Brian Cowan & Scott Sowerby 
The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England 

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trials had become a standard part of the way in which modern Britons imagined how their constitutional monarchy had superseded the absolutist pretensions of the Stuart monarchs.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.

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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 Mc Kenzie

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

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