George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham

English politician

• Born: August 28, 1592
• Birthplace: Brooksby, Leicestershire, England
• Died: August 23, 1628
• Place of death: Portsmouth, Hampshire, England

As the personal favorite of James I and Charles I, Buckingham was the most powerful political figure in Britain in the 1620’s. Under his leadership, British participation in the Thirty Years’ War resulted in embarrassing military defeats, causing a dangerous political and constitutional rupture between the Crown and Parliament.

Early Life

The first duke of Buckingham (BUHK-ihng-uhm) was born George Villiers on August 28, 1592. He was the second son of the second marriage of a rather obscure country squire, Sir George Villiers, who died in 1605, leaving the boy to the care of his ambitious and formidable mother. The future duke was sent to France in 1611 to polish his courtly skills. He turned up at the English court in August, 1614, in a threadbare suit, without powerful friends, connections, or prospects, hopeful of making his way on the basis of the charm and good looks with which he was plentifully supplied.

Villiers was fortunate in catching the eye of King James I , who delighted in the intimate company of attractive young men. The king’s current favorite, the earl of Somerset, had grown insolent, though the king had long been patient with him, and he had made many enemies, public as well as private. Once the king noticed Villiers, he appointed him cupbearer, over Somerset’s objections, which appointment kept Villiers constantly in the royal presence. The archbishop of Canterbury encouraged Villiers’s rapid rise, hoping to reorient the country’s foreign policy against Spain. In April, 1615, Villiers was made a gentleman of the king’s bedchamber, again over Somerset’s objections, and was knighted. As the relationship ripened, the king, always generous to his friends, began to shower gifts of land and money on his young protégé. Villiers won the support of the queen with his charm and eventually of young Prince Charles, who became devoted to him. Somerset, mired in scandal, was dismissed, utterly routed.

In rapid succession, between June, 1616, and January, 1619, Villiers was made master of the horse, a knight of the Order of the Garter, Lord Waddon, Viscount Villiers, earl of Buckingham, marquess of Buckingham, and lord high admiral. In May, 1620, with King James’s blessing, Buckingham married Katherine Manners, daughter of the earl of Rutland, one of the richest peers in England.

Buckingham now became the sole dispenser of royal patronage. Without his approval, it was impossible to obtain the king’s assent to anything. Both the swiftness of his rise and his monopoly of royal favor were naturally deeply resented at court, but Buckingham, secure in his relationship with the king, withstood all attempts to supplant him. The king treated him, as he did Prince Charles, as an apprentice at governing, but Buckingham did not interest himself in the management of royal policy so long as he was consulted about appointments.

Early in his startling ascent to the heights of power, Buckingham showed that he possessed quick wit, great charm, and considerable daring. He was an adventurer who had risen far beyond what was thought possible for someone of his background, but he did not allow resentment at his astonishing rise to unnerve him. He also made every effort to provide for the members of his extended family. To his friends and family, he showed loyalty and boundless generosity; to rivals and enemies, implacable hostility, albeit hidden beneath courtesy.

Life’s Work

The central political problem of the day was how Great Britain should deal with the Thirty Years’ War, which had just broken out in Europe. The king’s inclinations were, as always, peaceful, but it proved impossible to remain aloof. James’s son-in-law, Frederick V , the Protestant elector of the Palatinate in Germany, had accepted the crown of Bohemia in defiance of Catholic Austria. This decision had set off the war, and Frederick promptly lost both of his crowns. James could not sit idly by and allow his daughter’s husband and their children to be dispossessed, but the military power of the Catholic states Austria and Spain was formidable. The king found, on summoning Parliament late in 1620, that the cost of recovering the Palatinate would be far more than he could afford or Parliament would grant. He therefore tried to pursue a diplomatic solution. What England, as the strongest Protestant power, had to offer in return for a restored Palatinate was a valuable promise of neutrality in the widening European war and a marriage alliance with Spain.

Buckingham and Prince Charles grew impatient with the slow pace of negotiation, in which Spain and Austria seemed to be gaining from the delay. In the spring of 1623, they pressed the aging king to allow them to go to Spain themselves to force a conclusion to the negotiations. Although it was extremely dangerous, they would not be denied. Traveling in disguise and almost unaccompanied, they descended on Madrid without warning and then spent six fruitless months trying to conclude the talks. While in Spain, Buckingham was made a duke, the first nonroyal English duke in more than fifty years. Ultimately, Buckingham and Charles concluded that Spain had never been serious about restoring the Palatinate, whatever had been promised or implied, and they returned home to a chorus of popular approval and demands for war, which they did much to inflame.

King James was no longer fully in control of the situation and reluctantly summoned Parliament. Buckingham won from them some funds, inadequate for a full-scale war but sufficient for the beginning of a vigorous military action against Spain. As lord admiral, Buckingham had done much to revitalize the Royal Navy, which had been allowed to decay during the Jacobean years of peace. Buckingham now set about trying to assemble a coalition of Protestant powers to oppose Austria and Spain in Germany and to secure the indispensable assistance of Catholic France by offering it a marriage alliance. Without French help, the Protestant powers were not strong enough to prevail over Spain and Austria. France was reluctant, however, to commit resources to recover the Palatinate. Buckingham raised an army, led by the German adventurer Count Peter Ernst Mansfeld (1580-1626), but it came to grief. Badly paid and supplied, the troops melted away when the expected French aid was not forthcoming. At this juncture, the old king died.

