Abstract
Noise and the expression of emotions were a frequent and acceptable part of criminal trial proceedings during the eighteenth century. In this way, political trials were normalised and were qualitatively indistinguishable from other types of criminal proceedings. However, this essay argues that the acoustic and emotional disruptions of political trials during the 1790s were viewed by some contemporaries very differently to the same disruptions of ‘ordinary’ criminal trials. The noise and emotions of political trials during the 1790s reinforced conservative perceptions of reformers as vulgar, unruly and unworthy members of society.
The research for this essay was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP0774643).
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Notes
- 1.
Cockburn, Examination, I: 68.
- 2.
For a discussion of political trials during the “age of revolutions”, see Michael Lobban, “From Seditious Libel to Unlawful Assembly: Peterloo and the Changing Face of Political Crime c. 1770–1820”, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 10 (1990), 307–352; Philip Harling, “The Law of Libel and the Limits of Repression, 1790–1832”, The Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 107–134; and Jon Mee, “Treason, Seditious Libel, and Literature in the Romantic Period” in Oxford Handbooks Online (New York, 2016), 1–23.
- 3.
T.A. Jackson, Trials of British Freedoms: Being Some Studies in the History of the Fight for Democratic Freedom in Britain (London, 1940), 35.
- 4.
Lobban, “From Seditious Libel to Unlawful Assembly”, 309.
- 5.
Kenneth R. Johnston, Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s (Oxford, 2013), xiv. Italics in the original source.
- 6.
Ibid., xvii.
- 7.
Clive Emsley, “Repression, ‘Terror’ and the Rule of Law in England during the Decade of the French Revolution”, English Historical Review, 100 (1985), 822.
- 8.
Clive Emsley, “An Aspect of Pitt’s ‘Terror’: Prosecutions for Sedition during the 1790s”, Social History, 6 (1981), 164.
- 9.
Emsley, “Repression, ‘Terror’ and the Rule of Law in England”, 822.
- 10.
Emsley, “An Aspect of Pitt’s ‘Terror’”, 174. As an integral part of a moral panic, the prosecution of radical expressions and activities is only one element of a broader cultural construction. The validity of the concept of a ‘reign of terror’, therefore, cannot be determined merely by the number of political trials but must also consider the wider societal impacts of the Jacobin panic that manifested as “unofficial terror”. See Michael T. Davis, “The British Jacobins and the Unofficial Terror of Loyalism of the 1790s”, in Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism, ed. Brett Bowden and Michael T. Davis (Brisbane, 2008), 92–113. For a discussion of political trials as part of the British Jacobin panic, see Michael T. Davis, “The British Jacobins: Folk Devils in the Age of Counter-Revolution?”, in Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England, ed. David Lemmings and Claire Walker (Basingstoke, 2009), 221–244.
- 11.
Steve Poole, “Pitt’s Terror Reconsidered: Jacobinism and the Law in Two South-Western Counties, 1791–1803”, Southern History, 17 (1995), 65–87. Also see Johnston, Unusual Suspects, 329–330.
- 12.
Emsley, “Repression, ‘Terror’ and the Rule of Law in England”, 824.
- 13.
John Bugg, Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford, 2014), 12.
- 14.
Mee, “Treason, Seditious Libel, and Literature in the Romantic Period”, 8.
- 15.
Thomas Jones Howell (ed.), A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and other Crimes and Misdemeanours, 33 vols (London, 1809–1828), XXIV: 1112–1113. For a discussion of Yorke’s trial, see Amnon Yuval, “Between Heroism and Acquittal: Henry Redhead Yorke and the Inherent Instability of Political Trials in Britain during the 1790s”, Journal of British Studies, 50 (2011), 612–638.
- 16.
L.G. Mitchell (ed.), The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 9 vols (Oxford, 1981–2015), VIII: 404.
- 17.
The Diary or Woodfall’s Register, 10 June 1793.
- 18.
Morning Post, 23 December 1793.
- 19.
Morning Post, 23 December 1794.
- 20.
Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006), 65.
- 21.
Davis, “The British Jacobins”, 230.
- 22.
