ever was tried before any human tribunal, to say nothing of the
magnitude of its consequences,) we soon found, whatever the reasons
might be, without at present blaming the prisoner, without blaming your
Lordships, and far are we from imputing blame to ourselves, we soon
found that this trial was likely to be protracted to an unusual length.
The Managers of the Commons, feeling this, went up to their constituents
to procure from them the means of reducing it within a compass fitter
for their management and for your Lordships' judgment. Being furnished
with this power, a second selection was made upon the principles of the
first: not upon the idea that what we left could be less clearly
sustained, but because we thought a selection should be made upon some
juridical principle. With this impression on our minds, we reduced the
whole cause to four great heads of guilt and criminality. Two of them,
namely, Benares and the Begums, show the effects of his open violence
and injustice; the other two expose the principles of pecuniary
corruption upon which the prisoner proceeded: one of these displays his
passive corruption in receiving bribes, and the other his active
corruption, in which he has endeavored to defend his passive corruption
by forming a most formidable faction both abroad and at home. There is
hardly any one act of the prisoner's corruption in which there is not
presumptive violence, nor any acts of his violence in which there are
not presumptive proofs of corruption. These practices are so intimately
blended with each other, that we thought the distribution which we have
adopted would best bring before you the spirit and genius of his
government; and we were convinced, that, if upon these four great heads
of charge your Lordships should not find him guilty, nothing could be
added to them which would persuade you so to do.
In this way and in this state the matter now comes before your
Lordships. I need not tread over the ground which has been trod with
such extraordinary abilities by my brother Managers, of whom I shall say
nothing more than that the cause has been supported by abilities equal
to it; and, my Lords, no abilities are beyond it. As to the part which I
have sustained in this procedure, a sense of my own abilities, weighed
with the importance of the cause, would have made me desirous of being
left out of it; but I had a duty to perform which superseded every
personal consideration, and that duty was obedience to the House of
which I have the honor of being a member. This is all the apology I
shall make. We are the Commons of Great Britain, and therefore cannot
make apologies. I can make none for my obedience; they want none for
their commands. They gave me this office, not from any confidence in my
ability, but from a confidence in the abilities of those who were to
assist me, and from a confidence in my zeal,--a quality, my Lords, which
oftentimes supplies the want of great abilities.
In considering what relates to the prisoner and to his defence, I find
the whole resolves itself into four heads: first, his demeanor, and his
defence in general; secondly, the principles of his defence; thirdly,
the means of that defence; and, fourthly, the testimonies which he
brings forward to fortify those means, to support those principles, and
to justify that demeanor.
As to his demeanor, my Lords, I will venture to say, that, if we fully
examine the conduct of all prisoners brought before this high tribunal,
from the time that the Duke of Suffolk appeared before it down to the
time of the appearance of my Lord Macclesfield, if we fully examine the
conduct of prisoners in every station of life, from my Lord Bacon, down
to the smugglers who were impeached in the reign of King William, I say,
my Lords, that we shall not, in the whole history of Parliamentary
trials, find anything similar to the demeanor of the prisoner at your
bar. What could have encouraged that demeanor your Lordships will, when
you reflect seriously upon this matter, consider. God forbid that the
authority either of the prosecutor or of the judge should dishearten the
prisoner so as to circumscribe the means or enervate the vigor of his
defence! God forbid that such a thing should even appear to be desired
by anybody in any British tribunal! But, my Lords, there is a behavior
which broadly displays a want of sense, a want of feeling, a want of
decorum,--a behavior which indicates an habitual depravity of mind, that
has no sentiments of propriety, no feeling for the relations of life, no
conformity to the circumstances of human affairs. This behavior does not
indicate the spirit of injured innocence, but the audacity of hardened,
habitual, shameless guilt,--affording legitimate grounds for inferring a
very defective education, very evil society, or very vicious habits of
life. There is, my Lords, a nobleness in modesty, while insolence is
always base and servile. A man who is under the accusation of his
country is under a very great misfortune. His innocence, indeed, may at
length shine out like the sun, yet for a moment it is under a cloud; his
honor is in abeyance, his estimation is suspended, and he stands, as it
were, a doubtful person in the eyes of all human society. In that
situation, not a timid, not an abject, but undoubtedly a modest
behavior, would become a person even of the most exalted dignity and of
the firmest fortitude.
