John Felton

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John Felton (c. 1595-1628) was an English soldier who stabbed George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham to death in Portsmouth. Felton may have felt that the poor state of the English Navy would not improve while the Duke was alive.

The privy council attempted to have Felton questioned under torture on the rack, but the judges resisted, unanimously declaring its use to be contrary to the laws of England. He was hanged.

Felton's assassination of the Duke was fictionalized in Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers. The Duke's assassination is recently fictionalized in Phillippa Gregory's novel "Earthly Joys".

[edit] References

Memorials & Monuments in Portsmouth Cathedral: The Duke of Buckingham
Alastair Bellany, "John Felton", in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Alastair Bellany, "Libel in Action: Ritual, Subversion and the English Literary Underground, 1603-1642" in Tim Harris, The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500-1800 (2001), contains a section about public responses to the assassination.
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.