God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [29]
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 violence. 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;