Vicesimus Knox, The Spirit of Despotism (Trenton, 1802), 98.
- 23.
Barry Godfrey, “Sentencing, Theatre, Audience and Communication: The Victorian and Edwardian Magistrates’ Courts and their Message”, in Les témoins devant la justice: Une histoire des statuts et des comportements, ed. Benoit Garnot (Rennes, 2003), 163, 166.
- 24.
Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and Criminal Law”, in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England, ed. Douglas Hay et al. (New York, 1975), 17–63.
- 25.
E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (Harmondsworth, 1977), 269.
- 26.
David Lemmings, “Introduction: Criminal Courts, Lawyers and the Public Sphere”, in Crime, Courtrooms and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1700–1850, ed. David Lemmings (Farnham, 2012), 2.
- 27.
See J.M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton, NJ, 1986); and Peter King, Crime and Law in England, 1750–1840: Remaking Justice from the Margins (Cambridge, 2006).
- 28.
Peter King, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England 1740–1820 (Oxford, 2000), 255.
- 29.
Eileen Kennedy-Moore and Jeanne C. Watson, Expressing Emotion: Myths, Realities, and Therapeutic Strategies (New York, 1999), 48.
- 30.
Sun, 17 July 1798.
- 31.
Report of the Whole Proceedings on the Trial of Henry Sheares and John Sheares, Esquires, for High Treason (Cork, 1798), 85.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
The Trial of Messrs. Henry and John Sheares, on Charges of High Treason (Cork, 1798), 18.
- 34.
For a discussion of this process in the psychological context of mourning, see R.A. Neimeyer, D. Klass and M.R. Dennis, “Mourning, Meaning and Memory: Individual, Communal and Cultural Narration of Grief”, in Meaning in Positive and Existential Psychology, ed. A. Batthyany and P. Russo-Netzer (New York, 2014), 325–346.
- 35.
On the commemoration of the Scottish Martyrs during the nineteenth century, see Alex Tyrrell and Michael T. Davis, “Bearding the Tories: The Commemoration of the Scottish Political Martyrs of 1793–94”, in Contested Sites: Commemoration, Memorial and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul A. Pickering and Alex Tyrrell (Aldershot, 2004), 25–56.
- 36.
Morning Chronicle, 24 March 1794.
- 37.
Weekly Register, 30 May 1798.
- 38.
Mirror of the Times, 19 May 1798.
- 39.
Whitehall Evening Post, 24 May 1798.
- 40.
Morning Post, 25 February 1794.
- 41.
Cecilia Lucy Brightwell, Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie (Norwich, 1854), 49.
- 42.
For a discussion of the theatricality of the 1794 Treason Trials, see Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry and Spectatorship (Ithaca and London, 1997), 33–67.
- 43.
Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials, XXIV: 977.
- 44.
True Briton, 3 November 1794.
- 45.
Oracle and Public Advertiser, 6 November 1794.
- 46.
Morning Post, 24 November 1794.
- 47.
Thomas Hardy, Memoir of Thomas Hardy (London, 1832), reprinted in Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working-Class Politicians 1790–1885 (London, 1977), 72.
- 48.
Morning Post, 17 November 1794.
- 49.
Oracle and Public Advertiser, 13 May 1796.
- 50.
Courier and Evening Gazette, 24 November 1794.
- 51.
Morning Post, 24 November 1794.
- 52.
Oracle and Public Advertiser, 6 November 1794.
- 53.
Hardy, Memoir, 72.
- 54.
Oracle and Public Advertiser, 6 November 1794.
- 55.
Hardy, Memoir, 72.
- 56.
Ibid.; Oracle and Public Advertiser, 6 November 1794.
- 57.
Hardy, Memoir, 72.
- 58.
General Evening Post, 29 November 1794.
- 59.
Courier and Evening Gazette, 24 November 1794.
- 60.
Ibid.
- 61.
Ibid.
- 62.
Morning Chronicle, 14 January 1794.
- 63.
Cockburn, Examination, II: 24.
- 64.
Morning Chronicle, 17 January 1794.
- 65.
Ibid.; Cockburn, Examination, II: 23–24.
