The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  He was found lying unconscious on the cobbles. His ‘skull was broken’ and one of his eyes ‘hung out of his head’. His body was ‘bruised and wounded so much, that no part was left to receive a wound’. He was carried down to the Poultry Compter, the sheriff’s prison at the end of Old Jewry, where he died early the following morning, a ‘wretched life’ ended by ‘a miserable & strange death’. His pockets were searched, showing he was carrying several knives, a nightcap braided with gold thread, 40 shillings, a crystal ball and a collection of miniatures, including one of the gaoler of Frances Howard, the wife of Robert Carr and perpetrator of the Overbury poisoning.

  The official response to the death was outrage. The king summoned the lord mayor to Whitehall and demanded those responsible be punished. When the authorities failed to produce the culprits, several constables were arrested and gaoled for neglect of duty, but quickly bailed so they could take part in the hunt for the ringleaders.

  While these investigations were underway, handwritten notes appeared nailed to signposts and doors around Coleman Street:

  Let Charles and George do what they can,

  Yet George shall die like Doctor Lambe.

  The Scrivener’s Tale

  A few hundred yards from where John Lambe fell, John Felton, one of the many unpaid soldiers in the capital, was nursing his grievances and a wounded hand. Having made his way to London from Portsmouth, he had been forced to take mean lodgings in the house of Thomas Foot, a servant to the warden of the nearby Fleet prison. The Fleet had bad associations for Felton. His father, once a successful pursuivant and bailiff based in rural Suffolk, had died there, ruined by unemployment and debt.

  One of nine children with precarious prospects, Felton had signed up for soldiering some time in the mid-1620s, and had taken part in the Cádiz fiasco of 1626. Following the defeat and scattering of the fleet, he had ended up in Ireland.

  By June 1627, Felton had made his way back to England where he learned that Buckingham was preparing to lead a new expedition to attack the port city of La Rochelle. Relations with the French had deteriorated sharply after the expulsion of Queen Henrietta Maria’s entourage, and in a gesture of Protestant solidarity the duke had ordered a mission to relieve Huguenots who had become besieged in the city by forces loyal to King Louis. As with Cádiz, the mission had been a disaster; arriving with a second wave of ships and soldiers, Felton had taken part in an attack that ended in horrific slaughter and ignominious withdrawal.

  Since coming to London, the soldier had begun to suffer from a paralysing ‘melancholy’, his sleep interrupted ‘by dreams of fighting’, a condition for which he blamed the mission’s figurehead, the Duke of Buckingham. Adding to his resentment was a claim to £80 of backpay, and a conviction that the duke had cheated him out of a captaincy in favour of one of his minions.

  Around the time of John Lambe’s death, Felton had started to look for a scrivener, or professional scribe, to write petitions about his grievances so he could present them to the Privy Council. Elizabeth Josselyn, who shared his lodgings, was the wife of a stationer, so perhaps she recommended George Willoughby, who was based in nearby Holborn.

  Scriveners were enjoying a boom in demand for their services. In January 1628, Charles had summoned yet another Parliament in his ongoing yet futile efforts to raise money for his regime’s military adventures. The MPs were proving as defiant as they had been in 1626, promising a generous subsidy, but also producing a steady stream of remonstrances and demands that disgruntled citizens, increasingly despondent about the state of national affairs, were eager to read. Printing such tracts, or the flurry of scurrilous poems and songs that were produced in response to them, was difficult without attracting the attention of the authorities, so a lively black market had sprung up in copies produced by hand. Willoughby was an enterprising and enthusiastic supplier, supplementing legitimate and less exciting work by transcribing a range of illicit texts, including a copy of the ditty nailed to signposts in Coleman Street predicting the duke’s demise following John Lambe’s murder.

  Felton arrived at Willoughby’s shop to find him busy transcribing the Commons’ latest remonstrance. The document had originally been delivered to Charles at a joint meeting of both Houses of Parliament held at the Banqueting House on 17 June 1628. News of its damning indictment of the duke had spread quickly through the city, producing a strange outburst of popular exultation, with a ringing of bells and lighting of bonfires that ‘equalled those at his majesty’s coming from Spain’ in 1623. The king had responded by issuing a proclamation that dismissed yet again the allegations made against the favourite. He also ordered that the thirteen articles brought against George by the previous Parliament be struck from the official record.

  Felton, it emerged, was something of a connoisseur of prohibited literature, having seen a copy of Eglisham’s Forerunner of Revenge. He asked Willoughby if he could borrow the scrivener’s copy of the MPs’ remonstrance to read. Despite the dangers of putting a paper bearing his own imprint into the hands of a stranger, Willoughby agreed. Tucking it into his jacket, Felton went off to study it in a tavern on Shoe Lane, round the corner from his lodgings.

  The effect was revelatory. It awoke a feeling that George was not only responsible for Felton’s personal problems, but a dangerous tyrant at the heart of government who had undermined the constitution and thrown the kingdom into disarray. A messianic conviction overcame the traumatized ex-soldier, commanding him to take action, not just on his own account, but for the sake of the nation. For the next few weeks he underwent a period of fasting and prayer, during which he reflected on his feelings, wondering if he was being lured by a ‘temptation from the devil’. Then on Sunday, 18 August 1628, he concluded that the time had come to act.

  The following morning, Felton rose and dressed, carefully fastening into his hatband a passage copied from a popular work of moral guidance, which argued that a man who was not willing to sacrifice his life for the honour of God, his king and his country was ‘cowardly and base’. He went to visit his mother and sister, who lived nearby, to borrow some money. He told them that he was returning to Portsmouth because the duke was visiting the port to review a fleet being prepared for another mission to La Rochelle, and he intended to confront him about the matter of his missing pay. He then went to a cutler near Tower Hill, where he bought a tenpenny dagger.

  I Am the Man

  Southwick House, a small mansion built among the ruins of a monastic abbey, overlooked the beautiful wooded countryside of south Hampshire. Since late July 1628, as the fleet gathered in nearby Portsmouth, it had been Charles’s home. George had been expected to join the king, but was detained in London, frantically dealing with organizing the Rochelle relief mission that he hoped would redeem his military reputation. Everything was on the line. He had pledged to lead the expedition himself, had replaced key members of the Admiralty in the hope of improving management of the ramshackle fleet, ordered deserters to be hanged, mortgaged his property, even raised £1,500 by selling the buttons off his best pearl suit, all, as he put it, ‘for the use of His Majesty’s Navy’.

  On 6 August, George wrote to Charles that he was still having problems victualling the ships; ‘I dare not come from hence,’ he wrote, until he had seen the matter ‘despatched, being of such importance’. Finally, by 12 August he was ready to leave, and set off for Southwick, arriving two days later.

  After a brief reunion with Charles, he rushed off to Portsmouth, setting up quarters in the Greyhound Inn. It was already packed with members of his staff, along with his wife Kate, who was pregnant with their fourth child, and the French Huguenot leader Benjamin de Rohan, Duc de Soubise. Frantic final preparations kept George occupied, which included with typical aplomb the provision of ten pieces of tapestry to decorate his cabin in the fleet’s flagship and a tent for his personal use.

  On 17 August, George set off for Southwick for a pre-arranged meeting with the king, but found his coach surrounded by hundr
eds of sailors demanding to be paid. One leaned into the coach and tried to pull him from his seat. George responded by leaping out, grabbing his assailant, and dragging him back to the Greyhound, where he was locked up in a room to be dealt with later.

  News of the emergency reached Southwick, and a courtier saw Charles waiting anxiously at the window of his chamber for ‘a whole hour’, gazing across the downs for a sight of George’s coach. When it was finally spotted, Charles’s entourage ‘all left the king, lords and all’, and rushed ‘down into the base court to meet him, as if he was the greatest prince in the world’.

  Following his meeting with a relieved king, George returned to the Greyhound Inn to find his attacker had been released for fear of reprisals. George demanded his recapture, which was achieved a few days later. However, when he was seized, fellow mariners surrounded the prisoner’s escort, threatening to free him, whereupon George with ‘divers of his followers, colonels, captains and others, went on horseback and, having their swords drawn, rode down the street and drove all the mariners before them’. A furious battle ensued during which two of the mariners were killed and many others wounded. The duke finally captured the ringleader and took him to a gibbet by the shore, where he was hanged.

  The violent reprisal, while typical of military discipline, poisoned the already aggrieved mood among the troops, and a sense of unease descended on the town.

  On 22 August, George wrote despondently to his friend John Pennington that he had begun to feel that ‘no happy success’ could be expected of the mission ‘without an especial blessing from God’. He took to his bed, remaining indisposed for the rest of the day until Charles arrived from Southwick. They met for a while, and when the king took his leave, George, it was noted, embraced Charles ‘in a very unusual and passionate manner’.

  By the following morning, however, George’s mood had improved, and he bounded down to the inn’s parlour full of energy. Negotiations had been underway with the French king over the fate of La Rochelle, and according to Soubise the threat of another English attack had led to the siege of the city being lifted. George was so delighted that he danced a jig for joy. He snatched a quick breakfast before calling for his horse so he could break the happy news to the king at Southwick.

  As George made to leave, he walked from the parlour into the hallway, where he stopped to talk to one of his colonels. After they had spoken, the colonel bowed, and George reciprocated. As he stood, a man leaned over the colonel’s shoulder and thrust a knife into George’s left breast ‘clean through a rib’. George staggered back, crying ‘villain!’ He pulled the dagger from his chest and reached for his sword, but a swoon overcame him, causing him to stumble. The press of people around prevented him from falling, until, in the melee, someone realized what had happened, and started to yell for help. The crowd pulled away, and George’s limp body dropped to the floor.

  The breakfast things were swept off the parlour table, and a group lifted the duke onto it. Others rushed off to apprehend the assassin. Kate, who had stayed in bed, was drawn from her room by the noise. She called for a friend, and came onto the gallery overlooking the parlour. Gazing down, she saw her dying thirty-five-year-old husband spread out on the table beneath her, blood seeping from his mouth.

