CHAPTER XXIV.—Jury of the Olden Time
—Preparations—The Scales of Justice.
At last the trial came on, and Sir Robert Whitecraft, the great champion of Protestantism—a creed which he did not believe—was conducted into the court-house and placed in the dock. He was dressed in his best apparel, in order to distinguish himself from common culprits, and to give this poor external evidence of his rank, with a hope that it might tell, to a certain extent at least, upon the feeling of the jury. When placed in the dock, a general buzz and bustle agitated the whole court His friends became alert, and whispered to each other with much earnestness, and a vast number of them bowed to him, and shook hands with him, and advised him to be cool, and keep up his spirits. His appearance, however, was any thing but firm; his face was deadly pale, his eyes dull and cowardly, his knees trembled so much that he was obliged to support himself on the front of the dock.
At length the trial commenced, and the case having been opened by a young lawyer, a tall, intellectual-looking man, about the middle age, of pale but handsome features, and an eye of singular penetration and brilliancy, rose; and after pulling up his gown at the shoulders, and otherwise adjusting it, proceeded to lay a statement of this extraordinary case before the jury.
He dwelt upon “the pain which he felt in contemplating a gentleman of rank and vast wealth occupying the degraded position of a felon, but not, he was sorry to say, of a common felon. The circumstances, my lord, and gentlemen of the jury, which have brought the prisoner before you this day, involve a long catalogue of crimes that as far transcend, in the hideousness of their guilt, the offences of a common felon as his rank and position in life do that of the humblest villain who ever stood before a court of justice.
“The position, gentlemen, of this country has for a long series of years been peculiar, anomalous, and unhappy. Divided as it is, and has been, by the bitter conflict between two opposing creeds and parties, it is not to be wondered at that it should be a melancholy scene of misery, destitution, famine, and crime; and, unhappily, it presents to us the frightful aspect of all these. The nature, however, of the conflicts between those creeds and parties, inasmuch as it bears upon the case of the prisoner, gentlemen, who now stands for trial and a verdict at your hands, is such as forces me, on that account, to dwell briefly upon it. In doing so, I will have much, for the sake of our common humanity, to regret and to deplore. It is a fundamental principle, gentlemen, in our great and glorious Constitution, that the paramount end and object of our laws is to protect the person, the liberty, and the property of the subject. But there is something, gentlemen, still dearer to us than either liberty, person, or property; something which claims a protection from those laws that stamps them with a nobler and a loftier character, when it is afforded, and weaves them into the hearts and feelings of men of all creeds, when this divine mission of the law is fulfilled. I allude, gentlemen, to the inalienable right of every man to worship God freely, and according to his own conscience—without restraint—without terror—without oppression, and, gentlemen of the jury, without persecution. A man, or a whole people, worship God, we will assume, sincerely, according to their notions of what is right, and, I say, gentlemen, that the individual who persecutes that man, or those people, for piously worshipping their Creator, commits blasphemy against the Almighty—and stains, as it were, the mercy-seat with blood.
“Gentlemen of the jury, let me ask you what has been the state and condition of this unhappy and distracted country? I have mentioned two opposing creeds, and consequently two opposing parties, and I have also mentioned persecution; but let me also ask you again on which side has the persecution existed? Look at your Roman Catholic fellow-subjects, and ask yourselves to what terrible outburst of political and religious vengeance have they not been subjected? But it is said they are not faithful and loyal subjects, and that they detest the laws. Well, let us consider this—let us take a cursory view of all that the spirit and operation of the laws have left them to be thankful for—have brought to bear upon them for the purpose, we must suppose, of securing their attachment and their loyalty. Let us, gentlemen, calmly and solemnly, and in a Christian temper, take a brief glance at the adventures which the free and glorious spirit of the British Constitution has held out to them, in order to secure their allegiance. In the first place, their nobles and their gentry have been deprived of their property, and the right of tenure has been denied even to the people. Ah, my lord, and gentlemen of the jury, what ungrateful and disloyal miscreant could avoid loving a Constitution, and hugging to his grateful heart laws which showered down such blessings upon him, and upon all those who belong to a creed so favored? But it would seem to have been felt that these laws had still a stronger claim upon their affections. They would protect their religion as they did their property; and in order to attach them still more strongly, they shut up their places of worship—they proscribed and banished and hung their clergy—they hung or shot the unfortunate people who tied to worship God in the desert—in mountain fastnesses and in caves, and threw their dead bodies to find a tomb in the entrails of the birds of the air, or the dogs which even persecution had made mad with hunger. But again—for this pleasing panorama is not yet closed, the happy Catholics, who must have danced with delight, under the privileges of such a Constitution, were deprived of the right to occupy and possess all civil offices—their enterprise was crushed—their industry made subservient to the rapacity of their enemies, and not to their own prosperity. But this is far from being all. The sources of knowledge—of knowledge which only can enlighten and civilize the mind, prevent crime, and promote the progress of human society—these sources of knowledge, I say, were sealed against them; they were consequently left to ignorance, and its inseparable associate—vice. All those noble principles which result from education, and which lead youth into those moral footsteps in which they should tread, were made criminal in the Catholic to pursue, and impossible to attain; and having thus been reduced by ignorance to the perpetration of those crimes which it uniformly produces—the people were punished for that which oppressive laws had generated, and the ignorance which was forced upon them was turned into a penalty and a persecution. They were first made ignorant by one Act of Parliament, and then punished by another for those crimes which ignorance produces.
