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to him, even during his sickness; consequent- | all over with wit, was a consummate debauly his punishment comprehended an additional chee; and a fine lady, though set off with a sentence of divorce. This patriot having en- brilliant imagination, was an impudent codured many years imprisonment, sunk under quette. Satire, which in the hands Horace, the oppression, and died in prison: this was Juvenal, and Boileau, was pointed with a gesuch a wound to the authority and rights of nerous resentment against vice, now became parliament, that even after the restoration, the declared foe of virtue and innocence. the judgment was revered by parliament. the city of London, in all ages, as well as the time we are speaking of, was remarkable for its opposition to arbitrary power, the poets levelled all their artillery against the metropolis, in order to bring the citizens into contempt: an alderman was never introduced on the theatre, but under the complicated character of a sneaking, canting hypocrite; a miser and a cuckold; while the court-wits, with impunity, libelled the most valuable part of the nation. Other writers, of a different stamp, with great learning and gravity, endeavoured to prove to the English people, that slavery was jure divino. Thus the stage and the press under the direction of a licenser, became battering engines against religion, virtue, and liberty. Those who had courage enough to write in their defence, were stigmatised as schismatics, and punished as disturbers of the government.

That Englishmen of all ranks might be effectually intimidated from publishing their thoughts on any subject, except on the side of the court, his majesty's ministers caused an information, for several libels, to be exhibited in the star-chamber, against Messrs. Prynn, Burton, and Bastwick. They were each of them fined five thousand pounds, and adjudged to lose their ears on the pillory, to be branded on the cheeks with hot irons, and to suffer perpetual imprisonment! Thus these three gentlemen, each of worth and quality in their several professions, viz. divinity, law, and physic, were, for no other offence, than writing on controverted points of church-government, exposed on public scaffolds, and stigmatized and mutilated, as common signal rogues, or the most ordinary malefactors.

Such corporeal punishments, inflicted with all the circumstances of cruelty and infamy, bound down all other gentlemen, under a servile fear of the like treatment; so that for several years no one durst publicly speak or write in defence of the liberties of the people; which the king's ministers, his privy council, and his judges, had trampled under their feet. The spirit of the administration looked hideous and dreadful: the hate and resentment which the people conceived against it, for a long time lay smothered in their breasts, where those passions festered and grew venomous, and at last discharged themselves by an armed and vindictive hand.

King Charles II. aimed at the subversion of the government; but concealed his designs under a deep hypocrisy: a method which his predecessor, in the beginning of his reign, scorned to make use of. The father, who affected a high and rigid gravity, discountenanced all barefaced immorality. The son, of a gay, luxurious disposition, openly encouraged it: thus their inclinations being different, the restraint laid on some authors, and the encouragement given to others, were managed after a different manner.

In this reign a licenser was appointed for the stage and the press; no plays were encouraged but what had a tendency to debase the minds of the people. The orignal design of comedy was perverted; it appeared in all the shocking circumstances of immodest dou- | ble entendre, obscure description, and lewd representation. Religion was sneered out of countenance, and public spirit ridiculed as an awkward old-fashioned virtue; the fine gentleman of the comedy, though embroidered VOL. II....3 I

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But when the embargo on wit was taken off, sir Richard Steele and Mr. Addison soon rescued the stage from the load of impurity it laboured under; with an inimitable address, they strongly recommended to our imitation the most amiable, rational, manly characters; and this with so much success, that I cannot suppose there is any reader to day conversant in the writings of those gentlemen, that can taste with any tolerable relish the comedies of the once admired Shadwell. Vice was obliged to retire and give place to virtue: this will always be the consequence when truth has fair play: falsehood only dreads the attack, and cries out for auxiliaries: truth never fears the encounter: she scorns the aid of the secular arm, and triumphs by her natural strength.

But to resume the description of the reign of Charles II. the doctrine of servitude was chiefly managed by sir Roger Lestrange.He had great advantages in the argument, being licenser for the press, and might have carried all before him, without contradiction, if writings on the other side of the question had not been printed by stealth. The authors, whenever found, were prosecuted as seditious libellers; on all these occasions, the king's counsel, particularly Sawyer and Finch, appeared most abjectly obsequious to accomplish the ends of the court.

During this blessed management, the king had entered into a secret league with France, to render himself absolute, and enslave his subjects. This fact was discovered to the world by doctor Jonathan Swift, to whom sir William Temple had intrusted the publication of his works.

