I
My lords, I know that what has been done these two days will be rejudged;- that is my comfort, and all my hope.1
The defendants in many of the political trials of the âage of revolutionsâ, whether speaking for themselves or through professional counsel, were confident that they would appear as protagonists in later histories. They were not to be disappointed. The challenge for those placed on trial was to situate themselves and their own plights within a relevant history of liberty â British, English, Scottish, Irish, or universal â and historical narratives were the most common feature of defences. They carried with them, as did Skirvingâs failed defence above, an appeal to posterity which was taken up by later lawyers, activists, politicians, and historians.
As extraordinary moments within the lives of states, political trials have always attracted attention. The collections of State Trials that developed in Britain from the early eighteenth century were of course partly designed as legal textbooks. More importantly, however, they were national histories, textual monuments that rehearsed a long-range history of liberty and challenges to it explicitly through the medium of political trials. Key episodes around which that narrative developed and on which this volume pivots and much of the relevant scholarship has focused are the notorious rash of state trials for treason and sedition in England and Scotland in 1793â4. By labelling these and the other trials examined in this volume as âpoliticalâ it is not intended to downplay the political dimensions of other (indeed, by some definitions, of all) criminal trials. Certainly, for a trial to be âpoliticalâ may not require that it have an explicitly partisan quality, or that it garner extraordinary levels of public interest, or that its content and outcomes expressly involve contests over the distribution of power within the state.2 Many of the trials considered in this volume, however, embodied all three of these qualities. It is difficult to explain the significance of these trials for contemporary audiences or their enduring attraction to later generations without these qualities.
The trials of the 1790s were almost immediately central to a number of partisan narratives about politics and the state, which were crafted in accounts of the trials themselves as well as in Parliament and other institutions and through the proliferating print culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Most obviously for radicals and for opposition Whigs, they were evidence of the veracity of their critiques. For loyalists, ministers, and the Crown successful verdicts were evidence of the substance of their arguments that the state needed to defend itself via the law. Even acquittals, while carrying the cost of bolstering the radical cause by apparent ministerial defeat, carried benefits for the state. The acquittal of Thomas Hardy in 1794, for example, underlined Thomas Erskineâs plea to the jury: âlet us not follow the example of that which we deplore in another countryâ.3 By serving âto set up her happy constitution, the strict letter of her guardian laws, and the proud condition of equal freedom, which her highest and lowest subjects ought equally to enjoyâ acquittals might be personally embarrassing for ministers, but served wider loyalist arguments, which were prominent within its efforts to persuade the lower orders, about the freedom preserved by British laws.4
Partisan interpretations and uses of political trials were not, of course, novel phenomena in the 1790s.5 During and after the âage of revolutionsâ these uses continued to develop. There is now a rich historiography of commemoration and memorialisation of the victims of political trials. It reveals, among other things, the contested interpretations of political trials in subsequent decades. The âmartyrsâ of the Scottish courts in the 1790s, for example, became the focus of pan-British efforts at commemoration after the 1830s, but Whigs, household suffrage campaigners, and Chartists all imbued them with different significance.6 Similarly, the comparative visibility of different defendants has ebbed and flowed depending on the needs of and contests between the commemorators themselves: Chartists, liberals, socialists and nationalists have all selected different points of emphases within political trials and sought to commemorate accordingly.7 The nature of the source materials has frequently supported this proliferation of perspectives. The famous speech from the dock of Robert Emmet became a classic statement of republican Irish nationalism, but exists in over seventy versions supporting a range of interpretations.8 That so many different groups have sought to establish âownershipâ of the political trials does speak volumes about their significance.
