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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 Alexander Dumas's The Three Musketeers.
References
- This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, a publication in the public domain.1911 Britannica Please update as needed.
Bibliography
- 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.
External links
- D'Israeli, Isaac. "Felton, the Political Assassin", Curiosities of Literature
"John Felton"