God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  Following his capture Felton explained that he was owed £80 for previous military service and had been passed over for command of his company, but he also claimed to be acting for the Protestant religion. Significantly, too, he said that while ‘reading the Remonstrance of the House of Parliament it came into his mind, that in committing the act of killing the Duke he should do his country good service’.4 In all then, Felton’s was a premeditated, political act, in the commission of which he claimed some legitimacy, even perhaps a degree of parliamentary sanction. According to one eyewitness he said, ‘God have mercy on thy soul’ as he struck the fatal blow.5 It turned out that there were many others who thought that Felton had done a public service, but in committing the murder Felton had also accepted his own death, apparently preparing for it and eschewing the chance to escape. Several months later, having been found guilty of the murder, he was hanged at Tyburn and his body was taken to Portsmouth, where it was hung up in chains ‘in manner as is usual upon notorious murders’.6

  While in prison awaiting trial Felton became something of a celebrity and was frequently visited by people anxious to ‘see the man who had committed so bold a murder’ and others wishing ‘to understand what were the motives and inducements thereunto’. His captors in fact were a little concerned that he was becoming ‘puffed up with the vain applause of the multitude’. Felton admitted that he had committed the murder and that he was wrong to have done it, but he told his visitors that ‘he had long looked upon the Duke as an evil Instrument in the Commonwealth and that he was convinced there for by the Remonstrance of Parliament’. Such considerations, ‘together with the instigation of the Evil One’, had led him to his action. Under examination before the council he expanded on some of these comments, saying that he had killed the duke, ‘partly for private displeasure, and partly by reason of a Remonstrance in Parliament, having also read some books which he said defended that it was lawful to kill an enemy to the republic’.7

  The Privy Council was anxious to discover who had incited him to commit the murder, suspecting the ‘Puritans’, but Felton insisted that he had acted alone and had not told anyone of his intentions. In the face of this insistence William Laud, then Bishop of London and emerging as an influential anti-Puritan, threatened him with the rack. But Felton was clearly made of stern stuff, and even though he was a ‘person of little stature’ he had ‘a stout and revengeful spirit’.8 In these tense moments he demonstrated considerable sang froid, replying that if he were put to the rack:

  he could not tell whom he might nominate in the extremity of torture, and if what he should say then must go for truth, he could not tell whether his Lordship (meaning the Bishop of London) or which of their Lordships he might name, for torture might draw unexpected things from him.

  After this there were no more questions for the prisoner.9

  Legal proprieties were observed throughout. Charles wanted to put Felton on the rack but respected the judges” unanimous opinion that it would not be lawful.10 At his trial, on 27 November, Felton offered ‘that hand to be cut off that did the fact’, but even though the offer was made by him the court found that it could not inflict this further punishment. Once again this decision was made despite the evident wishes of the King, who had ‘sent to the judges to intimate his desire that his hand be cut off before execution’.11

  On the scaffold Felton would have been expected to make a good end. Felons often made, or were said to have done, ‘last dying speeches’ which affirmed the validity of social and political order and the rightness of their own execution. The drama on the scaffold was a crucial demonstration of the power of the state, and its claims to legitimacy.12 Felton seems to have done his part. A pamphlet recounted his ‘prayer and confession’ on the scaffold, ‘word for word’. According to this account he asked several times for the forgiveness of God, acknowledging the punishments that he deserved and admitting that he had been driven by the Devil. He also sought the pardon of the Duchess of Buckingham and her household, including ‘the veriest scullion of her kitchen’. Better still, from an official point of view, he told his auditors: ‘That which drew me to this horrid sinful fact, was some foul reports, which though they had been true it was damnable in me, in committing so foul a sin’. He wished the King long life and hoped that ‘the parliament may agree, and be united in one’. He went further, expressing gratitude for official mercy: ‘I did not think but that I should come to a crueller death, as I have deserved’. On this account, then, Felton was a model of contrition on the scaffold: ‘I beseech you, none of you think that the fact was done well, it was abhorrent, I have so much dishonoured God in it, Lord forgive me this bloody sin, and all my other sins’.13 This printed version accords with other, briefer, descriptions which noted the depth of his repentance and the dignity of his death.14 The power of the regime, it seems, was unequivocally affirmed and the drama of the scaffold vindicated.

