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The English and Scottish State Trials of the 1790s Compared

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Political Trials in an Age of Revolutions

Part of the book series: Palgrave Histories of Policing, Punishment and Justice ((PHPPJ))

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Abstract

Historians have tended to compare the English and Scottish state trials of the 1790s only superficially, concluding that the Scottish courts treated radical reformers much more harshly than the English courts did. However, that assessment relies on virtually equating trials in Edinburgh for the lesser crime of sedition with the trials in London for the capital charge of high treason. This chapter compares various elements of both sets of trials, and suggests that examining the similarities between these trials sheds as much light on the state side of the prosecutions as does dwelling on the headline contrasts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    LCS General Meeting, 14 April 1794, in Mary Thale (ed.), Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, 1792–1799 (Cambridge, 1983), 133.

  2. 2.

    Cited by Nicholas Roe, “The Lives of John Thelwall”, in Steve Poole (ed.), John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon (London, 2009), 17.

  3. 3.

    Cockburn, Examination, I: 246.

  4. 4.

    John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, Vol. 2: The Reluctant Transition (London, 1983), 390; cf. Atle L. Wold, Scotland and the French Revolutionary War, 1792–1802 (Edinburgh, 2015), 67–69.

  5. 5.

    Gordon Pentland, “State Trials, Whig Lawyers and the Press in Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland”, in this volume; see also Jim Smyth and Alan McKinlay, “Whigs, Tories and Scottish Legal Reform c.1785–1832”, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History and Societies, 15 (2011), 111–32.

  6. 6.

    Henry W. Meikle, Scotland and the French Revolution (Glasgow, 1912), 155–60.

  7. 7.

    Henry Cockburn, Memorials of His Time (Edinburgh, 1856), 116.

  8. 8.

    Ehrman, The reluctant transition, 390; Wold, Scotland and the French Revolutionary War, 52.

  9. 9.

    Clive Emsley, “An Aspect of Pitt’s Terror: Prosecutions for Sedition During the 1790s”, Social History, 6 (1981), 173.

  10. 10.

    The National Archives [TNA], PC 1/22/37, 31 December 1794. Draught of an Order in Council Declaring and appointing the Place to which Joseph Gerald who has been Sentenced to be Transported in Scotland beyond the Seas shall be Conveyed, f.5.

  11. 11.

    National Records of Scotland [NRS], GD 214/658/1; draft at NRS JC 49/6JC 49/6.

  12. 12.

    Dr. Williams’s Library, London, James Wodrow to Samuel Kenrick, 24 August 1793.

  13. 13.

    State Trials, XXIII: 22–4.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 233.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 25.

  16. 16.

    By contrast, the failure of the London treason trials in autumn 1794 caused the authorities to prosecute Henry Redhead Yorke for seditious conspiracy rather than, as originally planned, treason. Timing was also responsible for his charge. Amanda Goodrich, “Radical ‘Citizens of the World’, 1790–95: The Early Career of Henry Redhead Yorke”, Journal of British Studies, 53 (2014), 634.

  17. 17.

    25 Geo III c.46.

  18. 18.

    A.G.L Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies. A Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and Other Parts of the British Empire (London, 1966), 38–57. See Henry Dundas to William Grenville as early as 17 Dec. 1789 for Dundas’s opinion that employment in public works in Scotland such as canal building were not an appropriate substitute for transportation. “Death, transportation and Bridewell are … the only variety of punishment that the manners of our country will admit of.” Historical Manuscripts Commission, Thirteenth Report, Appendix, Part III, The Manuscripts of J.B.Fortescue, Esq., Preserved at Dropmore, 10 vols (London, 1892–1927), X: 555–6.

  19. 19.

    But see Steve Poole, “Pitt’s Terror Reconsidered: Jacobinism and the Law in Two South-Western Counties, 1791–1803”, Southern History, 17 (1995), 65–87.

  20. 20.

    Emsley, “An Aspect of Pitt’s Terror”, 179–84.

  21. 21.

    I am grateful to Lindsay Farmer for advice on this point; see his Making the Modern Criminal Law (Oxford, 2015), p. 71.

  22. 22.

    Christina Bewley, Muir of Huntershill (Oxford, 1981), 83; Lindsay Farmer, Criminal Law, Tradition and Legal Order: Crime and the Genius of Scots Law, 1747 to the Present (Cambridge, 1997), 44.

  23. 23.

