Inarticulate Felton glowers his way across Europe as the lowest part of Buckingham’s ragged army, brooding, watching, fighting, getting wounded, whoring in a saturnine way, falling in love, sailing to the Low Countries, Cadiz and the Ile de Ré, witnessing all the humiliating defeats achieved by Buckingham from his silk-clad tent and ship. He watches his countrymen perish in hunger, despair and cruel neglect. Convinced that Buckingham means to take the crown of the anointed king (now Charles I), he buys a tenpenny knife at Tower Hill, walks his ‘nemesis’ journey to Portsmouth, plunges the knife into Bucking- ham and waits to be torn apart by the mob. It doesn’t happen. The mob has longed for this moment. When eventually Felton goes to his execution the people of England strew his way with flowers.
Blythe has Felton tell the whole grim story in the Tower as he awaits his death, and although we have known since page one what the end of the story will be we can’t bear to miss a word. We watch Felton pass from numbness to whimpering terror, to floods of tears, to pain, reverie, desolation, yearning (‘the serene sky’ is sapphire blue through the high barred window), to prayer and acceptance; his small figure dwindles away on the cart to the anonymity of the gallows, ‘the assassin’.
This is a painful novel but never heavy- going, and Blythe is full of surprises. He understands lust and he has given Felton a passion for a devout, Puritan, married Dutch lady, far from his everyday soldierly encounters of the streets. He adores her and imagines her slender and willing beneath the black balloon gowns of the Low Countries he believes conceal youth and desire. Felton writes this woman a tremendous love letter (‘My apple queen, my Christ-girl’) and then, as other than murderers have done before and since, notes, ‘I should have sent it.’ Madame von Hol sails on in her black clothes, happy with her holy husband, though she does request the release of Felton’s body for Christian burial. This is refused. It is left hanging in chains in Portsmouth for the seagulls, as England is left hanging after Buckingham’s murder ripe for stripping —the king’s execution, Cromwell, the civil wars. Felton’s act changed history.
His and Blythe’s beautiful Stour lands survive. Blythe has said somewhere that the English countryside always recovers in the end; ‘only man is vile’.
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