  It was a feature of these dramas, however, that they were not closely controlled: the leading players were the condemned felon and the crowd, and there were occasions when they departed from the script. The execution scene was a moment of negotiation, where claims to legitimacy were not simply asserted, but also tested.15 Although in this case the condemned man seems to have played his part, there are hints that the audience might have been less willing. Felton was quite aware of the possibility that his audience might think his action justified, or even laudable, and he twice asked that the executioner should not be held to account for his death.16

  There is other evidence of public sympathy for Felton and approval of the murder. Drinkers in Dover were in trouble for drinking a health to Felton only a week after the assassination, and as he passed through Kingston on his way to London from Portsmouth an old lady shouted out, ‘God bless thee, little David’. As he arrived at the Tower by water crowds gathered to see him. When he asked that they pray for him they, ‘with a general voice cried “Lord comfort thee”, “The Lord be merciful unto thee”, or such like words’.17 His trial was brought forward and expedited18 and the execution may not have been a very public spectacle: one correspondent reporting the scene was not sure on which day it had been enacted, having heard different days from different sources.19 Charles’s advisers could not have been sure it would be a good death.

  After the execution Felton continued to elicit sympathy and even approbation. At Trinity College, Oxford, in 1628, Alexander Gil, later to be schoolmaster to John Milton, got into trouble for proposing a toast to Felton’s health ‘saying that he was a sorry fellow and had deprived him of the honour of doing that brave action’. Many of his hearers, apparently, approved the sentiment. This, and other outrages such as suggesting that Charles would make a better shopkeeper than king, earned him a summons to appear before Laud. Under examination he claimed that such toasts were common in London and elsewhere.20 Numerous poems survive which applaud or excuse Felton along with many others abusing Buckingham, whose funeral was marked by public contempt for the dead duke.21 In 1629, during a quarrel in Middlesex, a man threatened to ‘Felton’ his adversary, and as late as 1645 a London woman was reported to have asked, ‘Is there a Felton yet living?’ ‘Her target seems to have been the “stuttering fool”, Charles I’.22

  Felton had touched a deep vein of hostility to Buckingham and the policies associated with his influence over the King. Against the assassin was ranged a Privy Council convinced that this reflected a deeper subversive movement, associated with Puritanism, which was self-evidently both populist and lawless. Felton himself respected the course of the law, and Christian strictures against murder, and regretted that they had not restrained him earlier. Many of those who might have wished Buckingham dead were presumably less willing to see that happy day arrive by these means. That both Felton and Charles I were denied permission to get the fatal hand severed revealed in extreme circumstances a fundamental respect for the rule of law which was second nature to Stuart Englishmen, and which was deeply offended by lawless violen
ce. But these were obviously very troubled times: on one hand there was a strong sense that there was a populist Puritan conspiracy whose agents claimed some excuse in the attitude of Parliament; on the other there was a regime that, even on the eve of an expedition to help besieged Protestants, tested the conscience of the godly and patriotic soldier, anxious to do good service to the King and to the ‘commonwealth’ or ‘republic’. This debate was not restricted to the councils of the powerful: it was carried out before a public audience, on the scaffold, in print and through the networks of gossip and rumour that bound English political society together.

