Courting Favor

Lucy Hughes-Hallett's astute, piquant biography of a Jacobean courtier, "The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham," is as much a psychological study of hierarchical power as it is of one man's life. Split into three sections, the book's structure has a contemporary air; lists, brief chapters, history with a wordsmith's lightness of touch.

It is a tale from the early, Stuart years of 17thcentury British history, sandwiched between Elizabeth I and the nation's civil war, and features battles with Parliament, awkward relations with Europe, and struggles over wealth, privilege and power. All the impulses it traces-the pursuit of glory, love and resentment-transcend the historical moment. Swap the court for a modern corporation and you have it: that a golden rise may well be followed by a fall; that, as in the Rubens painting of Buckingham's apotheosis on the ceiling of his London residence, where success flies, envy follows behind.

The indisputably handsome fellow at the heart of the story was born plain George Villiers, the second son of a Leicestershire squire, in 1592. The blessings of his cradle were beauty of form and a stupendously pushy mother. Spotting his natural charisma early, the widowed and remarried Mary sent him to France to be "finished," and he returned not much of a scholar but something more mesmerizing in the eyes of England's king, James I. The king was a man with an upbringing almost as dysfunctional as it is possible to imagine, his father murdered when he was young, his mother-Mary, Queen of Scots-beheaded by her cousin Elizabeth. Young James himself was beset by attempts to either kill or kidnap him.

James was dazzled by young Villiers, who, it seemed, was both magnetically attractive and everything the king was not-confident in his own skin, a peerless dancer, adored by women and the delight of his mentors, who included the polymath Francis Bacon. Ms. Hughes-Hallett renders the young man in his moment of glory: He dances in an Inigo Jones masque, diamonds start to come his way, ditties are written, the admiration of the king is obvious. The Earl of Somerset, who had made the mistake of growing both tetchy and a beard, had formerly captured the royal affections. Villiers proceeded to see off his rival, ascending to the precarious position of favorite. (Much scholarship has debated whether this passionate relationship was sexual. James called him "sweetheart" and "wife." Pamphleteers used cruder terms.) He was granted estates, roles, titles-he soon became Master of the Horse (a role like transport minister), Knight of the Garter, Baron, Viscount, Earl, Privy Councillor, Lord High Admiral and finally, triumphantly, the only nonroyal Duke at the time.

As the king's beloved, "Steenie" (shortened from St. Stephen, who was said to have the face of an angel) was charged with being his master's eyes and ears. In turn, he was besieged with requests for favors, sinecures, titles, from relations and friends hoping to be dragged up in his wake. Ambassadors became his spies on behalf of the king, and he began to collect the finest art, and further solidified his position by marrying Katherine Manners, the richest heiress in the land.

Buckingham soon became best friend and mentor to James's young heir, Prince Charles.

This alliance--whether it was strategic or organic in origin-would see favorite and heir embark on an inauspicious trip to Spain to woo the Infanta Maria as a bride for Charles. Though she was Catholic to his Protestant, she would bring pan-European alliances and a continent size dowry. However, Buckingham met his match in the Spanish king's own protégé, the Count-Duke of Olivares, a wily, grim tactician who did not relish the idea of Philip III's daughter marrying the Prince of Wales.

Ms. Hughes-Hallett, the author of "The Pike" (2013), a biography of the poet Gabriel D'Annun zio, has the historian's sense of context and the novelist's sense of character. She luminously spins the story of Buckingham's attempt to orchestrate a triumph of international and marital relations and how it all unraveled even before it began. It is testament to his allure that when the whole chimera collapsed he was still in favor with both father and son. In fact in Protestant England, where the match was dreaded, there was rejoicing at the return of the prince.

As the father king died-in the ambiguous presence of Buckingham and his mother, which was, at the very least, unwise-the son king rose and Buckingham, remarkably, was still there.

Charles I decided to govern, with a council of five (Buckingham at the lead) rather than relying on Parliament, with whom he had a fractious relationship.

This, along with the decision to adopt a bellicose, unpopular foreign policy, would spell Buckingham's downfall. But the duke acquired greater and greater housesNew Hall, Essex; Burley-on-the-Hill; Rutland and York House between the Strand and the Thames. He befriended Rubens and was painted by Van Dyck.

"The Scapegoat" leads us through Buckingham's descent, a painful slow-motion decline through his misguided attempts at international relations. As Lord High Admiral he proved a disaster: He failed to build a fighting fleet, and an ill-planned raid on Cadiz in 1625 was driven less by maritime strategy than by his hopes to regain personal popularity. The man who had two kings scarcely squeak without consulting him became the most detested person in the nation. The end, a stabbing in an inn by a disgruntled officer, is shocking when it comes, with all the randomness of a modern assassination.

Buckingham was buried, as befitted a near-royal duke, in Westminster Abbey, and he passed from the Stuart world into myth.

Alexandre Dumas, in his novel "The Three Musketeers" (1844), wrote: "He passed, with just title, as the handsomest gentleman and most elegant cavalier of France or England.

The favorite of two kings, immensely rich, all-powerful in a kingdom which he disordered at his fancy and calmed again at his caprice. George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, lived one of those fabulous existences which survive, in the course of centuries, to astonish posterity." For posterity, the Stuart psychodrama is indeed astonishing. A dazzling performance, a gruesome end: Ms.

Hughes-Hallett leaves us with fascinating insight into a formative and strange period of English history, where King and Parliament sat uneasily with each other, but a graceful youth could, for a while, outshine both.