But while Felton’s name was echoing through the kingdom, our new Brutus was at this moment exhibiting a piteous spectacle of remorse; so different often is the real person himself from the ideal personage of the public.  The assassination, with him, was a sort of theoretical one, depending, as we shall show, on four propositions; so that when the king’s attorney, as the attorney-general was then called, had furnished the unhappy criminal with an unexpected argument, which appeared to him to have overturned his, he declared that he had been in a mistake; and lamenting that he had not been aware of it before, from that instant his conscientious spirit sunk into despair.  In the open court he stretched out his arm, offering it as the offending instrument to be first cut off; he requested the king’s leave to wear sackcloth about his loins, to sprinkle ashes on his head, to carry a halter about his neck, in testimony of repentance; and that he might sink to the lowest point of contrition, he insisted on asking pardon not only of the duchess, the duke’s mother, but even of the duke’s scullion-boy; and a man naturally brave was seen always shedding tears, so that no one could have imagined that Felton had been “a stout soldier.”  These particulars were given by one of the divines who attended him, to the writer of the MS. letter.[250]

The character of Felton must not, however, be conceived from this agonising scene of contrition.  Of melancholy and retired habits, and one of those thousand officers who had incurred disappointments, both in promotion and in arrears of pay, from the careless duke, he felt, perhaps, although he denied it, a degree of personal animosity towards him.  A solitary man who conceives himself injured broods over his revenge.  Felton once cut off a piece of his own finger, inclosing it in a challenge, to convince the person whom he addressed that he valued not endangering his whole body, provided it afforded him an opportunity of vengeance.[251] Yet with all this, such was his love of truth and rigid honour, that Felton obtained the nickname of “honest Jack,” one which, after the assassination, became extremely popular through the nation.  The religious enthusiasm of the times had also deeply possessed his mind, and that enthusiasm, as is well known, was of a nature that might easily occasion its votary to be mistaken for a republican.

Clarendon mentions that in his hat he had sewed a paper, in which were written a few lines of that remonstrance of the Commons, which appeared to him to sanction the act.  I have seen a letter from Sir D. Carleton to the queen, detailing the particulars; his lordship was one of those who saved Felton from the swords of the military around him, who in their vexation for the loss of their general the duke, which they considered to be the end of the war, and their ruin, would have avenged themselves.  But though Felton, in conversation with Sir D. Carleton, confessed that by reading the remonstrance of the parliament it came