  This assassination occurred close to the climax of a crisis of parliaments. During the 1620s James and Charles had faced pressure to join the defence of Protestantism in the Thirty Years War, particularly in pursuit of an actively anti-Spanish foreign policy. They had not been able to get the money from parliaments to pay for it, though. The crown blamed this on the reluctance of parliaments to pay on a realistic scale; in fact, it seems, the reluctance arose at least as much from a sense that the crown was fighting the wrong wars, in the wrong way. At the same time Charles in particular was castigated for extending patronage and favour to Arminians. The difficulties of raising money and men for war had also intersected with divisions over foreign policy. Political difficulties over money and troops led to policies which raised constitutional concerns, while the direction of foreign policy alarmed the hotter sort of Protestant, a reaction compounded by the promotion of anti-Calvinists. It was not only the paranoid who could see here an intertwining threat to religion and liberty.23

  War with Spain came in 1625, but its fruit was a disastrous expedition to Cadiz, where, among other problems, some soldiers found that their muskets did not have fire holes and that many of the bullets were the wrong size. Parliament met the following February but failed to produce more money for war, preferring instead to impeach the Duke of Buckingham. Exasperated, Charles sought to raise money without Parliament by means of a forced loan. Direct pressure was applied to individuals, and those who refused to pay risked having troops billeted on them, or imprisonment. Five prominent resisters were imprisoned at the King’s pleasure. When they sued for the protection of habeas corpus (the fundamental right of the accused to have cause for their arrest shown), the King successfully sought to persuade Attorney Heath that he had the right to imprison in these circumstances without showing cause. It is likely that these men, the ‘Five Knights’, had intended to secure a day in court in order to test the legality of the loan; instead their cause had become a test case of the King’s right to arbitrary imprisonment. It was later said that Charles had caused the records of this opinion to be falsified, in order to make it a matter of record that he had the right to imprison without showing cause: the judges claimed that they had merely adjourned the matter for a later hearing. This use of the prerogative powers of the crown, and possibly felonious falsification of judicial records, raised questions not just about foreign policy and military affairs, but about the balance of the constitution. It caused a sensation in the parliament of 1628.24 If Felton threatened a lawless politics so too, in a way, did arbitrary royal power.

  In the meantime England had gone to war with France as well and in 1627 an expedition was launched to La Rochelle and the Île de Ré. Once again it was a military disaster, which came nowhere near achieving its objective despite the cost in lives and money.25 Although the military dividend was negligible the expeditions to Cadiz and La Rochelle had imposed considerable burdens on the country – impressment of troops, rates to pay for the food and clothes, billeting and martial law.26 The disaster at La Rochelle was freely criticized when a new parliament met in its aftermath and this gave encouragement to Felton in his murderous response. The attacks on Buckingham in the 1628 parliament further soured relations between crown and Parliament, and fears about the crown’s attitude towards the law culminated in the passage of the Petition of Right. Once thought to be a manifesto for parliamentary resistance to the crown, it is now often seen as a measure specific to its time – offering statutory protections against forced loans and the unpopular measures taken to achieve the failed military expeditions. Charles at first gave it an unwelcoming response but was persuaded to accept it. With the King’s approval secured, it was enrolled on the parliament roll, with a number, which seemed to suggest that it had the power of a statute. When it was printed, however, there was no statute number, and it was published with both the King’s answers, not just the more welcoming one. Charles’s line, throughout, was that it simply declared the situation as it existed: Parliament had won nothing from him.27 It was in the course of these debates about the Petition of Right that the House of Commons had drawn up a remonstrance against Buckingham; in the aftermath, a new force was gathered at Portsmouth for a renewed assault on La Rochelle. While it was in harbour, waiting for parliamentary moneys to arrive, Felton had struck his fatal blow against the regime. A few weeks earlier Dr Lambe, Buckingham’s doctor, had been attacked and killed by a crowd in a London street, amidst accusations of witchcraft.28