    John Cairns, “Scottish Law, Scottish Lawyers and the Status of Union”, in John Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge, 1995), 250; Lisa Steffen, Defining a British State: Treason and National Identity, 1608–1820 (Basingstoke, 2001), 5–6; Paul Halliday, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Cambridge, MA and London, 2010); Wold, Scotland and the French Revolutionary War, 17.

  24. 24.

    Wold, Scotland and the French Revolutionary War, 38–69, 209; idem, “Was there a Law of Sedition in Scotland? Baron David Hume’s Analysis of the Scottish Sedition Trials of 1794” in Gordon Pentland and Michael T. Davis (eds), Liberty, Property and Popular Politics: England and Scotland, 1688–1815. Essays in honour of H.T. Dickinson (Edinburgh, 2016), 163–75. Lindsay Farmer points out in his Chap. 2 in this volume that sedition per se was not a crime in Scots law until 1793. Until that year, as in England, it was treated as a quality of some other offence, such as libel or the related offence of leasing-making.

  25. 25.

    Wold, Scotland and the French Revolutionary War, 48–51.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., 58; James Epstein, “‘Our Real Constitution’: Trial Defence and Radical Memory in the Age of Revolution”, in James Vernon (ed.), Re-reading the Constitution: new narratives in the political history of England’s long nineteenth century (Cambridge, 1996), 35; Barrell and Mee, Trials, I: xliii, 352.

  27. 27.

    State Trials, XXII: 801.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., XXIII: 230.

  29. 29.

    Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, 164–5.

  30. 30.

    State Trials, XXII: 383.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., XXIII: 11–12, cf. Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, passim.

  32. 32.

    NRS, GD 214/658/1, unfoliated, [18].

  33. 33.

    State Trials, XXV: 512.

  34. 34.

    Barrell and Mee, Trials, V: 475–6.

  35. 35.

    Ehrman, The reluctant transition, 391; Poole, “Pitt’s Terror Reconsidered”, especially 65–73; Farmer, Criminal Law, Tradition and Legal Order, 66–74; Anne-Marie Kilday, “Contemplating the Evil Within: examining attitudes to criminality in Scotland, 1700–1840”, in David Lemmings (ed.), Crime, Courtrooms and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1700–1850 (Aldershot, 2013), 151–2.

  36. 36.

    TNA, PC 1/21/35A, 14th May 1794. Copy. Examination of Jere.h Joyce Tho.s Hardy and John Thelwall. Evidence Wm Mainwaring Esq.r Rt Hon.ble W.m Pitt Mr. John King. Ross & Thaw, Messengers. Office.

  37. 37.

    TNA, TS 24/1/2, ff. 1–5, The Treasury Solicitors’ (Chamberlayne and White) bill for “Seditious Prosecutions”.

  38. 38.

    Epstein, “‘Our Real Constitution’”, 36.

  39. 39.

    T.M. Parsinnen, “Association, convention and anti-parliament in British radical politics, 1771–1848”, English Historical Review, 88 (1973), 512–15 Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, 182–210, passim; The First Report from the Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons (London, 1794), 8–9, 20, 27, 40, 42; The Second Report from the Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons (London, 1794), 11–12, 15, 49ff.

  40. 40.

    State Trials, XXIII: 700.

  41. 41.

    Robert Southey, “To the Exiled Patriots. MUIR AND PALMER” (1794), in The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, complete in one volume (Paris, 1829), 698; Cockburn, Examination, 80–3. In Scottish criminal cases till 1825 a jury of 15 men was selected by the judge from a pool of 45 presented to him by the clerk of the court. Smyth and McKinlay, “Whigs, Tories and Scottish Legal Reform”, 116, 129; T.J. Dowds, “Muir’s ‘Good Cause’ 1820”, in Gerard Carruthers and Don Martin (eds), Thomas Muir of Huntershill: essays for the twenty-first century (Edinburgh, 2016), 266–7.

  42. 42.

    David Lemmings, “Introduction: Criminal Courts, Lawyers and the Public Sphere” in idem (ed.), Crime, Courtrooms and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1700–1850 (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT, 2013), 7.

  43. 43.

    State Trials, XIX: 11 note; ibid., XXIII: 134–5, 513, 679–80, 701, 901.

  44. 44.

    The cases against John Elder and John Smith collapsed in 1793 and that against James Menzies, in 1798.

  45. 45.

    Cockburn, Examination, II: 28. Henry Yorke, for one, had been accusing the government of packing juries well before his own trial in July 1795. State Trials, XXV: 1049.

  46. 46.

