Fourth Estate to publish Lucy Hughes-Hallet's biography of the Duke of Buckingham

Fourth Estate is publishing The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by biographer and author Lucy Hughes-Hallett.  

Publishing director Louise Haines acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Felicity Rubinstein at Lutyens Rubinstein. It will publish on 10th October 2024. 

Hughes-Hallett’s biography of Gabriele d’Annunzio, The Pike (also Fourth Estate), won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Costa Biography Award in 2013.  

Her new book is about the meteoric rise and fall of James I’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. “She transports us, with a novelist’s touch, into a courtly world of masques and dancing, gorgeous clothes, the art of Rubens and Van Dyck, gender-fluidity, sex and appallingly rudimentary medicine”, the publisher said. 

“She writes about witchcraft and hunting and the beginnings of the enlightenment, about print-media and public opinion as a political force. She brings alive tempestuous scenes in Parliament, when the Commons chamber was full of men weeping as they struggled to defend citizens’ legal rights. The vivid personalities of Buckingham, canny James I and poor stubborn, doomed Charles I leap from every page.” 

Haines said: “It’s a total joy to be working with Lucy on The Scapegoat. Lucy’s extraordinary recreation of early 17th-century England and Europe makes you time travel straight back to 1615.” 

Hughes-Hallett added: “Buckingham’s life is a compelling story, with deep resonance for today’s world. All of my books have explored the interface between actual events and the operations of imagination and desire. In this one I’ve been able to write as well about art and love and war-fever and pacifism in the setting of a society on the brink of cataclysmic change.”