John Felton ( assassin ) John Felton ( c . 1595 – 29 November 1628 ) was a lieutenant in the English army who stabbed George Villiers , 1st Duke of Buckingham to death in the Greyhound Pub of Portsmouth on 23 August 1628 . Background . Felton had been wounded in the Duke ' s disastrously managed military expedition of 1627 against the French at La Rochelle and he held a personal grudge against his victim who , he believed , had corruptly withheld some of his pay and deprived him of advancement . Buckingham was hugely unpopular in the land for the national disgrace of defeat by the French although , with the help of the king , Charles I , he had avoided legal moves against him by Parliament for corruption and incompetence . Shortly after the murder Felton presented himself before the crowd that had gathered and , expecting to be well received , announced his guilt . He was immediately arrested and taken before magistrates , who sent him to London for interrogation . 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 . While awaiting trial his actions were widely celebrated in poems and pamphlets , but the process of law took its course and he was hanged at Tyburn on 29 November 1628 . In a miscalculation by authorities , his body was sent back to Portsmouth for exhibition where , rather than becoming a lesson in disgrace , it was made an object of veneration . A large number of poems celebrating Felton and justifying his action were published . One by the Oxford scholar and cleric Zouche Townley claimed that Felton had saved England and King Charles from the corruption of Buckingham ' s politicking . An anonymous poem , " Upon the Duke ' s Death " , begins The poem goes on at length with a poetically poor , but reasoned argument that claims Buckingham ' s assassination was not even a crime , arguing that the Duke himself had been a criminal who had placed himself above the law . Fictionalizations . Felton ' s assassination of the Duke was fictionalized in Alexandre Dumas , père ' s " The Three Musketeers " . In Dumas ' novel , Felton serves under Lord de Winter who entrusts him to guard the fictional Milady de Winter . Milady ' s master , Cardinal Richelieu , has ordered her to have Buckingham murdered so that he will not aid the Huguenot cause in the city of La Rochelle . As they question each other she puts on a façade of sorrow and broken innocence , even pretending to be a Puritan like Felton , and inventing a story of being drugged and raped by the Duke . Milady manages to seduce Felton in a matter of days . They finally escape together and Felton is sent to stab Buckingham , which he then justifies on the grounds of his lack of promotion in order to protect Milady . However , Felton realizes that he has been deceived when Milady sails away without him and he is left to be hanged for his crime . In the 1973 film " The Three Musketeers " and its 1974 sequel " The Four Musketeers " , Felton is played by Michael Gothard . Felton appears briefly in the first film as a servant of the Duke of Buckingham ( Lord de Winter does not appear in the films ) . The second film portrays his gradual seduction by Milady at some length , and then his assassination of Buckingham . The Duke ' s assassination features in Philippa Gregory ' s novel " Earthly Joys " . In Ronald Blythe ' s novel " The Assassin " Felton is depicted as a complex character whose motives for the assassination are altruistic .