  In the confusion, John Felton had managed to escape into the inn’s kitchens. The panicking crowds in the parlour and hall suspected the assassin to have been an agent of King Louis, and began to shout ‘Frenchman! Frenchman!’ Mistaking their cries for his name, he drew his sword and stepped forward, proclaiming with a heroic flourish that would make his victim proud: ‘I am the man!’

  Sad Affliction’s Darksome Night

  One of Charles’s grooms came ‘boldly’ to the king while he was at prayers to break the news of George’s assassination. Charles apparently said nothing. He continued with his devotions, and then withdrew to his bedchamber. He did not come out for two days. Across the downs came the sound of peals of bells, and of the ‘base multitude’ drinking healths to the duke’s assassin, their cries of jubilation a bitter rebuke to Charles’s loyalty and love.

  In London, the Tuscan agent Salvetti reported that ‘the news of this fatal blow has spread rapidly over the whole kingdom, and, if I may express myself frankly, the appearances of satisfaction are almost universal’. George’s mother, Mary, was said to have taken the news calmly, having had powerful presentiments of the tragedy that was to befall her beloved son.

  George’s body was conducted back to the capital with due ceremony. He laid in state in Wallingford House for nearly a month, though how many visited to pay their respects goes unrecorded. He was buried at Westminster Abbey on 22 September, under the cover of dark to avoid raucous crowds disturbing the ceremony. Charles had called for a lavish monument to be raised in his memory, but it was considered tactless at a time of economic austerity, and the funds were diverted to paying off some of George’s creditors.

  John Felton was tortured, tried, and finally executed on 22 November. While the dust began to settle on George’s simple gravestone in Westminster Abbey, Felton was hailed a patriotic hero, even a Protestant martyr, who:

  With zeal and justice arm’d, hath in truth won

  The prize of patriot to a British son.

  The longer term effect of the duke’s death on Charles and his regime was profound. The king withdrew from the political fray, preferring to govern through small committees, and occupying the rest of his time indulging in the passion of his childhood, collecting objets d’art.

  The loss of a rival for Charles’s affections gradually aroused fresh feelings in Henrietta Maria. A courtier noted that, following George’s death, relations between the king and queen grew to ‘such a degree of kindness as he would imagine him a wooer again, and her gladder to receive his caresses’. The increase in affection had a corresponding effect on the couple’s fertility. After five barren years, a son was born on 29 May 1630, and christened Charles. Six children would follow, Van Dyck capturing the new mood of domestic intimacy in a painting known as the ‘great peece’, showing Charles with his sons, dogs and wife. The king looks out at the viewer with a tired but contented expression, while his wife glances at him with convincing fondness and the younger Charles rests his hands on his father’s knee.

  During the period that became known as the Personal Rule, Charles tried to reign without Parliament, but events eventually forced its recall in 1640 and the rancour that had arisen during the 1620s quickly re-established itself: MPs were told to raise taxes, taxes were not forthcoming unless grievances were met, Parliament was dismissed, until, finally, Parliament refused to be dismissed and civil war broke out.

  By 1648, Charles had been cornered by parliamentary forces on the Isle of Wight. He was captured and imprisoned there while MPs pondered the charges he should face. To the surprise of the Venetian ambassador, the focus was not on the supposed tyrannies of his Personal Rule, nor his role in provoking civil war. Instead, ‘old and almost forgotten charges’ were dragged up, principal among them that ‘his Majesty hastened the death of his father by poison’, or that George had ‘attempted it with his consent’. Though this was not the formal basis of his trial and execution in January the following year, it was a reminder of what had put the king and his Parliament at such deadly odds.

  In one of the many editions of the Eikon Basilike, a memoir attributed to King Charles I and published following his death, he portrayed himself, like Felton, as a martyr:

  And as the unmov’d rock outbraves

  The boisterous winds and raging waves;

  So triumph I, and shine more bright

  In sad affliction’s darksome night.

  George would receive no such uplifting elegy, at least not in the months following his death. Instead, the man once hailed as St George on Horseback became the subject of relentless satire and scorn. He was described as poisoning the court and kingdom as well as the late king. He had exploited Charles’s ‘yielding nature’, and become heady
with the ‘favourite’s honey’ while the ‘vital powers’ of others was ‘by poison wasted’. On and on it went, in the form of diatribes and dialogues between the duke and John Lambe; letters to his mother from Hell; a sometimes witty, often lewd outpouring of pent-up invective:

  Of honour, power, and pleasure, thou mightst be

  To all the world a just Epitome.

  Yet thou, even thou, like other Men art dead,

  And to th’infernal shade thy spirit’s fled.

  A few years later, after the anger had been allowed to dissipate, a single, sharply observed and beautifully crafted epitaph was published. It painted a more balanced portrait, which, despite its brevity, is more revealing than the atrocity that now hangs in the home of the current Prince of Wales. It was written by James Shirley, a playwright, poet, and contemporary of George’s:

  Here lies the best and worst of Fate,

  Two kings’ delight, the people’s hate,