This case is a pregnant instance of the dan

and of the little security the most valuable men have for their lives, in that society where a judge by remote inferences and distant innuendoes may construe the most innocent expressions into capital crimes. Sidney, the British Brutus; the warm, the steady friend of liberty; who from a diffusive love to mankind left them that invaluable legacy, his immortal discourses on government, was for these very discourses, murdered by the hands of lawless power.

Sidney, the sworn foe of tyranny, was a gentleman of noble family, of sublime under-ger that attends a law for punishing words, standing, and exalted courage. The ministry were resolved to remove so great an obstacle out of the way of their designs. He was prosecuted for high treason. The overt act charged in the indictment, was a libel found in his private study. Mr. Finch, the king's own solicitor-general, urged, with great vehemency, to this effect, "that the imagining the death of the king is treason, even while that imagination remains concealed in the mind; though the law cannot punish such secret treasonable thoughts, till it arrives at the knowledge of them by some overt act. That the matter of the libel composed by Sidney was an imagining how to compass the death of king Charles II.; and the writing of it was an overt act of the treason; for that to write was to act. (Scribere est agere.") It seems that the king's counsel in this reign had not received the same direction as queen Elizabeth had given her's; she told them they were to look upon themselves as retained not so much-(pro domina regina, as pro domina veritate)-for the power of the queen as for the power of truth.

Mr. Sidney made a strong and legal defence. He insisted that all the words in the book, contained no more than general speculations on the principles of government, free for any man to write down; especially since the same are written in the parliament rolls and in the statute laws.

He argued on the injustice of applying by innuendoes, general assertions concerning principles of government, as overt acts, to prove the writer was compassing the death of the king; for then no man could write of things done even by our ancestors, in defence of the constitution and freedom of England, without exposing himself to capital danger.

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After the revolution of 1688, when law and justice were again restored, the attainder of this great man was reversed by parliament. Being in Holland, (says bishop Burnet,) the princess of Orange, afterwards queen Mary, asked me what had sharpened the king her father so much against Mr. Jurieu? I told her he had writ with great indecency of Mary queen of Scots, which cast reflections on them that were descended from her. The princess said, Jurieu was to support the cause he defended, and to expose those that persecuted it, in the best way he could; and if what he said of Mary queen of Scots was true, he was not to be blamed who made that use of it: and she added, that if princes would do ill things, they must expect that the world will take revenge on their memories, since they cannot reach their persons. That was but a small suffering, far short of what others suffered at their hands."

In the former part of this paper it was endeavoured to prove by historical facts, the fatal dangers that necessarily attend a restraint of freedom of speech and the liberty of the press: upon which the following reflection naturally occurs, viz. that whoever attempts to suppress either of these our natural rights, ought to be regarded as an enemy to liberty and the constitution. An inconveniency is always to be suffered when it cannot be removed without introducing a worse.

He denied that scribere est agere, but allowed that writing and publishing is to act, (Scribere et publicare est agere) and therefore he urged, that as his book had never been pub- I proceed in the next place to inquire into lished nor imparted to any person, it could the nature of the English laws, in relation of not be an overt act, within the statutes of libelling. To acquire a just idea of them, the treasons, even admitting that it contained knowledge of history is necessary, and the getreasonable positions; that on the contrary it nius and disposition of the prince is to be conwas a covert fact, locked up in his private stu-sidered in whose time they are introduced dy, as much concealed from the knowledge of and put in practice. any man, as if it where locked up in the au- To infuse into the minds of the people an thor's mind. This was the substance of Mr. ill opinion of a just administration, is a crime Sidney's defence: but neither law, nor rea- that deserves no indulgence; but to expose son, nor eloquence, nor innocence ever avail- the evil designs or weak management of a ed, where Jefferies sat as judge. Without magistrate is the duty of every member of sotroubling himself with any part of the defence, ciety. Yet king James I. thought it an unhe declared in a rage, that Sidney's known pardonable presumption in the subject to pry principles were a sufficient proof of his inten- into the (arcana imperii,) the secrets of kings. tion to compass the death of the king. He imagined that the people ought to believe the authority of the government infallible, and that their submission should be implicit. It may therefore be reasonably presumed, that

A packed jury therefore found him guilty of high treason: great applications were made for his pardon. He was executed as a traitor.

the judgment of the star-chamber, concern- | ed down by that worthy jury, who were on ing libels, was influenced by this monarch's the trial of the seven bishops, prosecuted for a notions of government. No law could be bet- libel, in the reign of James II., the liberties ter framed to prevent people from publishing of Britain, in all human probability, had been their thoughts on the administration, than that lost, and slavery established in the three which makes no distinction, whether a libel kingdoms. be true or false. It is not pretended that any such decision is to be found in our books, before this reign. That is not at all to be wondered at; king James was the first of the British monarchs, that laid claim to a divine right.

