In the remote county of Suffolk the unhappy John Felton was born. He was the youngest son of an ancient family, and in somewhat narrow circumstances, and had been a lieutenant in a regiment of foot, under the command of Sir John Ramsey, in the expedition against Rhé. He was a man of great reserve, which, though he had long led a soldier’s life, in the course of which he appears to have risen from the ranks, was still silent and gloomy. In person he was diminutive, with a meagre form, and a face rendered almost ghastly from the expression of that deep, habitual, and apparently causeless melancholy to which we give the term morbid; and thus singularly did these outlines of his character correspond with the circumstances of his daily life. So strange was it to discover in the young soldier the characteristics attributable to a cloister rather than to a camp, that one turns to the mournful plea of insanity for explanation. But no defence of that nature, or on that ground, was ever attempted for Felton; unhappily, so much has lunacy increased in modern times, that it forms now one point in almost every case of unaccountable crime. In the days of our ancestors it was different. Such an excuse was rare, and only applied to imbecility, or to mania, when too apparent to be disputed. To this day, indeed, there has been found no adequate motive for the deed, which Felton long contemplated in the depths of a soul that never gave utterance to its joys or sorrows, and exchanged no sympathies with others. Whatever “may have been the immediate or greatest motive of that felonious conception,” Sir Henry Wotton declares, “is even yet in the clouds.”[110] The origin of that dark design has, nevertheless, been referred to a disappointment in Felton’s military career. This he subsequently denied, by saying that the Duke had always shown him respect. Whilst at Rhé, Felton’s captain having died in England, he naturally applied to Buckingham for promotion. The Duke, however, consulted the colonel of the regiment, and, by his suggestion, gave the company to an officer named Powell, who happened to be lieutenant of the colonel’s company, and a man of great bravery; and Felton himself acknowledged the justice and expediency of this preference of Powell to himself. So that, to follow the same authority, the idea of any rancour being harboured, owing to this arrangement, can have no foundation.[111] But the notion has been taken up by historians adverse to Buckingham--and such are in the majority--rather to heighten the impression that he suffered for an act of injustice, for which his death was, more or less, a retribution, than from any certain conviction on the point. Footnote 110: Wottonianæ Reliquiæ, p. 233. Footnote 111: Ibid.