From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, a stunning biography of one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic seventeenth-century Englishmen at the heart of political and royal life.George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628), was loved by three monarchs. King James I of England, whose bed-fellow he was, called him Steenie, after St Stephen whose face -was as the face of an angel-. James-s son, later King Charles I, equally enthralled by Buckingham-s glamour, made him his best friend and mentor. Anne of Austria, the Queen of France, confessed that -if an honest woman might love someone other than her husband- then Buckingham would have been her choice. Many believed that he was her lover. Buckingham was a dazzling figure. On horse-back, or cutting capers, he displayed a figure whose grace not even his worst enemies could refuse to acknowledge. He was also a skilful player of the political game, who rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth
