George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628) is one of the dazzling figures in English history, whose spectacular career dominated the 1620s, when he achieved not only political ascendancy at home but also a major role on the European stage of his time. Yet like many another favourite he earned himself massive unpopularity as well as power, and the unfavourable verdict of his contemporaries has been taken for granted by subsequent generations. A dispassionate and scholarly account of Buckingham has long been one of the major gaps in seventeenth-century studies, and the appearance of Roger Lockyer's massive and authoritative biography is therefore an event of the first importance.

Although Mr Lockyer deals with Buckingham's family relationships, his personal finances and his activities as a great patron of the arts, his is not simply a biography of Buckingham the man. It is also the first full-length study to take Buckingham seriously as a statesman and to assess his importance as one of the major figures in the complex pattern of European policy-making at the opening of the Thirty Years War. It is based upon extensive research in original sources, not only in England but also in France and Spain, and it shows the shallowness of the traditional view of Buckingham as an unprincipled adventurer.

As well as analysing Buckingham's policies and assessing their validity and effectiveness, Roger Lockyer unravels the fascinating story of his rise to power, his relations with James I and Charles I, his central role in the tangled Spanish and French marriage negotiations, his championship of the Huguenots, and his attempts to thwart the dangerous ambitions of Richelieu. Buckingham's was a stormy and dramatic career, ending, appropriately enough, with an assassin's dagger in Portsmouth, and Roger Lockyer has the narrative skill to do justice to it. This is not only an important book; it is also a magnificently readable one.

When, in 1972, the distinguished American historian, Professor T. K. Rabb, writing in the American Historical Review about early seventeenth-century studies, observed that 'few major areas of historical research have been laid so bare, with biographies of most of the leading actors also available', he added that 'The one grievous lacuna is a biography of the Duke of Buckingham, and unpleasant and lifelong project that thus far nobody has been wiling to undertake.' The mixture of regret and distaste has characterized much of the modern reaction to Buckingham. Yet Mr Lockyer, in triumphantly undertaking the task, has brought not only scholarship but also sympathy to his reinterpretation of Buckingham and his career; and he reveals to us in detail for the first time a man who, though certainly flawed and complex, was nevertheless a far more weighty and considerable personality, and a more significant statesman, than historians hitherto have been willing to allow.