records that the reaction was immediate and theatrical, noting, “a strange outburst of popular exultation, with a ringing of bells and lighting of bonfires that equalled those at his majesty’s coming from Spain.”

Yet, as Hughes-Hallett repeatedly emphasises, scapegoating only deferred a more radical reckoning. Twenty-one years after Buckingham died, England would execute its king. The violence visited upon the favourite ultimately returned to the sovereign himself.

“What I found most interesting was that they loved each other,” Hughes-Hallett said.

That love, unequal and publicly scandalous, as it was, made Buckingham powerful. It also made him expendable.

Buckingham’s life, in this telling, is not merely a biography of a fallen courtier. It is a case study in how societies manage dissent by personalising blame. He was ambitious, flawed, and sometimes reckless. But above all, he was useful. England needed someone to hate so that it did not have to confront its king. Buckingham was that someone.

Further reading:

Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham. London: 4th Estate, 2024.

Woolley, Benjamin. The King’s Assassin: The Fatal Affair of George Villiers and James I. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.