Who was the real George Villiers?

George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, was a prominent figure in the court of King James VI and I, who wielded considerable influence due to his long-standing position as the king’s favourite.

The second son born to a family of middling nobility in Leicestershire in c1592, Villiers grew up knowing a tumultuous family life and financial struggle. His mother, Mary Villiers, remarried twice after the death of his father (also named George), making strategic matches that allowed her to recoup her deceased husband’s debts and climb the social hierarchy. Of her four children, Mary singled out George as having the charisma and appeal that could aid his family’s ascent, and sent him to France as a teenager to learn courtly manners.

In 1603, James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth I to also hold the throne of England, as James I. When he began his English rule, the king’s inner circle was packed with Scottish courtiers. Knowing the king’s preference for the company of young, attractive men, a group of English nobles conspired to place the 21-year-old George in front of the king, hoping that he would catch the king’s eye.

What followed was a rise to prominence for George Villiers. He harnessed his charm to become a central figure in the king’s entourage for more than a decade, and used courtly alliances to gain positions of power for himself and his family – including his mother, Mary.

The story of the Villiers’ ascent is told in the 2024 drama Mary & George, starring Julianne Moore and Nicholas Galitzine in the title roles. Benjamin Woolley, biographer and author of The King’s Assassin: The Fatal Affair of George Villiers and James I (Pan Macmillan, 2017), joined the HistoryExtra podcast to share more about the extraordinary life of George Villiers.

What was George Villiers like?

Villiers possessed an undeniable allure that captivated those around him, explains Woolley.

“He had this kind of charisma, over which he seemed to have limited control. He was described posthumously (but by somebody who was alive at the same time) as having, ‘a face to paint an angel by’, so he was beautiful.”

He was a complex figure too. “He was rather impulsive, and he could be extremely arrogant,” says Woolley. “But one of the characteristics that I found most fascinating about him is that he was also capable of incredible humility.”

Villiers possessed an innate ability to lift allies to prominence, while ruthlessly handling adversaries.

How did George Villiers and James VI and I meet?

George Villiers’ fateful encounter with James VI and I occurred in 1614, at the estate of Apethorpe in Northamptonshire, during a visit by the king’s court.

Villiers was presented as a cupbearer, manoeuvred into the role by a group of courtiers trying to change the balance of the king’s cohort of advisors. His role wasn’t simply to serve drinks, but “somebody who was specifically introduced to the king to entertain him, and make the evening pass in a pleasurable fashion,” explains Woolley.

Over the course of the entertainments and dancing at Apethorpe – “he could dance like the devil,” Woolley says – Villiers succeeded in catching the king’s eye, and began to cultivate a relationship that challenged the existing favourite, a Scottish noble called Robert Carr.

The two men engaged in a feud that resulted in Carr’s fall from grace and implication in a court poisoning; he ended up imprisoned in the Tower of London.

What was George Villiers’ relationship with King James VI and I?

While historical interpretations vary, evidence suggests a profound emotional connection between Villiers and James, underscored by letters laden with affection.

Perhaps the strongest evidence that the relationship between them was sexual, is a letter from Villiers to the king, as explained by historian Joe Ellis on an upcoming episode of the HistoryExtra podcast. “In this letter, Buckingham mentions that he shall never forget at Farnham when they were on progress: ‘when the bed’s head could not be found between the master and his dog’.

“There are quite a few ways that you could take this, but I think that certainly does suggest some kind of physicality between the two,” says Ellis.

Woolley similarly highlights this collection of letters and their analysis by American academic David Moore Bergeron, who published a 1999 volume called King James and the Letters of Homoerotic Desire – “a bit of a breakthrough book”, according to Woolley.

“If you read [Bergeron], they’re a set of love letters,” he says. “There’s lots of ambiguous, suggestive phrasing in these letters. There are also very moving parts, such as when James sent a letter at Christmastime to George after the death of James’s queen, Anne, sort of pleading with George to become his wife.

“And that kind of language clearly shows a very deep, complex, probably sexual relationship between them.”

Villiers’ influence over James would extend beyond the personal realm, intertwining with matters of state and policy, and he quickly became a powerful figure in the affairs of state.

What sort of power did George Villiers come to have, and why did it cause such alarm?

Villiers’ ascent to power elicited widespread admiration and concern alike. “He had an extraordinary amount of power and status very quickly,” explains Woolley. The foremost example of this was in 1623 when he was granted his dukedom, establishing Villiers as the 1st Duke of Buckingham.

James’s predecessor Elizabeth I didn’t create any dukes, says Woolley. “That hadn’t really been done, I think, for about a century.

“There were dukes like the Howards, who went back to the time of the Normans, or there were members of the royal family. Dukedom, in other words, normally denoted some direct relationship to the royal family. And George got a dukedom. He also got his mother to be made countess, an extraordinary thing to achieve.”

In 1620, George Villiers married Lady Katherine Manners, the daughter of the Earl of Rutland (one of the richest families in England), and the pair went on to form an influential alliance marked by fondness, and had four children.

Along with his mother, Mary, Villiers also engineered the marriages of his siblings to suitably high-ranking people, and secured noble titles for his brothers. Yet his close ties to the king sparked apprehension among courtiers and parliamentarians, who feared his unchecked authority and its potential ramifications.