Needless to say, partisan narratives have never been especially interested in providing detailed histories or analyses of the events themselves. Alongside the trials, however, the kinds of sources on which later historians might work were being produced. The huge volume of trial reports should not, of course, gull the historian into believing that he or she has reliable access to what was said and done during political trials. Accounts were often published with partisan purposes and their publishers and publication histories were frequently entangled with the events they described. The single most-cited source in this volume, for example â Cobbettâs, later Howellâs, Complete Collection of State Trials â was begun in 1809 under the auspices of Thomas Bayly Howell and the prolific journalist and radical William Cobbett. It was to defray part of his own legal expenses and hefty fine after his seditious libel trial in 1810 that Cobbett signed this project over to the Howells.9
Part of the rationale for the State Trials was that the prosecutions of Hardy and others had major implications for the application of public law. Perhaps unsurprisingly it was lawyers who were most qualified to attempt and most forward in producing more substantial investigations of the trials, both detailing particular trials and using them to furnish analyses of different varieties of political crime. Lawyerly accounts were not, of course, devoid of partisanship. Another much-cited volume in the essays that follow, Henry Cockburnâs Examination of the Trials for Sedition that have hitherto occurred in Scotland, was part legal treatise, part Whig propaganda.
Modern historical accounts of these political trials can be dated to the post-war period. E. P. Thompsonâs Making of the English Working Class was, of course, pivotal in both establishing Britain during the âage of revolutionsâ as a site for creative historical scholarship and in affording political trials an important place in his narrative of a developing and politicising working class. At the risk of oversimplifying a rich and complex scholarship (whose complexities are, however, grappled with in many of the essays that follow), historians have been attracted to political trials in general and to specific celebrated trials, in order to answer two broad sets of questions.
The first regards the scope, scale and nature of both political crime and of government efforts to police and punish it in the 1790s and after. Histories that have looked at political trials in the round, either in the 1790s or across longer periods, have revealed a good deal. The caricature of âPittâs Terrorâ was an early focus of this kind of research.10 Thompson had pointed out that political trials carried both opportunities and costs for ministers: âPersecution, we know, is a two-edged weaponâ.11 Efforts to reveal the sharpness of both edges have given us a much more nuanced understanding of political trials across the period.12 Such investigations have also quantified and explained the changing nature of political crime, as the unreliable and blunt weapons of treason and seditious and blasphemous libel trials were increasingly (but not completely) replaced with public order offences as a means of defending the state from internal enemies.13
Overall, the development of this more complex account has seen the relative downgrading of coercion and persecution as blanket explanations for the chequered history of radicalism across this period. This has largely been done, however, without rescuing Pitt and his ministers from charges of deliberately exaggerating the nature of the radical threat, sponsoring alarmist reactions to it, and manipulating the legal process in their efforts to restrain it. Nonetheless, both the extent and the efficacy of flat legal repression in the âage of revolutionsâ is now very much more debatable. The proliferating histories of loyalism following on from H. T. Dickinsonâs lucid treatment of the phenomenon have focused on political trials as only one part of an economy of political reaction that focused on persuasion at least as much as it did on coercion.14
The second set of questions aims more at recovering the meanings of the trials. Pioneering cultural historians (or social historians who had taken a cultural turn) were especially drawn to the performative and linguistic dimensions of political trials. Trials have been explored as crucial political sites, rare and illuminating moments when the state and its critics entered into direct, creative, and often noisy confrontation. Historians of radicalism have focused on the complex opportunities they afforded â through ideologically motivated defence speeches, processions to the court, and the exploitation of the relationship between trials and the press â to challenge the claim to dominance which lay at the centre of legal language, ritual and spaces.15
This work has multidisciplinary origins, but much of it is relevant to Olivia Smithâs brilliant treatment of the period between the French Revolution and Peterloo as involving a prolonged conflict over language.16 Some of this work has, of course, addressed the issues sketched above. One of the key ways, for example, in which trials were âdouble-edgedâ lay in the stateâs inability to fix securely the spectacle and language involved. The treason trials have a privileged place here. As widely-reported and focal moments, the language and events around them have been anatomised to provide insights not only into the reshaping of treason law in this period, but also into the redefinition of the state, what allegiance to it meant and, in John Barrellâs monumental work, into the entire cultural history of the 1790s.17
The work outlined above has established political trials in Britain and elsewhere as key sites for the exploration of politics in the âage of revolutionsâ. While some of this work has looked at political trials in the round across comparatively long periods, scholarship has tended to coalesce around a few key, well-documented and long-celebrated trials. With notable exceptions, little effort has been made to recover and connect trials across different parts of the four nations, let alone to connect them to trials beyond âthe islesâ. In that sense, the historiography of political trials still bears the imprint of the more...