- 66.
Ibid., 25.
- 67.
Margarot’s supporters were said to be “perfectly quiet” (Morning Chronicle, 17 January 1794) and Cockburn recollected the “two parties advanced … in perfect silence” (Cockburn, Examination, II: 24–25).
- 68.
Although the promenading of reformers who had entered the criminal justice system in the 1790s occurred largely in the context of trials, there was also the case of John Frost who was escorted through the streets by the crowd after being released from prison in December 1793. See Morning Post, 23 December 1793.
- 69.
Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998), 210.
- 70.
On the importance of space to popular politics, see Katrina Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place 1789–1848 (Manchester, 2016).
- 71.
John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford, 2006), 33.
- 72.
King, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England 1740–1820, 255.
- 73.
Popular interference in courtroom proceedings extended well beyond the eighteenth century. Barry Godfrey has noted “that on many occasions the majesty of justice was traduced, and that the theatres of order deteriorated into a farce or a pantomime” during Victorian and Edwardian criminal proceedings. Godfrey, “Sentencing, Theatre, Audience and Communication”, 167.
- 74.
Amy Milka and David Lemmings, “Narratives of Feeling and Majesty: Mediated Emotions in the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Courtroom”, The Journal of Legal History, 38 (2017), 157.
- 75.
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), 149. On the way political trials were manipulated by radicals during the 1790s to challenge authority, also see Michael T. Davis, “‘I Can Bear Punishment’: Daniel Isaac Eaton, Radical Culture and the Rule of Law, 1793–1812”, in Crime, Punishment, and Reform in Europe, ed. Louis A. Knafla (Westport, 2003), 89–106; and James Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (Stanford, 2003), 59–82.
- 76.
Yuval, “Between Heroism and Acquittal”, 613.
- 77.
For a discussion of the association between radicalism and the mob in the 1790s, see Michael T. Davis, “‘Reformers No Rioters’: British Radicalism and Mob Identity in the 1790s”, in Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World, ed. Michael T. Davis (Basingstoke, 2015), 146–162.
- 78.
William Cobbett, A Summary View of the Politics of the United States (Philadelphia, 1794), in Porcupine’s Works: Containing Various Writings and Selections, 12 vols. (London, 1801), I: 63.
- 79.
True Briton, 7 November 1794.
- 80.
True Briton, 6 November 1794.
- 81.
Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials, XXIII: 696.
- 82.
London Chronicle, 16 January 1794.
- 83.
See Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England (New Haven and London, 2007), 106–130.
- 84.
Peter Denney, “Clamoring for Liberty: Alehouse Noise and the Political Shoemaker”, Eighteenth-Century Life, 41 (2017), 116.
- 85.
Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Citizen and Enemy as Symbolic Classification: On the Polarizing Discourse of Civil Society”, in Cultivating Symbolic Boundaries: Differences and the Making of Inequality, ed. Michéle Lamont and Marcel Fournier (Chicago and London, 1992), 292.
- 86.
[London Corresponding Society], The Report of the Committee of Constitution, of the London Corresponding Society (London, 1794), in London Corresponding Society, ed. Michael T. Davis, 6 vols (London, 2002), I: 339.
- 87.
Milka and Lemmings, “Narratives of Feeling and Majesty”, 158.
- 88.
Courier and Evening Gazette, 8 December 1794.
- 89.
True Briton, 3 November 1794.
- 90.
Morning Post, 13 February 1795.
- 91.
It is worth noting there was a legal precedent for the criminalisation and punishment of courtroom behavior during state trials. When Stephen Colledge was found guilty of high treason in 1681, “there was a great shout given; at which the Court being offended, one person who was observed by the Crier to be particularly concerned in the shout, was committed to gaol for that night”. Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials, VIII: 714.
- 92.
Morning Chronicle, 21 January 1794.
- 93.
True Briton, 25 December 1797.
- 94.
Daily Advertiser, 1 February 1796.
- 95.
Morning Chronicle, 1 February 1796.
- 96.
Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford, 2015), 23–24.
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Daily Advertiser.
General Evening Post.
London Chronicle.
