God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [362]
9. Rushworth, Historical Collections, I, p. 638. According to one account it was Dorset who had threatened him with the rack, and it was to him that Felton made the threat in return: Fairholt, Poems and Songs, p. xxvin. Suspicion that leading parliamentarians were connected with the murder was not confined to the council: Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, Conn., 1992), p. 48. For Laud and the Puritan plot see Jason Peacey, ‘The Paranoid Prelate: Archbishop Laud and the Puritan Plot’, in Barry Coward and Julian Swann (eds.), Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe: From the Waldensians to the French Revolution (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 113–34.
10. Rushworth, Historical Collections, I, pp. 638–9. Fairholt, Poems and Songs, also suggests that legal niceties did not always prevent the use of the rack: p. xxvin.
11. Rushworth, Historical Collections, I, pp. 640–41. See also Ellis, Original Letters, pp. 279–81.
12. James A. Sharpe, ‘“Last dying speeches”: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England’, PP, 107 (1985), 144–67.
13. Anon., The Prayer and Confession of Mr Felton, word for word as hee it spake immediatly before his Execution, Novem 29 1628, ESTC 19762. It was published anonymously and bears no place and date of publication, or the publisher, as if it had been published clandestinely. Although this was a publication likely to play well with the crown, the subject matter was rather sensitive, of course. As a matter of general policy Charles and his advisers had turned their backs on propaganda in 1627, reversing a policy which Charles and Buckingham had pursued in 1623: Thomas Cogswell, ‘The Politics of Propaganda: Charles I and the People in the 1620s’, JBS, 29:3 (1990), 187–215; See also Richard Cust, ‘Charles I and Popularity’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 235–58.
14. Sir Thomas Barrington reported that Felton ‘condemned and bewailed his fate, died penitently and disavowed all justification of the deed, desired all the people to pray for him and so ended his days’, Arthur Searle (ed.), Barrington Family Letters 1628–1632, Royal Historical Society, Camden Society, 4th ser., 28 (London, 1983), p. 39. See also Ellis, Original Letters, pp. 281–2.
15. Thomas Laqueur, ‘Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604–1868’, in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine and James M. Rosenheim (eds.), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 305–55; Peter Lake and Michael C. Questier, ‘Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England’, PP, 153 (1996), 64–107.
16. Anon., Prayer and Confession.
17. CSPD, 1628–9, p. 277; Ellis, Original Letters, pp. 260–61.
18. Ibid., pp. 278–9. For an example of an execution rearranged in order to ‘avoid a crowd of people’ see Donald Woodward, ‘“Here comes a chopper to chop off his head”: The Execution of Three Priests at Newcastle and Gateshead, 1592–1594’, Recusant History, 22 (1994), 1–6, at p. 1.
19. Ellis, Original Letters, p. 281.
20. Fairholt, Poems and Songs, pp. xxix-xxx. See also Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, pp. 186–91; Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York, 1977), p. 28.
21. Fairholt, Poems and Songs, passim. Some of this material is discussed in David Nor-brook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 53–8; David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. edn (Oxford, 2002), pp. 211, 312–12; Sharpe, Personal Rule, pp. 48–9; Bellany, ‘“Rayling Rymes and Vaunting Verse”’, esp. pp. 304–9.
22. Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious