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disgraceful. "The proceedings on the Popish Plot," says Mr. Fox*, "must always be considered as an indelible disgrace upon the English nation, in which king, parliament, judges, juries, witnesses, prosecutors, have all their respective, though certainly not equal, shares. Witnesses of such a character as not to deserve credit in the most trifling cause, upon the most immaterial facts, gave evidence so incredible, or, to speak more properly, so impossible to be true, that it ought not to have been believed if it had come from the mouth of Cato; and upon such evidence, from such witnesses, were innocent men condemned to death and executed. Prosecutors, whether attorneys and solicitors-general, or managers of impeachments, acted with the fury which in such circumstances might be expected; juries partook naturally enough of the national ferment; and judges, whose duty it was to guard them against such impressions, were scandalously active in confirming them in their prejudices, and inflaming their passions." Whether we impute the origin of this strange transaction to an extraordinary degree of blind credulity, or to the wicked contrivance of a party, or to a mixture of both these causes, the effects which it produced were the same; for, as the measures of Charles I. had done before the Commonwealth, the proceedings in the Popish Plot prepared the way for the irruption of arbitrary power by degrading the administration of justice in the eyes of the people; and thus promoted the designs of a dissolute prince, who, influenced by evil counsellors, and aided by corrupt and unprincipled judges, afterwards broke down most of the guards and fences which had been previously provided for the security of the subject. Perhaps the most singular feature in the history of this Plot, was that the people themselves * History of the Reign of James II.

were actually stimulated by the fever of alarm respecting Popery to an attack against their own liberties, and were blindly hurrying to a more hopeless slavery, a more complete prostration to the power of the Crown, than had been known at any previous period. But, even in those evil days of extravagant injustice and popular frenzy, the seed which had been sown by Cromwell was never entirely lost; for then, even under the worst government, and the worst judges, the administration of the criminal law (bad as it was) was better than it had ever been before the Commonwealth; while the experience of the insufficiency of the laws, as they previously stood, to stop the violent career of bad princes, led directly to the passing of various important laws upon the Revolution in 1688. Such were the Bill of Rights, the Toleration Act, the Bill of Settlement, with its conditions, and some others," which," in the language of Blackstone, "have asserted our liberties in more clear and emphatical terms; have regulated the succession of the Crown by Parliament, as the exigencies of religious and civil freedom required; have confirmed and exemplified the doctrine of resistance, when the executive magistrate endeavours to subvert the constitution; have maintained the superiority of the laws above the king, by pronouncing his dispensing power to be illegal; have restrained the king's pardon from obstructing parliamentary impeachments; have regulated trials for high treason; and have made the judges completely independent of the king, his ministers, and his successors *."

We cannot forbear to make one remark, which forcibly presents itself to the mind on perusing the State Trials, and comparing the earlier proceedings with those of the present day-we allude to the * Blackstone's Com., vol. iv. p. 357.

striking improvement which has taken place in the dignity and decorum of our courts, produced by the sense of propriety and responsibility which, in general, actuates all connected with them, whether judges, counsel, jurors, witnesses, or parties. This great improvement, which must be obvious to every one who has witnessed a modern trial and read a trial of the reign of Elizabeth, is not the result of any interference of the legislature, or of any express regulations of the courts. There is no positive law which forbids a judge at the present day, by vulgar abuse and clamour, to beat down the defence of an innocent man, as the infamous Jefferies did; there is no statute which prohibits the crown from placing upon the bench men of bad character, like Jefferies, who have been notoriously "blemishes at the bar*;" nevertheless we feel no apprehension that the Crown will, in this respect, abuse the authority with which the constitution has invested it, or that judges will disgrace themselves by following so base an example. The fact is, that the general increase of knowledge in England since the Reformation has gradually formed a tribunal in the power of public opinion, which was utterly unknown to our ancestors, but to which all men in eminent stations amongst us must now consider themselves as amenable. By this power of opinion, fashioned and educated as it has been by our national experience, and enlightened and expanded by the general cultivation of good sense, and habits of correct thinking, the conduct of public men is far more effectually controlled and directed than by any positive laws which could be devised. It is to this power that

*These words are used by Algernon Sidney respecting Jefferies, in the paper delivered by him to the sheriff at his execution; see 9 How. State Trials, 916. They are afterwards remarked upon by Jefferies on the trial of Hampden; ibid. 1058.

we owe the comparative purity and dignity of our judicial procedure; and it is to this that we must look for the gradual introduction of those further improvements in our civil and political institutions, by which the security of our freedom and the efficiency of our laws may be confirmed, and this country rendered practically, what Milton somewhere describes a free state to be in theory, "the mansionhouse of liberty, encompassed and surrounded by the protection of the law."

It is proposed by the present series to extend more widely amongst general readers the advantage and entertainment which may be derived from the perusal of criminal trials, by selecting from the State Trials, and other sources, those which possess the greatest interest, and may be useful in illustrating, in a popular manner, either English history generally, or the history of our jurisprudence. It is not intended to confine the selection to what are in strictness called State Trials, but to take indiscriminately, and without reference to their connection with political transactions, such as may be subservient to the general object of usefulness and entertainment.

With respect to the early trials, it must be admitted that it is extremely difficult to render them generally interesting. The absence of the oral examination of witnesses is one cause of the failure of interest; besides which, the reader is perplexed and bewildered by the irregularity of the procedure, and its total difference from that with which he is familiar in our modern Courts of Justice. If, therefore, entertainment had been the only object contemplated, it would have been improper to commence this series at an earlier point of time than the Restoration: but as it is intended to illustrate particular portions and pe

riods of English History, to trace the changes in our criminal law, and the steps by which it has advanced to its present state, and to exhibit a fair comparison between the ancient and modern forms of administering justice, it is obviously desirable to go back as far as materials can be found sufficiently complete to be used for those purposes.

One great obstacle to deriving either advantage or entertainment from the perusal of the more ancient trials, is the inaccurate and confused form in which they have been published. Before the full introduction of short-hand, the reports of trials, even by eyewitnesses of the proceedings, were necessarily defective; the Speeches of Judges, Counsel and Prisoners, especially where points of law were involved, could never be perfectly taken down at the time, and as the reporters were not usually lawyers, they could not accurately relate from memory what they did not fully understand; still less could the evidence be correctly given, consisting, as it did for the most part, of written documents read by the officer of the Court, to which the reporter had no access. With respect to the evidence, some reporters, as in the Duke of Norfolk's case, merely referred to it generally, and then honestly laid down their pens while the examinations were read, without attempting to report at all what they knew they could not report accurately: The only ill effect of this was to render the case unintelligible. Others again adopted a more mischievous course; not content with leaving blanks in their report, they filled them up after the trial with facts drawn from a vague recollection of the proofs, or their own imaginations, and thus falsified the whole evidence in the case. Many instances of this might be given; a remarkable one occurs in the Trial of the Earls of Essex and Southampton as published in all the editions of State Trials; the contents of the

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