IN DEFENSE OF LORD GEORGE GORDON
Before the Court of King's Bench, 1781
BY LORD THOMAS ERSKINE
Gentlemen,—You have now heard, upon the solemn oaths of honest, disinterested men, a faithful history of the conduct of Lord George Gordon, from the day that he became a member of the Protestant Association to the day that he was committed a prisoner to the Tower. And I have no doubt, from the attention with which I have been honored from the beginning, that you have still kept in your minds the principles to which I entreated you would apply it, and that you have measured it by that standard. You have, therefore, only to look back to the whole of it together; to reflect on all you have heard concerning him; to trace him in your recollection through every part of the transaction; and, considering it with one manly, liberal view, to ask your own honest hearts, whether you can say that this noble and unfortunate youth is a wicked and deliberate traitor, who deserves by your verdict to suffer a shameful and ignominious death, which will stain the ancient honors of his house forever.
The crime which the Crown would have fixed upon him is, that he assembled the Protestant Association round the House of Commons, not merely to influence and persuade Parliament by the earnestness of their supplications, but actually to coerce it by hostile, rebellious force; that, finding himself disappointed in the success of that coercion, he afterward incited his followers to abolish the legal indulgences to Papists, which the object of the petition was to repeal, by the burning of their houses of worship, and the destruction of their property, which ended, at last, in a general attack on the property of all orders of men, religious and civil, on the public treasures of the nation, and on the very being of the government.
To support a charge of so atrocious and unnatural a complexion, the laws of the most arbitrary nations would require the most incontrovertible proof. And what evidence, gentlemen of the jury, does the Crown offer to you in compliance with these sound and sacred doctrines of justice? A few broken, interrupted, disjointed words, without context or connection—uttered by the speaker in agitation and heat—heard, by those who relate them to you, in the midst of tumult and confusion—and even those words, mutilated as they are, in direct opposition to, and inconsistent with, repeated and earnest declarations delivered at the very same time and on the very same occasion, related to you by a much greater number of persons, and absolutely incompatible with the whole tenor of his conduct. Which of us all, gentlemen, would be safe, standing at the bar of God or man, if we were not to be judged by the regular current of our lives and conversations, but by detached and unguarded expressions, picked out by malice, and recorded, without context or circumstances, against us? Yet such is the only evidence on which the Crown asks you to dip your hands, and to stain your consciences, in the innocent blood of the noble and unfortunate youth who stands before you.
I am sure you cannot but see, notwithstanding my great inability, increased by a perturbation of mind (arising, thank God! from no dishonest cause), that there has been not only no evidence on the part of the Crown to fix the guilt of the late commotions upon the prisoner, but that, on the contrary, we have been able to resist the probability, I might almost say the possibility of the charge, not only by living witnesses, whom we only ceased to call because the trial would never have ended, but by the evidence of all the blood that has paid the forfeit of that guilt already; since, out of all the felons who were let loose from prisons, and who assisted in the destruction of our property, not a single wretch was to be found who could even attempt to save his own life by the plausible promise of giving evidence to-day.
What can overturn such a proof as this? Surely a good man might, without superstition, believe that such a union of events was something more than natural, and that a Divine Providence was watchful for the protection of innocence and truth.
I may now, therefore, relieve you from the pain of hearing me any longer, and be myself relieved from speaking on a subject which agitates and distresses me. Since Lord George Gordon stands clear of every hostile act or purpose against the Legislature of his country, or the properties of his fellow-subjects—since the whole tenor of conduct repels the belief of the traitorous intention charged by the indictment—my task is finished. I shall make no address to your passions. I will not remind you of the long and rigorous imprisonment he has suffered; I will not speak to you of his great youth, of his illustrious birth, and of his uniformly animated and generous zeal in Parliament for the Constitution of his country. Such topics might be useful in the balance; yet, even then, I should have trusted to the honest hearts of Englishmen to have felt them without excitation. At present, the plain and rigid rules of justice and truth are sufficient to entitle me to your verdict.