Mirror of the Times.
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Morning Post.
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The Diary or Woodfall’s Register.
True Briton.
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John Bugg, Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford, 2014).
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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.
Michael T. Davis, “The British Jacobins and the Unofficial Terror of Loyalism of the 1790s”, in Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism, ed. Brett Bowden and Michael T. Davis (Brisbane, 2008), 92–113.
Michael T. Davis, “The British Jacobins: Folk Devils in the Age of Counter-Revolution?”, in Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England, ed. David Lemmings and Claire Walker (Basingstoke, 2009), 221–244.
Michael T. Davis, “‘Reformers No Rioters’: British Radicalism and Mob Identity in the 1790s”, in Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World, ed. Michael T. Davis (Basingstoke, 2015), 146–162.
Peter Denney, “Clamoring for Liberty: Alehouse Noise and the Political Shoemaker”, Eighteenth-Century Life, 41 (2017), 105–21.
Clive Emsley, “An Aspect of Pitt’s ‘Terror’: Prosecutions for Sedition during the 1790s”, Social History, 6 (1981), 155–84.
Clive Emsley, “Repression, ‘Terror’ and the Rule of Law in England during the Decade of the French Revolution”, English Historical Review, 100 (1985), 801–25.
James Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (Stanford, 2003).
Barry Godfrey, “Sentencing, Theatre, Audience and Communication: The Victorian and Edwardian Magistrates’ Courts and their Message”, in Les témoins devant la justice: Une histoire des statuts et des comportements, ed. Benoit Garnot (Rennes, 2003), 161–71.
Philip Harling, “The Law of Libel and the Limits of Repression, 1790–1832”, The Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 107–134.
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Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006).
T.A. Jackson, Trials of British Freedoms: Being Some Studies in the History of the Fight for Democratic Freedom in Britain (London, 1940).
Kenneth R. Johnston, Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s (Oxford, 2013).
Eileen Kennedy-Moore and Jeanne C. Watson, Expressing Emotion: Myths, Realities, and Therapeutic Strategies (New York, 1999).
Peter King, Crime and Law in England, 1750–1840: Remaking Justice from the Margins (Cambridge, 2006).
David Lemmings, “Introduction: Criminal Courts, Lawyers and the Public Sphere”, in Crime, Courtrooms and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1700–1850, ed. David Lemmings (Farnham, 2012), 1–22.
Michael Lobban, “From Seditious Libel to Unlawful Assembly: Peterloo and the Changing Face of Political Crime c. 1770–1820”, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 10 (1990), 307–352.
Jon Mee, “Treason, Seditious Libel, and Literature in the Romantic Period” in Oxford Handbooks Online (New York, 2016), 1–23.
Amy Milka and David Lemmings, “Narratives of Feeling and Majesty: Mediated Emotions in the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Courtroom”, The Journal of Legal History, 38 (2017), 55–78.
Katrina Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place 1789–1848 (Manchester, 2016).
R.A. Neimeyer, D. Klass and M.R. Dennis, “Mourning, Meaning and Memory: Individual, Communal and Cultural Narration of Grief”, in Meaning in Positive and Existential Psychology, ed. A. Batthyany and P. Russo-Netzer (New York, 2014), 325–346.
Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry and Spectatorship (Ithaca and London, 1997).
Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford, 2015).
Steve Poole, “Pitt’s Terror Reconsidered: Jacobinism and the Law in Two South-Western Counties, 1791–1803”, Southern History, 17 (1995), 65–87.
Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998).
E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (Harmondsworth, 1977).
Alex Tyrrell and Michael T. Davis, “Bearding the Tories: The Commemoration of the Scottish Political Martyrs of 1793–94”, in Contested Sites: Commemoration, Memorial and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul A. Pickering and Alex Tyrrell (Aldershot, 2004), 25–56.
Amnon Yuval, “Between Heroism and Acquittal: Henry Redhead Yorke and the Inherent Instability of Political Trials in Britain during the 1790s”, Journal of British Studies, 50 (2011), 612–38.
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Davis, M.T. (2019). The Noise and Emotions of Political Trials in Britain During the 1790s. 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_6
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