it not
monstrous, they asked, that a culprit should be denied a sight of his
indictment? Often an unhappy prisoner had not known of what he was
accused till he had held up his hand at the bar. The crime imputed to
him might be plotting to shoot the King; it might be plotting to poison
the King. The more innocent the defendant was, the less likely he was
to guess the nature of the charge on which he was to be tried; and how
could he have evidence ready to rebut a charge the nature of which
he could not guess? The Crown had power to compel the attendance of
witnesses. The prisoner had no such power. If witnesses voluntarily came
forward to speak in his favour, they could not be sworn. Their testimony
therefore made less impression on a jury than the testimony of the
witnesses for the prosecution, whose veracity was guaranteed by the most
solemn sanctions of law and of religion. The juries, carefully selected
by Sheriffs whom the Crown had named, were men animated by the fiercest
party spirit, men who had as little tenderness for an Exclusionist of a
Dissenter as for a mad dog. The government was served by a band of able,
experienced and unprincipled lawyers, who could, by merely glancing over
a brief, distinguish every weak and every strong point of a case,
whose presence of mind never failed them, whose flow of speech was
inexhaustible, and who had passed their lives in dressing up the worse
reason so as to make it appear the better. Was it not horrible to see
three or four of these shrewd, learned and callous orators arrayed
against one poor wretch who had never in his life uttered a word in
public, who was ignorant of the legal definition of treason and of the
first principles of the law of evidence, and whose intellect, unequal
at best to a fencing match with professional gladiators, was confused by
the near prospect of a cruel and ignominious death? Such however was the
rule; and even for a man so much stupefied by sickness that he could not
hold up his hand or make his voice heard, even for a poor old woman who
understood nothing of what was passing except that she was going to be
roasted alive for doing an act of charity, no advocate was suffered to
utter a word. That a state trial so conducted was little better than a
judicial murder had been, during the proscription of the Whig party, a
fundamental article of the Whig creed. The Tories, on the other
hand, though they could not deny that there had been some hard cas