“His grip on policy, as well as the king personally, seemed almost total,” Woolley states. “He was a polarizing figure.”

“There was concern, particularly in Parliament, over the way that George was beginning to shape matters of political policy.”

The relationship between Britain and the Habsburgs was a key battleground. “James wanted to have a peace. All that had come up in the great Elizabethan era, the Armada and so on, was changed to an attitude of cooperation and peace.”

Villiers developed his own views on this sensitive policy. Ultimately, he decided – along with James’s son Charles (who, since the death of his elder brother Henry in 1612, was heir to the throne) – to set up Britain as part of a league that would challenge the domination of the Habsburgs in Spain.

“That, as you can imagine, caused alarm,” explains Woolley, “because he was in a position to change that policy.”

Villiers’ arrogance would also play a part in the breakdown of the king’s marriage negotiations to set up a match between Prince Charles and the daughter of the Spanish king, and later he pressured the king to go to war with Spain.

Woolley speculates if there was anything Villiers could have done to temper the stronger reactions to his ascent. “If George had sort of kept his nose out of politics, that would have been less of an issue, with respect to attitudes towards him at the time,” he says.

But it wasn’t possible for Villiers to be a non-political figure. Part of his role as the ‘favourite’, a semi-official role, was controlling distribution of royal patronage offices on the king’s behalf – “jobs for the boys, if you like,” as Woolley puts it.

“So you couldn’t have any role as a politician in James’s government without being in George’s good books.

“And it was James’s vulnerability to his passionate engagement with his favourites – in particular, George – that shaped the way that the power was distributed in the court.”

What role did George Villiers play in King James VI and I’s death?

James died at Theobalds Palace in Hertfordshire on 27 March 1625, with his son, Charles, and Villiers by his side. The official sources had it that the king died of a condition that resulted from malaria or typhus, which were endemic in England in the early 17th century (other sources consider dysentery as a possible illness, too).

But the secretive nature of what happened in the ‘Chamber of Sorrows’, as the king’s sickbed came to be called, left room for much speculation in the months following his death.

“This secret history,” wrote scholars Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell for BBC History Magazine, “the unauthorised version of James’s death, would take another 12 months to achieve a definitive form, but the anxious whispers around court in the early spring of 1625 were disturbing enough.

“Something untoward had happened in James’s sickroom. Someone had violated the strict protocols regulating who was to treat the king, and when.”

In terms of Villiers’ actions, “there were a set of treatments that were regularly used,” to manage James’s condition, says Woolley – usually repeated purging (whether through bleeding, laxatives or emetics). James reportedly “scoffed at medicine” and found the regime repugnant. Villiers and the king had regularly corresponded on ailments and treatments that had plagued them both, and in this final illness, Villiers had consulted an Essex doctor named John Remington and procured a plaster suggested by his mother, and, unbeknown to the other doctors, it was “applied to the king’s breast”.

In the months following James’s death, Villers was accused outright of poisoning the king. And with good reason, according to Woolley. “I think it’s almost certain that George had hand in – how can one put it? – helping James into the grave. But there isn’t a conclusion to this issue.”

What cannot be doubted, he says, is the historical significance of the political argument that Villiers did have a role in the king’s death.

“We don’t know what happened exactly in the king’s bedchamber. What we do know is that during the Civil War, after the arrest of Charles I, this idea that Charles (who was present at the time of his father’s death) was involved in it, surfaced rapidly as one of the reasons why Charles should be held to account. So, it clearly had a contribution to the political culture of the time,” explains Woolley.

“Charles wasn’t tried on that basis, for the murder of his father or anything like that, but it certainly fed into the antagonisms between the parliamentarians and the royalists.”

The poisoning allegations, though inconclusive, underscored the contentious nature of Villiers’ influence, and the turbulent political climate that characterised the early 17th century.

What happened to George Villiers?

After James’s death, accusations continued to be levied towards Villiers by political opponents. In the spring of 1626, George Eglisham, a Scots Catholic poet, physician and polemicist, published The Forerunner of Revenge, a pamphlet that accused him of murdering several leading courtiers, as well as the king.

Though under siege from pro-Spanish advocates and others who sought to curb his power, Villiers continued to hold influence in the court of James’s successor, Charles I. That lasted until 1628, when Villiers was assassinated.

His killer was John Felton, an embittered army officer who blamed Villiers for military failures and other personal grievances. He stabbed Villiers to death in a crowded room in a Portsmouth inn (due to the crowd, Felton was able to escape unidentified, though he later confessed and was hanged for his crime at Tyburn).

“Some thought it a fitting ‘execution’ of a notorious murderer,” write Bellany and Cogswell, “while others reported that Felton himself had cited Eglisham’s pamphlet as one of his motivations for killing the duke.”

Villiers’s assassination sent shockwaves across England, and left a complex legacy. Woolley believes that the story of George and his relationship with James is significant in understanding the “fertile environment in which the seeds of Civil Wars [that broke out in the 1640s] could flourish”.

George was survived by his mother, Mary, who died in 1632. They are both buried in Westminster Abbey.