    Wold, Scotland and the French Revolutionary War, 67–9; Ehrman, The Reluctant Transition, 397; Emsley, “An Aspect of Pitt’s Terror”, 170; Epstein, “‘Our Real Constitution’”, 34; Philip Harling, “The Law of Libel and the Limits of Repression, 1790–1832”, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 115; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1780–1832 (Harmondsworth, 1968), 509. See also James Epstein’s chapter in this book, which notes that Winterbotham’s supporters expected his jury to be packed.

  47. 47.

    State Trials, XXII: 965–85.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., XXV: 1004.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., XXIII: 114 and note, referring to John Burnett, Criminal Laws of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1811); on trials for treason see Barrell and Mee, Trials, VII: 437, 467–8.

  50. 50.

    Barrell and Mee, Trials, I: xvi-xvii, xliv, 257 note; State Trials, XXII: 254–5516-19; The Prison Diary of Horne Tooke, 15; Kenneth R. Johnston, Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s (Oxford, 2013), 192. See also the speech of the Recorder in Eaton’s trial in February 1794, State Trials, XXIII: 1047–54.

  51. 51.

    State Trials, XXII: 875–6; see Epstein’s essay in this volume.

  52. 52.

    NRS, JC 26/1793/1/4, 1–9; H.T. Dickinson, “Thomas Muir (1765–99)”, ODNB.

  53. 53.

    R.R. Palmer, The age of democratic revolution: a political history of Europe and America, 2 vols (Princeton, 1959), II: 480.

  54. 54.

    Brian D. Osborne, Braxfield: the hanging judge? (Glendaruel, Argyll, 1997); see, for instance, Bewley, Muir of Huntershill, 83.

  55. 55.

    Peter D.G. Thomas, “Charles Pratt, First Earl Camden (1714–1794)”, ODNB.

  56. 56.

    Barrell and Mee, Trials, V: 324–443, 477 n. 324.

  57. 57.

    State Trials, XXIII: 808.

  58. 58.

    Lord Eldon’s Anecdote Book, eds Anthony L.J. Lincoln and Robert Lindley McEwen (London, 1960), 57; see also Walter Sichel (ed.), The Glenbervie Journals (London, 1910), 212.

  59. 59.

    Lord Eldon’s Anecdote Book, 57; Sichel (ed.), Glenbervie Journals, 213; State Trials, XXV: 555–743; Barrell and Mee, Trials, VII: 467. See also Douglas Hay, “Sir James Eyre (bap. 1734, d. 1799)”, ODNB.

  60. 60.

    Osborne, Braxfield: the hanging judge?, 218; NRS, RH2/4/83, ff. 178–9, Robert Dundas to Henry Dundas, 27 April 1798.

  61. 61.

    Meikle, Scotland and the French Revolution, 136.

  62. 62.

    Wold, Scotland and the French Revolutionary War, 65; Epstein, “‘Our Real Constitution’”, 38.

  63. 63.

    Kilday, “Contemplating the Evil Within”, 153–54; Farmer, Criminal Law, 43–44.

  64. 64.

    This point is worth much fuller investigation; it has the potential to explain comparative acquittal rates in both countries. There were, however, a number of other factors which affected differences in acquittal rates (such as the proportion of public to private prosecutions, and the difference in law between sedition as a misdemeanour and sedition as a crime, discussed above), so care is required in laying great weight on it here.

  65. 65.

    State Trials, XXV: 1138; cf. Epstein, “Sermons of Sedition” in this volume.

  66. 66.

    Ibid., XXII: 802.

  67. 67.

    Barrell and Mee, Trials, II: 446–47.

  68. 68.

    Ibid., XXIII: 194.

  69. 69.

    Ibid., 10, cf. ibid., 88.

  70. 70.

    Palmer, The age of democratic revolution, II: 480; Steve Poole, The Politics of Regicide in England, 1760–1850 (Manchester, 2000), 97; Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, 190, 212–16; Barrell and Mee, Trials, VIII: 30, 87–8, 94, 108.

  71. 71.

    Poole, Politics of Regicide, 99.

  72. 72.

    Roe, “The Lives of John Thelwall”, 18.

  73. 73.

    See, at least as reported in State Trials, the cases of Daniel Holt (XXII: 1202–35), Maurice Margarot (XXIII: 672–4), Henry Redhead Yorke (XXV: 1021); and Barrell and Mee, Trials, I: xlvi-xlvii; ibid., II: 446–7.

  74. 74.

    John Barrell, “Thelwall in his own defence: the Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons”, in Poole (ed.), John Thelwall, 40.

  75. 75.

