John Barrell’s Imagining the King’s Death

John Barrell. Imagining the King's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793-1796. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xvii + 737. $115. ISBN 0-19-811292-0.

There has been something of a gap in scholarly treatments, historical and literary, of radical and conservative politics during the 1790s in Britain. The Treason Trials of 1794, in which leaders of radical societies in London and Edinburgh were put on trial for High Treason with prosecutions initiated by a frightened administration, have been seen as important public events and have been analyzed in terms of their outcomes' effects on government policy and public opinion. But the content of what went on at these trials, the complex legal arguments of the prosecutions, how they developed from 1791 onward, and how means were found by defense lawyers to block the juggernaut that looked as if it would keep on rolling until the heads of the London Corresponding Society committee members rolled too, has been given very little attention. This is a gap that John Barrell attempts to fill.

After examining the state of the treason statute and other laws that could be used by authorities to control political dissidence in the first two years of the 1790s, Barrell then examines the French regicide as it was represented and imagined in Britain. The main body of the book is taken up with meticulous analysis of the legal arguments used to prosecute radicals from 1792 to 1795. First, Barrell analyzes charges of sedition in Edinburgh and the trials overseen by the notorious Braxfield, then two charges of High Treason in Scotland, and finally the better-known London treason trials during the Autumn of 1794. The final sections of the book consider government responses to the failure to convict members of the London Corresponding Society and the Society for Constitutional Information, and the rationale behind and consequences of the "Two Acts" of 1795. The concept chosen by Barrell to link the whole thematically is that of imagination--how the state, the law, the king, and resistance and revolution are to be imagined, and what the proper place of that faculty in political discourse is. As such, it is possible, Barrell intimates, to link the legal discourse with the use of the concept of imagination in Romantic writing a few years later.

It is in some ways strange that, as Professor Barrell points out from time to time, so little attention has been paid to the legal arguments that informed these pivotal trials. Perhaps it is due in large part to the intimidating, dry, and technical nature of the material: four hefty volumes of the State Trials, plus the learned eighteenth-century commentaries, the reports and correspondence of central government, documents seized by the Treasury and now held by the British Public Records Office as thousands of individual papers in dozens of folders, and the numerous newspaper reports of the trials that appeared at the time. ¹ But there might be a more significant reason for the omission of this material from scholarly research, which has to do with the place of the London Corresponding Society and 1790s radicalism in the canon of labor history. In his autobiography, Francis Place, the first to document this history, makes surprisingly little of the specifics of an event important enough to prompt him to join the London Corresponding Society. ² When the Whigs returned to power in the 1830s, they showed great interest in these early reformers and made much of their suffering as prisoners without going into the legal arguments that either convicted or freed them. ³ E. P. Thompson continues these omissions, dismissing almost entirely the importance of the defense by stating that the LCS committee members were acquitted simply because "a Grand Jury of respectable citizens had no stomach" for the gruesome punishment of hanging, drawing, and quartering that would theoretically have followed a guilty verdict. For the historian of labor, legal proceedings--being specialized, sealed in...