The Romans (who were a people that understood the decorum of life as
well as we do) considered a person accused to stand in such a doubtful
situation that from the moment of accusation he assumed either a
mourning or some squalid garb, although, by the nature of their
constitution, accusations were brought forward by one of their lowest
magistrates. The spirit of that decent usage has continued from the time
of the Romans till this very day. No man was ever brought before your
Lordships that did not carry the outward as well as inward demeanor of
modesty, of fear, of apprehension, of a sense of his situation, of a
sense of our accusation, and a sense of your Lordships' dignity.
These, however, are but outward things; they are, as Hamlet says,
"things which a man may play." But, my Lords, this prisoner has gone a
great deal further than being merely deficient in decent humility.
Instead of defending himself, he has, with a degree of insolence
unparalleled in the history of pride and guilt, cast out a recriminatory
accusation upon the House of Commons. Instead of considering himself as
a person already under the condemnation of his country, and uncertain
whether or not that condemnation shall receive the sanction of your
verdict, he ranks himself with the suffering heroes of antiquity.
Joining with them, he accuses us, the representatives of his country, of
the blackest ingratitude, of the basest motives, of the most abominable
oppression, not only of an innocent, but of a most meritorious
individual, who, in your and in our service, has sacrificed his health,
his fortune, and even suffered his fame and character to be called in
question from one end of the world to the other. This, I say, he charges
upon the Commons of Great Britain; and he charges it before the Court of
Peers of the same kingdom. Had I not heard this language from the
prisoner, and afterwards from his counsel, I must confess I could hardly
have believed that any man could so comport himself at your Lordships'
bar.
After stating in his defence the wonderful things he did for us, he
says,--"I maintained the wars which were of your formation, or that of
others, _not of mine_. I won one member of the great Indian confederacy
from it by an act of seasonable restitution; with another I maintained a
secret intercourse, and converted him into a friend; a third I drew off
by diversion and negotiation, and employed him as the instrument of
peace. When _you_ cried out for peace, and your cries were heard by
those who were the objects of it, I resisted this and every other
species of counteraction by rising in my demands, and accomplished a
peace, and I hope an everlasting one, with one great state; and I at
least afforded the efficient means by which a peace, if not so durable,
more seasonable at least, was accomplished with another. I gave you
_all_; and you have rewarded me with _confiscation, disgrace, and a life
of impeachment_."
Comparing our conduct with that of the people of India, he
says,--"_They_ manifested a generosity of which we have no example in
the European world. Their conduct was the effect of their sense of
gratitude for the benefits they had received from my administration. I
wish I could say as much of my own countrymen."
My Lords, here, then, we have the prisoner at your bar in his demeanor
not defending himself, but recriminating upon his country, charging it
with perfidy, ingratitude, and oppression, and making a comparison of it
with the banians of India, whom he prefers to the Commons of Great
Britain.
My Lords, what shall we say to this demeanor? With regard to the charge
of using him with ingratitude, there are two points to be considered.
First, the charge implies that he had rendered great services; and,
secondly, that he has been falsely accused.
My Lords, as to the great services, they have not, they cannot, come in
evidence before you. If you have received such evidence, you have
received it obliquely; for there is no other direct proof before your
Lordships of such services than that of there having been great
distresses and great calamities in India during his government. Upon
these distresses and calamities he has, indeed, attempted to justify
obliquely the corruption that has been charged upon him; but you have
not properly in issue these services. You cannot admit the evidence of
any such services received directly from him, as a matter of
recriminatory charge upon the House of Commons, because you have not
suffered that House to examine into the validity and merit of this plea.