In 1625, the newly crowned King Charles I was forced to summon Parliament, the money granted for the war effort the previous year having been squandered. Parliament, which had been uninterested in, if not hostile to, the plan for a war in Europe, could not be expected to produce money for more of the same. Buckingham, seeing the difficulty, proposed that if Parliament produced the funds, it should have the war it preferred, a naval war in the best Elizabethan manner, directly against Spain and the riches of her Indies. Under this pressure, Parliament voted some additional money, though not enough, and a naval expedition against Spain was launched in the fall of 1625. It returned home in disgrace, having accomplished nothing. The new Parliament, summoned in 1626, responded to Buckingham’s mismanagement of the situation by impeaching him. The king could save him only by hastily dismissing Parliament.

Having narrowly escaped disaster on the domestic front, Charles and Buckingham now compounded their foreign policy difficulties. Because Charles had married a French princess, they were still hopeful of getting some help from their French alliance, but they managed matters so clumsily that, on the contrary, they blundered into war with France.

Hoping to force the French to help in Germany, Buckingham applied pressure by providing aid to the French Huguenots, the country’s Protestant minority, in their intermittent civil wars. In the summer of 1627, Buckingham took personal charge of an expedition to the Isle of Re, off Rochelle, the principal Huguenot stronghold. Here the duke spent many months besieging a French fortress until, exhausted, outnumbered, and on the point of being besieged themselves, the English were forced to withdraw.

When Buckingham returned with the remnants of his defeated army, he was the object of great public hatred, though he continued to possess the king’s confidence. Buckingham insisted on pursuing the French war, but a new Parliament raised a storm of objections to the measures the Crown had taken—without its approval—to finance the previous campaigns. These, embodied in the Petition of Right , provoked another dissolution of Parliament. Undeterred, Buckingham pressed forward on provisioning a relief fleet for Rochelle. He was at Portsmouth overseeing the work when, on August 23, 1628, a disgruntled officer who had survived the expedition against Spain assassinated him.

Significance

The first duke of Buckingham’s brief and astonishing career is difficult for modern historians to assess fairly, though the utter failures of his public policy make it easy to condemn him. His contemporary rivals for power regarded him with all the jealousy that only a rank upstart could excite. As an opponent of Parliament, he wins little retrospective sympathy from modern students. Like Cardinal de Richelieu in France and Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimental, count-duke of Olivares, in Spain, he was a practitioner and a great example of a form of government long vanished, the rule of the royal favorite. A proper scholarly assessment of what he was trying to do, in his own terms, has always been difficult because few of his papers seem to have survived.

There can be little question that Buckingham’s failure had powerful consequences in British domestic politics, for the disgrace of the defeats and the huge costs of the war generated a parliamentary uproar that poisoned the political atmosphere in the 1620’s, making cooperation between king and Parliament impossible. Whether these grave difficulties were a major precipitant of the English Civil War, which followed a dozen years later, is still a matter of controversy, but it is difficult to imagine that they played no role at all.

Buckingham rose swiftly, because he was attractive and charming and devoted himself successfully to holding the favor of two successive kings. His youth and inexperience brought him to grief, and for the disasters of the 1620’s he has received much blame. The seventeenth century made of his swift rise and fall a moral tale about the wickedness of a subject misleading his king and an object lesson about the folly of letting an upstart “crow” rise from obscurity to the highest level of society and politics.

Bibliography

Cooper, J. P., ed. The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years’ War, 1609-1648/59. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1971. An authoritative collaborative survey of the world in the early seventeenth century, with good bibliographies for further study. A basic introduction for serious students seeking the general historical background for the period.

Dalton, Charles. Life and Times of General Sir Edward Cecil, Viscount Wimbledon. 2 vols. London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1885. Cecil commanded the failed attack on Spain in 1625. This biography, despite its age and protectiveness toward its subject, prints many documents and gives much detail on the political and military difficulties facing Buckingham.

Elliott, J. H. Richelieu and Olivares. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. A concise and highly suggestive comparative study of two other royal favorites, contemporaries and rivals of Buckingham. Useful as a measure of Buckingham’s failure.

Gardiner, S. R. History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 1603-1642. 10 vols. London: Longman, 1883-1884. Despite its age, still the best narrative history of the period, though under growing scholarly attack (see Russell and Sharpe works below). Extremely critical of Buckingham and the Stuart administration generally.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Documents Illustrative of the Impeachment of the Duke of Buckingham in 1626. London: Camden Society, 1887. A central collection of documents on the greatest political crisis of Buckingham’s career, assembled and introduced by the greatest historian of the period. Virtually all the other volumes of documents assembled and edited by Gardiner for the Camden Society are relevant here. They were the by-product of his great history.

Lockyer, Roger. Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592-1628. London: Longman, 1984. Has replaced all previous biographies in its completeness and thoroughness of research. Has been criticized for its strong and rather one-sided defense of Buckingham. Though now the standard biography, its exoneration of Buckingham remains controversial.

Russell, Conrad. Parliaments and English Politics, 1621-1629. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. A key work in the attempt to revise the history of the politics of the 1620’s. Since Gardiner’s views can be seen as partisan, Buckingham’s difficulties appear more sympathetically.

Sharpe, Kevin, ed. Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History. Reprint. New York: Methuen, 1985. With Russell, one of the most influential revisionist works attempting to see the history of the 1620’s not, as Gardiner did, essentially in the terms set by Parliament, but with attention to the Stuart position.

Treadwell, Victor. Buckingham and Ireland, 1616-1620: A Study in Anglo-Irish Politics. Portland, Oreg.: Four Courts Press, 1998. Explores the influence of Buckingham on Ireland in the early years of the 1600’s, and concludes that his influence was invariably for the worse.