“And now, my lord, and gentlemen of the jury, it remains for me to take another view of the state and condition of this wretched country. Perhaps there is not in the world so hideously a penal code of laws as that which appertains to the civil and religious rights of our unfortunate Roman Catholic countrymen. It is not that this code is fierce, inhuman, unchristian, barbarous, and Draconic, and conceived in a spirit of blood—because it might be all this, and yet, through the liberality and benevolence of those into whose hands it ought to be entrusted for administration, much of its dreadful spirit might be mitigated. And I am bound to say that a large and important class of the Protestant community look upon such a code nearly with as much horror as the Catholics themselves. Unfortunately, however, in every state of society and of law analogous to ours, a certain class of men, say rather of monsters, is sure to spring up, as it were, from hell, their throats still parched and heated with that insatiable thirst which the guilty glutton felt before them, and which they now are determined to slake with blood. For some of these men the apology of selfishness, an anxiety to raise themselves out of the struggles of genteel poverty, and a wolfish wish to earn the wages of oppression, might be pleaded; although, heaven knows, it is at best but a desperate and cowardly apology. On the other hand, there are men not merely independent, but wealthy, who, imbued with a fierce and unreasoning bigotry, and stained by a black and unscrupulous ambition, start up into the front ranks of persecution, and carry fire and death and murder as they go along, and all this for the sake of adding to their reprobate names a title—a title earned by the shedding of innocent blood—a title earned by the oppression and persecution of their unresisting fellow-subjects—a title, perhaps that of baronet; if I am mistaken in this, the individual who stands before you in that dock could, for he might, set me right.
“In fact, who are those who have lent themselves with such delight to the execution of bad laws? of laws that, for the sake of religion and Christianity, never ought to have been effected? Are they men of moral and Christian lives? men whose walk has been edifying in the sight of their fellows? are they men to whom society could look up as examples of private virtue and the decorous influence of religion? are they men who, on the Sabbath of God, repair with their wives and families to his holy worship? Alas! no. These heroic persecutors, who hunt and punish a set of disarmed men, are, in point of fact, not only a disgrace to that religion in whose name they are persecutors, and on whose merciful precepts they trample, but to all religion, in whatever light true religion is contemplated. Vicious, ignorant, profligate, licentious, but cunning, cruel, bigoted, and selfish, they make the spirit of oppressive laws, and the miserable state of the country, the harvest of their gain. Look more closely at the picture, gentlemen of the jury, and make, as I am sure you will, the dismal and terrible circumstances which I will lay before you your own. Imagine for a moment that those who are now, or at least have been, the objects of hot and blood-scenting persecution, had, by some political revolution, got the power of the State and of the laws into their own hands; suppose, for it is easily supposed, that they had stripped you of your property, deprived you of your civil rights, disarmed you of the means of self-defence, persecuted yourselves and proscribed your religion, or, vice versa, proscribed yourselves and persecuted your religion, or, to come at once to the truth, proscribed and persecuted both; suppose your churches shut up, your pious clergy banished, and that, when on the bed of sickness or of death, some of your family, hearing your cries for the consolations of religion, ventured out, under the clouds of the night, pale with sorrow, and trembling with apprehension, to steal for you, at the risk of life, that comfort which none but a minister of God can effectually bestow upon the parting spirit; suppose this, and suppose that your house is instantly surrounded by some cruel but plausible Sir Robert Whitecraft, or some drunken and ruffianly Captain Smellpriest, who, surrounded and supported by armed miscreants, not only breaks open that house, but violates the awful sanctify of the deathbed itself, drags out the minister of Christ from his work of mercy, and leaves him a bloody corpse at our threshold. I say, change places, gentlemen of the jury, and suppose in your own imaginations that all those monstrous persecutions, all those murderous and flagitious outrages, had been inflicted upon yourselves, with others of an equally nefarious character; suppose all this, and you may easily do so, for you have seen it all perpetrated in the name of God and the law, or, to say the truth, in the hideous union of mammon and murder; suppose all this, and you will feel what such men as he who stands in that dock deserves from humanity and natural justice; for, alas! I cannot say, from the laws of his country, under the protection of which, and in the name of which, he and those who resemble him have deluged that country with innocent blood, laid waste the cabin of the widow and the orphan, and carried death and desolation wherever they went. But, gentlemen, I shall stop here, as I do not wish to inflict unnecessary pain upon you, even by this mitigated view of atrocities which have taken place before your own eyes; yet I cannot close this portion of my address without, referring to so large a number of our fellow-Protestants with pride, as I am sure their Roman Catholic friends do with gratitude. Who were those who, among the Protestant party, threw the shield of their name and influence over their Catholic neighbors and friends? Who, need I ask? The pious, the humane, the charitable, the liberal, the benevolent, and the enlightened. Those were they who, overlooking the mere theological distinctions of particular doctrines, united in the great and universal creed of charity, held by them as a common principle on which they might meet and understand and love each other. And indeed, gentlemen of the jury, there cannot be a greater proof of the oppressive spirit which animates this penal and inhuman code than the fact that so many of those, for whose benefit it was enacted, resisted its influence, on behalf of their Catholic fellow-subjects, as far as they could, and left nothing undone to support the laws of humanity against those of injustice and oppression. When the persecuted Catholic could not invest his capital in the purchase of property, the generous Protestant came forward, purchased the property in his own name, became the bona fide proprietor, and then transferred its use and advantages to his Catholic friend. And again, under what roof did the hunted Catholic priest first take refuge from those bloodhounds of persecution? In most cases under that of his charitable and Christian brother, the Protestant clergyman. Gentlemen, could there be a bitterer libel upon the penal laws than the notorious facts which I have the honor of stating to you?