It was a refined piece of policy in Augustus Cæsar, when he proposed a law to the senate, whereby invectives against private men were to be punished as treason. The pill was finely gilded and easily swallowed; but the Romans soon found that the preservation of their characters was only a pretext:-to preserve inviolable the sacred name of Cæsar was the real design of the law. They quickly discovered the intended consequence-if it be treason to libel a private person, it cannot be less than blasphemy to speak ill of the emperor.

This was a cause of the greatest expectation and importance that ever came before the judges in Westminster-hall.

The bishops had petitioned the king, that he would be graciously pleased not to insist upon their reading in the church his majesty's declaration for liberty of conscience, because it was founded on a dispensing power, declared illegal in parliament; and they said, that they could not in prudence, honour, or conscience, so far make themselves parties to it. In the information exhibited by the attorneygeneral, the bishops were charged with writing and publishing a false, malicious, and seditious libel, (under pretence of a petition) in diminution of the king's prerogative, and contempt of his government.

Sawyer and Finch were among the bishops' counsel, the former had been attorney, Perhaps it may not appear a too refined the latter solicitor-general. In these stations conjecture, that the star-chamber acted on the they had served the court only too well. They same views with Augustus, when they gave were turned out because they refused to supthat decision which made it criminal to pub-port the dispensing power. Powis and Willish truth of a private person as well as a magistrate. I am the more inclined to this conjecture from a passage in lord chief justice Richardson's speech, which I find in the trial in the star-chamber, against Mr. Prynn, who was prosecuted there for a libel. If subjects have an ill prince," says the judge, marry, what is the remedy? they must pray to God to forgive him: Mr. Prynn saith Williams took very indecent liberties with there were three worthy Romans that con- the prelates, who were obliged to appear in spired to murder Nero. This is most hor-court: he reproached them with acting rerible."

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Tremendous wickedness indeed, my lord chief justice! Where slept the thunder when these three detestable Romans, unawed by the sacred majesty of the diadem, with hands sacrilegious and accursed, took away the precious life of that imperial wolf, that true epitome of the Lord's anointed;-who had murdered his own mother; who had put to death Seneca and Burrhus, his two best friends and benefactors; who was drenched in the blood of mankind, and wished and endeavoured to extirpate the human race! I think my lord chief justice has clearly explained the true intent and meaning of the star-chamber doctrine; it centres in the most abjectively passive obedience.

The punishment for writing truth, is pillory, loss of ears, branding the face with hot irons, fine, and imprisonment, at the discretion of the court. Nay, the punishment is to be heightened in proportion to the truth of the facts contained in the libel. But if this monstrous doctrine could have been swallow

liams, who stood in their places, had great advantages over them, by reflecting on the precedents and proceedings, while those were of the king's counsel. "What was good law for Sidney and others, ought to be law for the bishops; God forbid that in a court of justice any such distinction should be made."

pugnant to their doctrine of passive obe-
dience: he reminded them of their preaching
against himself, and stirring up their clergy
to libel him in their sermons. For Williams
had been for many years a bold pleader in all
causes against the court. He had been speaker
in two successive parliaments, and a zealous
promoter of the bill of exclusion. Jefferies
had fined him ten thousand pounds for having
licensed, in the preceding reign, by virtue
of an order of the house of commons, the
printing of Dangerfield's Narrative, which
charged the duke of York with conspiracies
of a black complexion. This gentleman had
no principles, was guided by his own inter-
ests, and so wheeled about to the court.
king's counsel having produced their evi-
dences as to the publication of the petition,
the question then to be debated was, whether
it contained libellous matter or not.

The

It was argued in substance for the bishops, that the matter could not be libellous because it was true; sir Robert Sawyer makes use of the words false and libellous, as synonymous

terms, through the whole course of his argu- bench in favour of the bishops, when we conment; and so does Mr. Finch: accordingly sider, that the cause, as to Allibone, was bethey proceeded to show by the votes and jour-yond the jurisdiction of the court (coram non nals of the parliament, which were brought judice.)

from the tower to the court, that the kings of Here then is a late authority, which sets England, in no age, had any power to dis-aside, destroys, and annuls the doctrine of the pense with or set aside the laws of the land: star-chamber, reported by sir Edward Coke, and consequently, the bishops' petition, which in his case de libellis famosis. denied that his majesty had any dispensing power, could not be false, nor libellous, nor in contempt or diminution of the king's prerogative, as no such power was ever annexed to it. This was the foundation laid down through the whole course of the debate, and which guided and governed the verdict.