Imaginary Treason, Imaginary Law

Abstract

In 1794, two men were found guilty of high treason in Edinburgh, David Downie and the former government spy and possible agent provocateur Robert Watt. Later in the same year in London, three men were found not guilty of high treason: the radical political activist Thomas Hardy, of the London Corresponding Society; John Horne Tooke, the philosopher of language and long-time member of the Society for Constitutional Information; and John Thelwall, lecturer, pamphleteer and poet. Among those originally indicted in London, but later discharged, was the novelist and dramatist Thomas Holcroft. The acquittals have generally been regarded both as the greatest triumph of the revolutionary or reform movement in Britain in the 1790s, and as the point at which that movement went into decline, under the pressure of new laws defining seditious and treasonable practices, and of the need of the accused, during the trials, to insist that their aims were limited and entirely constitutional.