Courting Favor

HE ARRIVES like a beautiful comet, all winsome airs and shapely legs. He departs this earth a wretched scapegoat, shocked that the looks, charm and amiability that took him to the right hand of kings failed to make him a competent warmonger.

- CATHERINE OSTLER

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.