George Villiers was born on August 28 1592, the son of a Leicestershire knight and sheriff. Tall and handsome, he was sent to a finishing school in Angers to learn French, conversation, and dancing – the key accomplishments of an aspiring young courtier.
He returned to London aged 19, and his mentor, Sir John Graham, presented him at court. His training had paid off, and he cut a notable dash as a wit and dandy.
King James I was well known to have a soft spot for debonair young men, and his favourite at the time was Robert Carr, the Scottish earl of Somerset. Carr noted the arrival of Villiers, and blocked a move to make Villiers a gentleman of the king's bedchamber.
Villiers instead took up an appointment as cupbearer to the king, in which role James was quick to compliment Villiers on his skilled conversation. A friendship developed, and the following year Carr and his wife were conveniently convicted of murder and sent to the Tower, leaving James free to turn his relationship with Villiers into a sexual one.
James’s nickname for Villiers was“sweet Steenie”, a reference to St Stephen, who had the face of an angel. Villiers’s face was not the only part of his anatomy that won him admiration. He was also renowned for his shapely legs, especially when set off by the garter James presented him when investing him with the Order of the Garter in April 1616.
More favours and power were to follow rapidly. On August 27 1616, the eve of Villiers’s 24th birthday, the king elevated him to the peerage as Baron Whaddon of Whaddon and Viscount Villiers. The following year James made him Earl of Buckingham and swore him into the Privy Council. In 1619, James made him a marquess, and in 1619 he appointed him Lord High Admiral.
All this favouritism caused deep resentment at court and in the country. James was 20 years older than Villiers, chose not to wash because of a disfiguring skin disorder, and dribbled because of an overly large tongue. People could not help suspect that his lavish treatment of Villiers was intended to keep the younger man interested.
In 1620, Villiers marriedLady Katherine Manners (who renounced her Catholicism for the union), and the couple had four children. The indications are that it was a loving and happy marriage, and in 1623 his wife remarked: “never woman was so happy as I am, for never was there so kind a husband as you are”.
Villiers was popular with the young Prince Charles, and the two sealed a lifelong friendship when Villiers joined him on an expedition to Spain in 1623 to forge a marriage contract between Charles and the infanta. The mission went disastrously wrong – in part derailed by Villiers’s arrogance – and the pair returned full of indignation, forcing James to declare war on Spain.
As James’s reign headed to a close, Villiers maintained his position as one of the most powerful men in the land. After James’s death in 1625, Villiers continued to enjoy his privileged status under the new administration of King Charles I, but his ongoing privileges only increased the widespread resentment against him. He became a full-blown hate figure after his disastrous military campaigns at Cadiz (1625) and the Île de Ré (1627). Parliament tried to impeach him twice, and Charles could only save him by dissolving Parliament on both occasions.
On August 23 1628, Villiers was lodging at the Greyhound Inn in Portsmouth en route for La Rochelle. While in the inn’s great hall, a man rushed from the crowd and stabbed him fatally in the chest with a tenpenny butcher’s knife. The public reaction was overwhelmingly positive.
The murderer was John Felton, an Army lieutenant who had fought in the Île de Ré campaign and was angry with Villiers for not offering him a captaincy and saving him from financial ruin. In a telling sign of Villiers’s deep unpopularity, Feltonwas fêted as a hero
Villiers was buried in Westminster Abbey, alongside James I in the King Henry VII Chapel.
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