  In one sense these were symptoms of practical problems, matters of policy; but they revealed and helped to harden quite different views of the political world. English constitutional thought was a common-sense system, not a theoretical one. It had many elements, some of which were apparently contradictory, but which could co-exist so long as it was understood that particular arguments worked in particular circumstances and not others. While the common law and parliamentary statute were acknowledged to be supreme, the royal prerogative existed to deal with areas or circumstances beyond their reach. So, for example, the prerogative was used to regulate international affairs and to deal with conditions of emergency. A number of monarchs had raised revenue using the prerogative by imposing duties on overseas trade (impositions), or by creating monopolies over particular trades and raising fines for breaches of the monopolies. To the extent that these were measures for the regulation of trade these were clearly matters for the prerogative. To the extent that they were revenue devices they threatened the role of Parliament in authorizing taxation, and the common law in protecting the property of the subject. There was then a crucial ambiguity as to whether the impositions should be seen as illegal taxes, or revenues arising from the legitimate use of the prerogative to regulate international trade – an area beyond the common law. The trick was to avoid making people have to choose, but in the later 1620s and then again during the 1630s the questions were put quite clearly by a number of financial and military policies.29 When consensus failed, fundamental issues were raised: about the relationship between the subject and the crown, the nature of political liberty, and the means by which it was to be preserved.30

  An important element of fears about fundamental threats to liberty was of course anti-popery: those seeking to subvert religion would first need to subvert the law. Buckingham had also been a prominent patron of Arminians or anti-Calvinists in the English church. This rising tendency was characterized by a suspicion of predestinarian preaching, even an active hostility to the doctrine, and a correspondingly stronger emphasis on the practices and rites of the visible church. It had roots in the tradition represented by Hooker, and enjoyed increasingly powerful backing during the 1620s, but it elicited stringent criticism from opponents and disrupted the uneasy Calvinist consensus that had prevailed in the English church under Elizabeth and James. These anti-Calvinist churchmen tended to be less worried by the threat of the Antichrist than their opponents and more concerned about stability and order in the visible church. The best hopes for salvation lay in the educated ministry, acting under episcopal authority. Doctrinal Arminians shared a taste for more ceremony and order in the visible church with a wider group – the link between the theology and the liturgical preferences was not exact, but it all looked like popery to hotter Protestants. A number of these ceremonialists were also identified with a defence of the aggressive use of the prerogative and the apparently casual attitude of
Charles and his advisers towards the authority of parliaments and the common law. For example, Roger Maynwaring, a royal chaplain, and Robert Sibthorpe, rector of Brackley, caused a storm during the Forced Loan controversy by preaching that the monarch did not need the consent of his subjects in order to raise financial supply.31 This kind of argument seemed to threaten property rights – what could an Englishman call his own if the monarch could make financial levies without securing consent? In the 1629 parliament heated rhetoric about the popery of Arminians was closely tied to threats to liberty, the threat of the introduction of a ‘Spanish monarchy’.32

  Richard Montague, Bishop of Chichester, had gone further than most anti-Calvinists in his New Gagg for an Old Goose (1625), arguing that double predestination was a false doctrine and attacking the view that the Pope was the Antichrist. In 1626 Buckingham had hosted a meeting convened to discuss this, the most inflammatory anti-Calvinist publication of the period, and the meeting had failed to condemn it.33 Those who defended or failed to condemn Montague’s views, or those like them, enjoyed increasingly powerful patronage under Buckingham, William Laud and Charles, fostering considerable anxiety among the godly. The increasing prominence of this strand of opinion reinvigorated the longstanding debate about the identity of English Protestantism, a debate which was almost as old as English Protestantism itself.

  This debate had often been very public and fractious. On the Puritan side the language of anti-popery was very prominent and often associated with accusations about plots to undermine law and religion. Hostility to popery was set against the background of a view of English history in which God had intervened repeatedly to deliver His chosen people from these dangers. John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs made this case in numerous editions, and it drew further strength from the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot.34 Inevitably, this view of English history intersected with a view of England’s place in the world, with its foreign policy. In 1623 Charles had travelled in secret to Madrid, accompanied only by Buckingham, in the hope of securing the hand in marriage of the Spanish infanta. His mission failed – the Spanish had been stringing the English along for diplomatic reasons, hoping to prevent their entry into the European war on the wrong side, and were embarrassed by the arrival in town of the English sucker. Charles’s return to London was triumphant, rather than sheepish, however, as bonfires were lit and the bells rung out to celebrate another delivery from the clutches of the Antichrist, harbinger of a ‘blessed revolution’ in foreign policy.35