Historical biographer Lucy Hughes-Hallett talks to us about her latest book 'The Scapegoat' about the brilliant but brief life of the Duke of Buckingham and offers a sneak peek at what she'll be talking about at the upcoming Southwold Literary Festival this November.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike, a biography of Gabriele d'Annunzio, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction and the Costa Biography Award. Her other books are Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett is also a respected critic and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Her latest book is The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of The Duke of Buckingham. As King James I’s favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham was the King’s gatekeeper, right-hand man and lover. Buckingham’s story was part of a great political drama - falling from grace spectacularly, he came to represent everything that was wrong with the country. In this richly compelling and authoritative account, Hughes-Hallett summons an era that still resonates today.
Lucy is one of the speakers at the Southwold Literary Festival appearing on Sunday 10 November. You can find The Scapegoat and Lucy's other books on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
I grew up in a fairly remote part of the countryside, and I read the whole time. A rather lonely childhood is a wonderful thing for a writer. My mother believed, and I agree with her, that children are amazingly open to new words and new ideas –much more so than adults - so there is really no limit to what they can absorb. She would have been shocked by the concept of ‘young adult fiction’. Why patronise young people by feeding them pap?
I didn't really go to school until I was 10 – a little country school where there were only two classes, the Big Ones and the Little Ones. The wonderful woman who taught the Big Ones used to read Lord of the Rings aloud to us every morning. Most of the rest of the time we were writing poetry. My poems were luridly apocalyptic visions. There was a bit of French conversation. I don’t remember any maths lessons.
Each of my books has grown out of years of thinking around a subject. I spent some time in Italy in my teens, so yes, I was aware of d’Annunzio, his beautiful poetry and his ugly politics. The Pike followed on from my previous book – Heroes. In both books I was writing about the way the glamour and exhilaration of heroism and hero-worship shades into toxic politics and the cult of violence.
Each time I write a book, I have to invent a brand-new structure. Writing non-fiction, you have to think about what you can do with the sources available. With fiction (I’ve written a novel, Peculiar Ground, and a collection of short stories, Fabulous) you’re creating your own material so you have more freedom.
It’s about George Villiers, who arrived at King James I’s court in 1614 as the fourth son of an obscure country gentleman with only one coat, and died, murdered, fourteen years later, having become the Duke of Buckingham and the richest and most powerful non-royal person in the country.
His story allows me to write about sex and gender and love at a time when thinking about those things was very different from ours. About war and pacifism: King James kept England out of the Thirty Years War but as soon as he was dead Buckingham plunged into it. About confrontations between parliament and would-be absolute monarchs. And along with those big topics, I write about the smaller ones that bring the past to life – about fabulously expensive suits and flowers and jewels and babies.
Buckingham was hated by the public. In the last three years of his life he started two unnecessary wars and so caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people. A popular rhyme prays God to ‘take this slime away’. But those who knew him personally all agree he was charming. And though he was hated for his recklessly aggressive foreign policy, initially the public loved him for it. They were bored of peace and excited by ideas of honour and chivalry. They failed to understand how much war would cost, in money, and in lives.
I’ll be talking about Buckingham’s life, and showing pictures. He rose to the pinnacle of Jacobean society on the strength of his looks, and he wanted those looks recorded. He posed for some thirty portraits – to artists including Van Dyck, Rubens, Van Honthorst. He was also a great collector. His pictures by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, del Sarto were smuggled out of the country during the Commonwealth and bought by a Habsburg Archduke. They now form the core of the Italian collection in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna
I’m writing about the rebellious women in Dickens’s novels.
Charlotte Brontë’s Villette.
No. I want my readers to think about my books, not about me.
