“I shall suffer, no doubt; but I hope my children will live to see justice done to their bleeding country. I would rather die like a man than live like a slave. I am sorry I have not the power, gentlemen, to say more; I shall, therefore, withdraw.”
John Thomas Brunt was next called upon. He came forward in a quick and rather hurried manner; and, in answer to the usual interrogatory, addressed himself to the Court in a firm and confident tone.
He said, he “had intended to have written the observations which he should make, but he had not had the benefit of ink and paper. He would repeat what he had before stated to the Jury on his trial, which had been so ably knocked down by the Solicitor-General, whose sophisticated eloquence would make even crime a virtue. He then proceeded to recapitulate the circumstances already stated by him in his defence. He protested against the verdict; not that he valued his life. No man valued it less when it was to be sacrificed in liberty’s cause.
“Looking around him in this Court, and seeing the sword of justice and the inscriptions which were placed on the walls above the Learned Judges, he could only say, that he felt his blood boil in his veins when he thought how justice was perverted, and her sacred name prostituted to the basest and vilest purposes. He was a man of his word, and not a shuttlecock, as some might suppose. If he pledged himself once to destroy a tyrant, he would do it.
“Edwards, that infamous villain, whom the Solicitor-General had not dared to bring forward, had preyed on his credulity; and Adams had betrayed him. Where was the benefit which would result to Christianity from the able defence made of it by the Solicitor-General? What was Christianity? Why, did its doctrines promulgate so horrid an idea, as that supposing a man to have been a Deist, and all at once to have been converted by seeing the halter staring him in the face, he would, therefore, be strengthened by Almighty God to become a villain and a perjured betrayer of his associates?
“That this was the case with Adams was evident from his own confession. Was this, then, Christianity? If it was, he prayed God he might die without it; for very different, indeed, were the ideas he had formed of religion.”
The prisoner then proceeded to attack the character of the witness, Hale, his apprentice; in which, however, he was interrupted by the Lord Chief Justice, who said, he would not allow persons and witnesses not before the Court to be vilified.
Brunt proceeded—“He had antipathy against none but the enemies of his country. He was a friend to the lower orders, and, as an honest man, had a fellow-feeling for his countrymen, who were starving through the conduct of Ministers. Lord Castlereagh and Lord Sidmouth had an antipathy against the people; and if he did conspire to murder them, was that high treason? He readily acknowledged that he had agreed to assassinate Ministers; but he denied having ever conspired to dethrone or injure the Monarch. But, if resisting the Civil Power, or opposing wicked Ministers, was treason, then he confessed he was guilty. He was no traitor to his country—he was no traitor to his King; but he was an enemy to a boroughmongering faction, which equally enslaved both the King and the people.
“The happiness, the glory, and the safety of the King, depended on his being free as well as his people; but this was not the case now. A faction ruled both King and people with lawless sway. He had, by his industry, been able to earn about three or four pounds a week; and, while this was the case, he never meddled with politics: but, when he found his income reduced to ten shillings a week, he began to look about him, and to ask to what could that be owing? And what did he find? Why, men in power, who met to deliberate how they might starve and plunder the country. He looked on the Manchester transactions as most dreadful, and thought that nothing was too severe for men, who had not only caused, but even applauded, the dreadful scenes which occurred there.
“With pleasure would he die as a martyr in liberty’s cause for the good of his country, and, to have been avenged on her tyrants would have given him pleasure to have died on the spot. He was not a traitor, nor a friend of a traitor, and it was only a villain who could call him so. While a nerve of his body could move, that nerve should and would be exerted against the enemies of the people.