In The Three Musketeers, Milady de Winter is captured on arriving in England by her brother-in-law, Lord de Winter, who knows her past and plans to deport her. He locks her in his castle and entrusts her to his most reliable officer, a young lieutenant named John Felton: a puritan, austere, devout, and warned that the prisoner is a dangerous liar. Milady has a few days. She studies her guard, discovers his faith and adapts to it. She prays aloud, sings psalms, refuses food, stages attempts at suicide and finally tells him a story: the Duke of Buckingham, the most powerful man in England, drugged and dishonoured her, and when she tried to denounce him, had her branded with the mark of a criminal. She shows Felton the brand on her shoulder as proof. Felton, who already hates Buckingham as a corrupt favorite and an enemy of the godly, accepts the story entirely. He helps her escape, takes her to a ship, and goes to Portsmouth, where Buckingham is preparing the fleet for La Rochelle. He gains access to the duke and stabs him to death. As he is arrested, he looks out to sea and sees Milady’s ship sailing away without waiting for him.
// The theoryLearning from someone you have never met
Edwin Sutherland’s differential association held that crime is learned in intimate groups, through contact with people who define it favourably. In 1956 Daniel Glaser proposed a correction: what matters is not with whom one associates, but with whom one identifies. “A person pursues criminal behavior to the extent that he identifies himself with real or imaginary persons from whose perspective his criminal behavior seems acceptable”. The reference figures can be distant—heroes of films, figures of history or religion, people one has only read about—and identification can be rapid when a person is looking for a role that gives meaning to their life. Glaser’s idea anticipates later research on radicalization, which has found that many people who commit political violence are drawn in not by long criminal careers but by identification with a cause, a martyr or a charismatic figure who offers them a heroic role.
A role made to measure
Milady does not ask Felton to commit a crime. She offers him an identity. In the role she builds for him, killing Buckingham is not murder but the act of a righteous man who avenges an innocent woman and frees England from a corrupt tyrant. She uses the reference figures that already mean most to him: the persecuted godly, the biblical heroes who struck down oppressors, the martyr who suffers for the truth. She presents herself as one of them, and the brand, which in fact proves her criminal past, becomes in her story the proof of Buckingham’s cruelty. Glaser’s theory explains why this works so quickly. Felton does not need to be persuaded that murder is acceptable in general. He only needs to see himself in a role, from whose perspective this particular killing is a duty.
// The subjectThe incorruptible who was corrupted
Lord de Winter chose Felton because he thought him incorruptible, and in a sense he was right: Felton cannot be bribed, seduced in any ordinary way or frightened. That is precisely what makes him vulnerable. A man who acts only on conviction can be moved by anyone who can reach his convictions, and Milady, who has studied him, does exactly that. Dumas presents Felton as both instrument and victim. He commits the murder, but the plan, the story and the motive are hers. The final image, the ship leaving without him, is the moment when he realizes what role he has really played: not the avenger of a martyr, but the disposable tool of a spy.
John Felton
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// The crackThe real Felton had his own reasons
Glaser’s theory explains Dumas’s Felton very well, but the novel takes liberties with history. The real John Felton, an army lieutenant who had served in the failed expedition to the Île de Ré, stabbed George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, at an inn in Portsmouth on 23 August 1628. He was not Milady’s jailer and there is no evidence of any manipulator behind him. He had grievances of his own—arrears of pay and a promotion he believed he deserved—and he had read Parliament’s remonstrance blaming Buckingham for the country’s misfortunes. He was hanged at Tyburn in November of that year, and some Londoners celebrated him as a hero. The real case fits strain theory and political identification at least as well as Dumas’s seduction.
The novel also makes a choice that the theory should resist: it turns a political assassination into the result of a woman’s seduction, which conveniently removes the political grievances that many contemporaries shared. Within the fiction, Felton chose to kill a man on the word of a prisoner he had been warned about. What Glaser adds is that people are most dangerous when they find a role that makes violence feel like duty, and that whoever offers that role shares the responsibility for what follows.
Radicalisation by identification
Research on lone attackers and political violence has found again and again the pattern Glaser described: people with grievances and a search for meaning who identify, sometimes very quickly, with a cause or a figure that offers them a heroic role. Recruiters, propagandists and online communities supply the role; the individual supplies the conviction. Prevention programs increasingly focus on that moment of identification: offering other roles, other models and other ways to answer the grievance. Felton’s story, written in 1844, describes the mechanism with uncomfortable accuracy. The most dangerous person is not always the one who wants to kill, but the one who has been given a reason to believe he must.
Three key ideas
- Glaser’s differential identification (1956) holds that people offend to the extent that they identify with real or imaginary persons from whose perspective crime seems acceptable. It anticipates research on radicalization through identification with a cause or a martyr.
- John Felton, the puritan officer guarding Milady, is persuaded by her that Buckingham dishonoured and branded her. He helps her escape and stabs Buckingham at Portsmouth; as he is arrested, he sees her ship sailing away without him.
- The crack: the real Felton (1628) acted on his own grievances, without any Milady, and the novel replaces politics with seduction. Even so, within the fiction, the stab was his choice.
Sources · further reading
- Glaser, D. (1956). “Criminality Theories and Behavioral Images”. American Journal of Sociology, 61(5), 433-444.
- Sutherland, E. H. (1947). Principles of Criminology (4th ed.). J. B. Lippincott.
- McCauley, C. and Moskalenko, S. (2008). “Mechanisms of Political Radicalization: Pathways Toward Terrorism”. Terrorism and Political Violence, 20(3), 415-433.
- Dumas, A. (1844). Les Trois Mousquetaires.
- Lockyer, R. (1981). Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592-1628. Longman.
- Bellany, A. and McRae, A. (eds.) (2005). Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources (section P, “The Assassination of Buckingham”). Early Modern Literary Studies Text Series I. https://earlystuartlibels.net/htdocs/buckingham_assassination_section/P0.html
- Lee, S. (1889). “Felton, John (1595?-1628)”. In L. Stephen (ed.), Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 18. Smith, Elder & Co. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Felton,_John_(1595%3F-1628)
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is John Felton?
John Felton is a villain from The Three Musketeers, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He was told not to speak to the prisoner.
Why does John Felton become a villain?
John Felton and differential identification: in The Three Musketeers, the officer ordered to guard Milady ends up believing himself the avenger of a martyr and stabs the Duke of Buckingham. Daniel Glaser explained that people offend when they identify with someone from whose point of view crime seems acceptable. Milady wrote the role to fit him.
Which criminological theory explains John Felton?
John Felton's case is analysed through Differential identification. Daniel Glaser’s theory of differential identification (1956) corrected Sutherland: one does not need to associate with criminals to learn to offend; it is enough to identify with someone, real or imaginary, from whose perspective crime seems acceptable. John Felton, the puritan officer who guards Milady de Winter in The Three Musketeers, is an extreme case: in a few days she convinces him that she is a victim of Buckingham, and he adopts the role she offers, that of the righteous man who avenges a martyr. The real Felton, who killed Buckingham in 1628, had other motives, and the difference is revealing.
