The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England
Title Details

306 Pages

23.4 x 15.6 cm

4 b/w illus.

Series: Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History

Series Vol. Number: 40

Imprint: Boydell Press

The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England

Edited by Brian Cowan and Scott Sowerby

  • Description
  • Contents
  • Author
  • Reviews
The book discusses the 'state trial' as a legal process, a public spectacle, and a point of political conflict - a key part of how constitutional monarchy became constitutional.

State trials provided some of the leading media events of later Stuart England. The more important of these trials attracted substantial public attention, serving as pivot points in the relationship between the state and its subjects. Later Stuart England has been known among legal historians for a series of key cases in which juries asserted their independence from judges. In political history, the government's sometimes shaky control over political trials in this period has long been taken as a sign of the waning power of the Crown. This book revisits the process by which the 'state trial' emerged as a legal proceeding, a public spectacle, a point of political conflict, and ultimately, a new literary genre. It investigates the trials as events, as texts, and as moments in the creation of historical memory. By the early nineteenth century, the publication and republication of accounts of the state trials had become a standard part of the way in which modern Britons imagined how their constitutional monarchy had superseded the absolutist pretensions of the Stuart monarchs. This book explores how the later Stuart state trials helped to create that world.
Part One: What Were the State Trials?
Introduction: The State Trials in Historical Perspective - Brian Cowan and Scott Sowerby
1. State Trials and the Rule of Law under the Later Stuarts and Early Hanoverians - Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor
2. Corruption and Later Stuart State Trials - Mark Knights
Part Two: Restoration State Trials
3. 'Blood will have Blood': The Regicide Trials and the Popular Press - Melinda S. Zook
4. The Trial and Execution of Oliver Plunket - John Marshall
5. Sham Plots and False Confessions: The Politics of Edward Fitzharris's Last Words, 1681 - Andrea McKenzie
6. Constructing Conspiracy: Reporting the Rye House Plot Trials - Newton Key
Part Three: Revolutionary State Trials
7. Enforcing Uniformity: Public Reactions to the Seven Bishops' Trial - Scott Sowerby
8. Revolutionary Justice and Whig Retribution in 1689 - Mark Goldie
9. Relitigating Revolution: Address, Progress, and Redress in the Long Summer of 1710 - Brian Cowan
10. Politics and Sentiment in the Jacobite State Trials - Paul Monod
11. Defeating Innuendoes: The Trials of Thomas Rosewell (1684) and Daniel Isaac Eaton (1794) - Annabel Patterson


Index

BRIAN COWAN is an Associate Professor of History at McGill University.

SCOTT SOWERBY is an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University.

"Offers a nuanced and rich insight into an important aspect of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English political culture." RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

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9781783276264

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Title Details

306 Pages

2.34 x 1.56 cm

4 b/w illus.

Series: Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History

Series Vol. Number: 40

Imprint: Boydell Press