SECTION VIII. Repealed Treasons. Sir M. Hale gives a catalogue of treasons subsequent to the statute of Edward III. which occupies two chapters, besides a chapter on petit treason: the first contains a list of treasons preceding the reign of Queen Mary; and the second, of treasons between that period and the reign of Charles II. As to the first list, he writes, in conclusion, that all treasons made since the Act of Edward III. were by the first statute passed in the first year of the reign of Queen Mary "at one blow laid flat.” The second list relates chiefly to treasons of Queen Elizabeth, which were, in fact, treasons for the profession of the Catholic religion, assumed in that reign to afford an unquestionable inference of harbouring a design against the queen's life, or for the overthrow of her government. Some treasons in this second list relate to coinage. All these treasons since Sir M. Hale's day have also been "laid flat;" but by several "blows," as by the coinage Act of William IV., the Catholic Relief Bill, and by statutes for abolishing penalties on the ground of religion passed in the reign of Victoria. It is remarkable that Henry VIII.'s new treasons and felonies should have been reflected on by his children, Edward VI. and Mary, at the commencement of their reigns; it indicates in what detestation his tyrannical statutes were held. The preambles of these acts in mitigation of Henry VIII.'s cruel laws are curious and edifying; that of Edward VI. is thus: "Subjects should rather obey from the love of their prince, than from dread of severe laws; that as in tempest or winter one course or garment is convenient, and in calm or more warm weather, a more liberal case, or lighter garments both may and ought to be followed and used, so it is likewise necessary to alter laws according to the times." That of Queen Mary would do honour to a modern parliament: "Forasmuch as the state of every king and ruler standeth more assured by the love of the subject towards their sovereigns, than in the dread and fear of laws made with rigorous pains; and laws also justly made for the preservation of the commonweal, without extreme punishment or rigour, are more often obeyed and kept than those laws made with extreme punishments." The history of these treasons which have been happily prostrated may be instructive as exhibiting the length to which arbitrary princes and subservient parliaments have carried the licence of despotic power and greediness for forfeitures. For example, we find, in Hale's lists, that poisoning was made high treason; so it was to publish of the king by express writing, or words, that the king is an heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper; so the marrying any of the king's reputed children without licence; so "if any by writing, printing, or exterior act, word, or deed, accept, take, judge, or believe the marriage of the king with Anne of Cleves to be good." One of the treasons most recently abolished was that of importing or concealing papal bulls, a species of writing by the so-called, in statutory language, Bishop of Rome, which Swift ridicules in his Tale of a Tub, where he speaks of Peter's bulls that "roared terribly and breathed fire out of their nostrils, and were sent out upon errands of great importance, and at last grew so troublesome, that some gentlemen of the north-west got a parcel of English bull-dogs which baited them so terribly that they felt it ever after." Petit treason, or the killing by a wife of her husband or baron, by a servant of his or her master or mistress, by a clergyman of his diocesan, or, as Sir M. Hale writes, it seems, his metropolitan, is another species of repealed treasons to which Sir M. Hale devotes a separate chapter. Among the curiosities contained in this chapter it is stated that if a wife throws a poker at her maid's head, which, by accident, lights on her husband's head and kills him, this is petit treason. This species of offence was abolished by a statute of George IV., and it is not now distinguished from murder. The ancient law was founded on feudal and fiscal reasons and relations in society which have undergone much change. In the time of Hale and down to the reign of George III., petit treason was attended with the scandalous punishment of burning women. Neither Hale nor Blackstone make any remark on this legal barbarity, except what Blackstone observes, that women were burnt by the Druids. Though petit treason is abolished, the term high treason at first used for the sake of distinction, is still retained as importing the ne plus ultra of criminality. Parricide was, according to Hale, treason at common law; but he says that, after the statute of treasons, it was the better opinion that parricide was not petit treason, unless the son or daughter received wages or meat from the parent. Blackstone is more complimentary to his countrymen than candour might seem to warrant, when he suggests that parricide has not received any peculiar punishment in England, because it was an unnatural barbarity, which, it was presumed, no one would be found wicked enough to commit in England. SECTION IX. Punishment of Treason. Humanity has received no more flagrant outrage in the institutions of any nation than by the punishment of high treason as detailed by Sir M. Hale. Nevertheless, no remonstrance against it is raised either by him or by Blackstone, and Sir E. Coke is its zealous eulogist. In the presence of seven persons under trial for the gunpowder plot, Coke, as attorney-general, expatiated on the singular propriety of each item of the horrible punishment of high treason. In his Institutes he justifies its barbarous items respectively by examples drawn from Scripture. In Hobbes's Dialogue between a Lawyer and a Philosopher, composed in the time of Sir M. Hale, the philosopher notices that the scriptural punishments adduced by Coke were not in point, for that they were not all heaped on one traitor. To which the lawyer replies, "Lord Coke meant none of this, but intended (his hand being in) to shew his reading, or his chaplain's, in the Bible."1 Owing to the exertions of Sir S. Romilly, in the reign of George III., which were, for a long time, baffled by the crownofficers, who protested that he was breaking down the "bulwarks of the constitution," the sentence for high treason has been humanised from that stated by Hale. It now requires the criminal to be hanged till he is dead, instead of being cut down alive; and it omits that his entrails are to be cut out and burnt while he is still alive. Women were burnt for treason in Hale's time; which Blackstone attributes to the regard of our ancestors "for decency due to the sex." The burning of women was abolished in the reign of George III. The sympathy felt for Mrs Gaunt, as composedly she collected the straw round her stake to accelerate the flames by which she was consumed alive for the feminine fault of harboring traitors, contributed to swell the public indignation which finally extinguished the dynasty of the Stuarts. During the Commonwealth the sentence for treason had been restricted to the severing the head; but after the Restoration, its horrors were revived, with the concurrence of Hale, in the first instance against the Regicides, and were too literally enforced. The regicide Harrison, when the executioner was in the act of disembowelling him, rose, and gave that functionary a blow on the face. Hugh Peters, after being carried on a sledge to the scaffold, was made to sit thereon within the rails, to behold the 1 Sir M. Hale, in his precedent for the sentence on traitors, omits an item which had been inflicted, with his concurrence, on the regicides, and is extolled by Coke as indicating that the traitor was "unworthily begotten, and unfit to leave any race after him." execution of Cook, who had been attorney of the commonwealth, and we are told that "when Cook was cut down alive, and brought to be quartered, Col. Turner ordered the sheriff's men to bring Peters near, that he might see it; and bye and bye the hangman came to him all besmeared in blood, and rubbing his bloody hands together, he tauntingly asked, 'Come, how do you like this work, Mr Peters? how do you like it?' He replied, 'Friend, you do not well to trample on a dying man.' In the reign of Charles II. Walcot was executed for the Rye House Plot; and twelve years after his execution, a writ of error was brought, and his attainder reversed, because in the record of his sentence it had not been stated that his entrails should be burnt while he was alive, or in legal language "ipso vivente comburentur." David, Prince of Wales, and Wallace, whose offences were a patriotic resistance to the "chains and slavery of proud Edward's power," were the first victims of a punishment which disgraced this nation from that period till late in the reign of George III, Chatterton in his poem of high promise, Bristowe's tragedy, graphically describes the particulars of the sentence executed on Sir Bowdin. And Shenstone, in his ballad of Jemmy Dawson executed for the Scotch Rebellion, relates what appears to be a true history of his sweetheart following him to his execution at Kensington common. The cruelties practised on that occasion are thus noticed. And severed was that beauteous neck, H |