Скачать или смотреть Precedent and the Mind of Government in the British state trials for sedition and treason, 1793–99

Emma Macleod discusses the Scottish and English trials for treason in the 1790s which the government of Pitt the Younger and local employed to clamp down on the perceived dangers of 'Jacobinism' inspired by the French Revolution. In England and Scotland, radical reformers widely published democratic reform proposals and formed political societies meeting regularly in many British cities. The main goal of this paper is to order to understand the mind of government beyond a simple elite instinct for repression.
This paper brings new light on the state repression of those reformers who were easily branded as dangers to the monarchy. It does so by examining the report drafted by John Bruce (1744–1826), deputy keeper of the State Paper Office, for Henry Dundas, the British Home Secretary, into the treason trials of the Jacobites from the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries in a quest for precedents to suggest and legitimise the policies of the Pitt administration. Emma Macleod demonstrates that not only the radical defendants, but also government ministers and legal officers involved in these prosecutions, should be examined in an Anglo-Scottish framework. The concern of this historically-minded administration for legal precedent helps to explain how the government of a relatively liberal state at the end of the eighteenth century justified, at least to itself, the ruthlessness of its repression of radical reformers.