On August 23, 1628, at Portsmouth, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, was conferring with his officers on the preparations for an expedition to La Rochelle. England sought to succour the Protestants besieged by the armies of the French King. The Duke held command of the fleet. From behind, John Felton drew near and struck him beneath the ribs, under the left arm. Buckingham collapsed. The assassin dropped his weapon and vanished into the press of the crowd, yet he made no long endeavour to fly.
Buckingham had already achieved wide notoriety long before men saw the fall of the hand that struck him down. For months past, the Duke had been denounced in Parliamentary debates as a royal favourite who had exceeded all bounds of his authority. A broadside scattered in the streets asked who governed the realm; its answer arraigned first the King, then the Duke, and lastly the Devil. A short while prior, Dr. Lambe, commonly styled the "Duke’s Devil," had been murdered by a London mob. His slayers had cried out that they would deal still more cruelly with his patron. Political rancour circulated through ballads and menaces, loud enough that a man might persuade himself the slaughter of a minister would render a service to his country.
The Duke is said to have cried out that the villain had killed him. Felton at first took advantage of the uproar to slip away; he had lost his hat. When a bystander picked it up, he claimed ownership thereof rather than make good his escape. He subsequently confessed to having dealt the blow and showed no remorse for the deed. Those present subdued him. The Duke’s demise had occurred under the very eyes of his military household, yet no tumult could efface the question already presenting itself: had Felton acted alone?
What astonished contemporaries was the swiftness with which the murderer was transformed by some into a hero. On the road to London, passers-by hailed him as a saviour. An aged woman bestowed her blessing upon him, likening him to David, the youth who had brought down a giant. In taverns, healths were drunk in his honour. A schoolmaster was sentenced for having praised Felton and reviled the King, declaring he would gladly have performed the assassination with his own hands. Others discerned in it an answer to the excessive power of the royal favourite. A populace that had viewed the Duke as an oppressor could readily welcome his slayer as an avenger.
Within the Tower of London, his cell became a kind of reception chamber. Persons of diverse ranks came to look upon the man who had dared to slay the royal favourite, and to inquire into his reasons. He admitted the murder and pronounced himself worthy of condemnation, yet insisted that Buckingham had been an evil instrument for the realm. He traced this conviction to the Grand Remonstrance of Parliament. Each visitor departed with the same confession and a differing estimate of its significance: a heinous crime, or an act of justice that existing institutions had failed to render. Nothing indicates whether their opinions were altered by hearing him.
At the Privy Council, however, the inquiry turned upon an entirely different matter. The ministers wished to determine whether Felton had acted alone or whether Buckingham’s adversaries had set him on. They questioned him as to whether Puritans were involved. Felton denied that any living man had known of his intention. He maintained that the Duke appeared to him an unfaithful servant of the State, an opinion he anchored in the Remonstrance of the Commons. Yet he was pressed to name his confederates, and he named none.
The threat of torture was raised during this examination. The Earl of Dorset informed him it was the King’s pleasure that he should be put to the rack to discover his instigators. Felton replied that he doubted the King would act against the law. He affirmed he had disclosed his design to no man; were he tortured, he added, he would accuse Lord Dorset and no other. He thus maintained his assertion of a solitary deed, while cautioning the councillors that torture could wring forth only what they wished to hear.
Charles thereupon inquired of the judges whether the rack might be lawfully employed. The magistrates deliberated upon the question and answered that no law of England sanctioned torture. The King had declared he would not resort to his prerogative if the law did not warrant it. The judges found no legal ground for the measure. The episode thus lent Buckingham’s death an unexpected consequence: his assassin, raised above his fellows by political fury, compelled the Crown publicly to define the limits of the coercion it sought to inflict.
Felton’s motives cannot be reduced solely to the Parliamentary Remonstrance. According to Borrow’s account, he had suffered disappointments in his military career, and the Duke owed him arrears of pay; the author deems it probable that he harboured personal animosity as well, though Felton denied it. He bore the reputation of a melancholy and retired man. On one occasion, he had severed part of his own finger and sent it with a challenge, to demonstrate he would hazard his flesh to obtain satisfaction. Yet he was also known by the sobriquet of "Honest Jack." The selfsame witnesses could perceive in him a man of honour and a man capable of assassination.
Within his hat, he had stitched a paper addressed to those who might find his corpse after the deed. He wrote therein that no man ought to condemn him without first condemning himself, for the grievance against the Duke had endured too long unpunished. He held that neither gentleman nor soldier should shrink from yielding his life for God, King, and country. Another source cited by Borrow records that he kept upon his person propositions of political theology: the safety of the people as the supreme law, the prosperity of the realm as the common good. Divines urged against him a limit: evil might not be done that good should come of it. These precepts did not prove that another mind had directed his hand; they illustrated how he had clothed a solitary resolve in the language of duty.
On November 27, Felton was brought to the bar of the King’s Bench. He was asked whether he was guilty of the murder set forth in the indictment. He confessed to slaying Buckingham and declared he deserved death, though he had not acted out of personal malice against the Duke. Sentence having been pronounced, he asked that the hand that struck the blow be severed before his execution. The judges refused: the law allowed them not to add an exceptional penalty to that appointed for murder. Charles had made his desire known to them, but the magistrates upheld the same rule for all prisoners alike.
Felton was hanged, and his body was afterwards suspended in chains. Before his death, a street ballad had already exalted him as a martyr; following it, poets and adherents of the Parliamentary faction continued to style him the saviour of his country. Yet his own confession remained far narrower than the legend. He had struck down the Duke, he answered for the crime, and he refused to divide the blame with confederates whom he declared non-existent. At Portsmouth, he had sought to stay one man. In London, some saw in his stroke an act of justice that Parliament had been powerless to dispense, others an assassination whose popular favour imperilled all social order. His final petition to yield his hand to the executioner epitomized this contradiction: he acknowledged the blood spilt, yet without renouncing the cause to which he had bound it.