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The Duke of Buckingham, wrote Alexandre Dumas, lived ‘one of those fabulous existences which survive… to astonish posterity’. In the summer of 1614, a young man from a modest gentry family was invited to a hunting party in Northamptonshire to meet a very special guest. George Villiers was affable, not terribly bright and superlatively beautiful. His mother Mary, a practical and ambitious woman, knew what his looks could do for the family, and she aimed high. The mark was King James I, a monarch who openly loved men. The king had lavished his then favourite, Robert Carr, with titles, wealth and great offices, but the finest pair of legs in Europe extinguished his star. James was to remain utterly enthralled by Villiers for the rest of his life, so ensorcelled that it was believed the author of Daemonologie had himself been bewitched.
The period between 1603 and 1625 hovers on the brink of modernity, its mores both recognisable and elusive; if the Jacobean age were to be personified in a masque, the bizarrely beautiful art form it created, it would dance as Janus, the god of duality and transition, looking simultaneously forward and back. As ‘a man who lived a woman’s life’, Buckingham (as he became) is its alien familiar, the unique creature of a unique time.
Clever, coarse, suspicious and passionate, James I had endured an emotionally starved and frequently terrifying childhood, shadowed by the fate of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots. The precise nature of his physical relationship with Buckingham remains uncertain.
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