Being king can be a lonely business. Perhaps the less suited a person is to rule, the more urgently they feel the need for a companion, a favourite, who will ease their worries and provide their pleasures. James I of England was just such a monarch. Although he had an unshakeable faith in his right to rule, he required distraction from the heavy burden of state. Scholarship, including musing on the divine right of kings, was one of these escape routes; hunting and drunkenness, too; but his true solace, for nearly 10 years, was his beloved bedfellow, George Villiers, whom he raised from humble origins to become Duke of Buckingham.
Buckingham has been relatively overlooked because his identity-bending role as James’s “sweet child and wife” rendered him somehow suspect. A man whose skills included dancing like a dream and looking marvellous on a horse was seen as less worthy of study than a minister of state, despite the decade-long role Buckingham would grow into as co-architect and implementer of Stuart policy. The fact that the issues that would tear the country apart when the civil wars began 14 years later had their roots in these policies only adds to his importance. This fabulous biography is long overdue.
