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It is at least possible, for example, that one of the books that Felton had read ‘which defended that it was lawful to kill an enemy to the republic’ was Thomas May’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, published the previous year. Pharsalia was a poem about the civil wars from which Julius Caesar emerged as dictator. It championed the virtues of the republic against Caesar, and dealt with his murder by Brutus. May’s edition was dedicated to figures associated with support of the international Protestant cause and opposition to an extensive view of royal prerogative powers. The poem itself is ambiguous: it is clear about the horrors of civil war but claims that imperial peace is worse; it recognizes virtue in Caesar while despising his victory; it champions the republican armies, but blames their defeat on a lack of will. At one point May commends the war for having produced Nero – critics differ as to whether this is an ironic point or not. But in the context of early Stuart England republican virtue lay in the selfless service of the public, not in government without a king. Readers of Pharsalia could be found on both sides at the outbreak of civil war in 1642, and it was more than possible to read it without approving of Felton’s actions. Nonetheless, May’s translation was sufficiently sensitive, politically, that the dedicatory pages were removed from many of the early editions.55

Felton’s fate was marked and celebrated in an outpouring of ‘underground verse’, like that found copied out in the desk of his friend the scrivener. This was an important feature of the political culture of the 1620s: poems circulated in manuscript, employing rough verse and expressing anti-courtly sentiments, in marked and deliberate contrast to the refined culture of the court. In Felton’s case there was an ambivalence, akin to his own, between a Christian revulsion at murder and sense of civic virtue in his dramatic act on behalf of the commonwealth. The classical heritage offered a fund of republican thinking, and practical examples, on which those anxious to defend the commonwealth could draw. One of the verse epitaphs to Felton contains very clear echoes of Pharsalia – if Felton had not read May then some of his supporters certainly had. The republican virtues of active citizenship which animated much of the government of the kingdom offered too the resources with which to criticize royal government, and to imagine alternative political worlds.56

Charles’s policies, then, caused outrage but also outrages. In 1629, Parliament met again, following Buckingham’s death. Hostility to Arminianism and the collection of tonnage and poundage (customs duties with disputed legal status) led to speeches which came close to personal attacks on Charles, and which seemed to make radical claims for the constitutional position of Parliament. Charles moved to adjourn the sitting, but the Speaker of the House of Commons was not allowed simply to call an adjournment by members anxious that they were about to be deprived of a platform. The Speaker was physically held in his chair while resolutions hostile to Arminianism and tonnage and poundage were read. In the meantime the door was barred to Black Rod, who had arrived to end the session.57 For Charles, this sudden dissolution of Parliament was a repudiation of Puritan populism in more than one sense, a solution to the problem posed by the plotting of ‘envenomed spirits which troubled… the blessed harmony between us and our subjects’.58

Compared to the fraught politics of the late 1620s it could be claimed with some reason that the 1630s were halcyon days in England. Two crucial elements of the situation had changed – the country was not at war, and parliaments were not meeting. The dissolution of Parliament in 1629 signalled the opening of the ‘Personal Rule’, what turned out to be eleven years of government without recourse to Parliament. Without parliaments England was still an informed and participatory political society, in which