    State Trials, XXIV: 891. Cf. the Foxite notion of the “Pitt system” of the 1790s more broadly, a wicked, deliberate plan to go to war against France in order to have a reason to expand the power of the executive and create opportunities for personal ministerial gains. E.g. War with France! Or, Who Pays the Reckoning (London, 1793), 23.

  76. 76.

    F. Murray Greenwood, “Judges and Treason Law in Lower Canada, England, and the United States during the French Revolution, 1794–1800”, in F. Murray Greenwood and Barry Wright (eds), Canadian State Trials, I: Law, Politics, and Security Measures, 1608–1837 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 241–95.

  77. 77.

    Barrell and Mee, Trials, I: 2–3; State Trials, XXIII: 284, 696–8.

  78. 78.

    State Trials, XXIII: 592; see also Lord Swinton, ibid., 898–9.

  79. 79.

    Horne Tooke, Prison Diary, 11; State Trials, XXIV: 179 and XXV: 258.

  80. 80.

    Lord Eldon’s Anecdote Book, eds Lincoln and McEwen, 55–6. Scott also said (57) it had been necessary to prosecute for treason to prevent an acquittal in a trial for sedition on the grounds that the correct charge would have been treason. This is less convincing, and it is impossible to know whether, vice versa, convictions for sedition might have been secured had that charge been prosecuted instead of the unsuccessful charge of treason.

  81. 81.

    Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, 329–30.

  82. 82.

    Though see also Katrina Navickas’s essay in this volume; and also E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: the Origin of the Black Act (London, 1975; 1990 edition), p. 263. Thanks to James Epstein for pointing out the latter.

  83. 83.

    John Brewer and John Styles, An Ungovernable People: the English and their law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (London, 1983), 14, 16, 19. See also H.T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: political ideology in eighteenth-century Britain (London, 1977), 159–62.

  84. 84.

    State Trials, XXII: 479–80.

  85. 85.

    Ibid., XXIII: 269; Cockburn, Examination, I: 185.

  86. 86.

    John Bruce (1744–1826), previously professor of logic of the University of Edinburgh and by 1794 Under Keeper of the State Paper Office. TNA HO 102/62, [John Bruce], Report by Mr. Bruce on Treason 1794. A copy of part 1 of 7 of this document (ff. 1–52 of 315ff.) is held at NRS, GD152/222/3/5.

  87. 87.

    TNA, PC 1/3111, 11 Oct. 1794. Letter from Mr. Attorney and Solicitor General on the subject of granting permissions to persons to visit the prisoners now under confinement for High Treason.

  88. 88.

    State Trials, XXV: 6–12; Barrell and Mee, Trials, VI: 474.

  89. 89.

    State Trials, XXIV: 1379; Barrell and Mee, Trials, VIII, 94. On Winterbotham, see note 38 above.

  90. 90.

    State Trials, XXIII: 509, 606–7, 629–32, 635–6, 704, 1001.

  91. 91.

    Ibid., XXVI: 1220–1.

  92. 92.

    E.g. TNA PC 1/21/35A and 35B, passim; First Report from the Committee of Secrecy; Second Report from the Committee of Secrecy; NRS, JC 26/1793/1, passim.

  93. 93.

    NRS, JC26/1793/1/1/1, Criminal Letters His Majesty’s Advocate Agt Mr. Thomas Muir – 1793. Sedition. Recorded, unfoliated [28]; John Barrell, “Imaginary Treason, Imaginary Law”, in Barrell, The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (Basingstoke, 1992), 120; Michael T. Davis, “Prosecution and radical discourse during the 1790s: The case of the Scottish Sedition Trials”, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 33 (2005), 148–58.

  94. 94.

    Greenwood, “Judges and Treason Law”, 249.

  95. 95.

    HMC, Dropmore, II, 595, Pitt to Lord Grenville, 5 July 1794.

  96. 96.

    See Mike Rapport’s helpful test of a robust legal system in his chapter below; and the figures of casualties of the French Terror cited at his note 8.

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Acknowledgement

The author wishes to acknowledge with gratitude funding from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland (ref. 70422) in support of research for this chapter.

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    Emma Macleod

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    Michael T. Davis

  2. Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

    Emma Macleod

  3. School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Gordon Pentland

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Macleod, E. (2019). The English and Scottish State Trials of the 1790s Compared. In: Davis, M., Macleod, E., Pentland, G. (eds) Political Trials in an Age of Revolutions. Palgrave Histories of Policing, Punishment and Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98959-4_4

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-98958-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-98959-4

  • eBook Packages: Law and CriminologyLaw and Criminology (R0)

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