We have not been heard upon this recriminatory charge, which makes a
considerable part of the demeanor of the prisoner; we cannot be heard
upon it; and therefore I demand, on the part of the Commons of Great
Britain, that it be dismissed from your consideration: and this I
demand, whether you take it as an attempt to render odious the conduct
of the Commons, whether you take it in mitigation of the punishment due
to the prisoner for his crimes, or whether it be adduced as a
presumption that so virtuous a servant never could be guilty of the
offences with which we charge him. In whichever of these lights you may
be inclined to consider this matter, I say you have it not in evidence
before you; and therefore you must expunge it from your thoughts, and
separate it entirely from your judgment. I shall hereafter have
occasion, to say a few words on this subject of _merits_. I have said
thus much at present in order to remove extraneous impressions from your
minds. For, admitting that your Lordships are the best judges, as I well
know that you are, yet I cannot say that you are not men, and that
matter of this kind, however irrelevant, may not make an impression upon
you. It does, therefore, become us to take some occasional notice of
these supposed services, not in the way of argument, but with a view by
one sort of prejudice to destroy another prejudice. If there is anything
in evidence which tends to destroy this plea of merits, we shall recur
to that evidence; if there is nothing to destroy it but argument, we
shall have recourse to that argument; and if we support that argument by
authority and document not in your Lordships' minutes, I hope it will
not be the less considered as good argument because it is so supported.
I must now call your Lordships' attention from the vaunted services of
the prisoner, which have been urged to convict us of ingratitude, to
another part of his recriminatory defence. He says, my Lords, that we
have not only oppressed him with unjust charges, (which is a matter for
your Lordships to judge, and is now the point at issue between us,) but
that, instead of attacking him by fair judicial modes of proceeding, by
stating crimes clearly and plainly, and by proving those crimes, and
showing their necessary consequences, we have oppressed him with all
sorts of foul and abusive language,--so much so, that every part of our
proceeding has, in the eye of the world, more the appearance of private
revenge than of public justice.
Against this impudent and calumnious recriminatory accusation, which
your Lordships have thought good to suffer him to utter here, at a time,
too, when all dignity is in danger of being trodden under foot, we will
say nothing by way of defence. The Commons of Great Britain, my Lords,
are a rustic people: a tone of rusticity is therefore the proper accent
of their Managers. We are not acquainted with the urbanity and
politeness of extortion and oppression; nor do we know anything of the
sentimental delicacies of bribery and corruption. We speak the language
of truth, and we speak it in the plain, simple terms in which truth
ought to be spoken. Even if we have anything to answer for on this head,
we can only answer to the body which we represent and to that body which
hears us: to any others we owe no apology whatever.
The prisoner at your bar admits that the crimes which we charge him
with are of that atrocity, that, if brought home to him, he merits
death. Yet, when, in pursuance of our duty, we come to state these
crimes with their proper criminatory epithets, when we state in strong
and direct terms the circumstances which heighten and aggravate them,
when we dwell on the immoral and heinous nature of the acts, and the
terrible effects which such acts produce, and when we offer to prove
both the principal facts and the aggravatory ones by evidence, and to
show their nature and quality by the rules of law, morality, and policy,
then this criminal, then his counsel, then his accomplices and
hirelings, posted in newspapers and dispersed in circles through every
part of the kingdom, represent him as an object of great compassion,
because he is treated, say they, with, nothing but opprobrious names and
scurrilous invectives.
To all this the Managers of the Commons will say nothing by way of
defence: it would be to betray their trust, if they did. No, my Lords,
they have another and a very different duty to perform on this occasion.
They are bound not to suffer public opinion, which often prevents
judgment and often defeats its effects, to be debauched and corrupted.
Much less is this to be suffered in the presence of our coördinate
branch of legislature, and as it were with your and our own tacit
acquiescence. Whenever the public mind is misled, it becomes the duty of
the Commons of Great Britain to give it a more proper tone and a juster
way of thinking. When ignorance and corruption have usurped the
professor's chair, and placed themselves in the seats of science and of
virtue, it is high time for us to speak out. We know that the doctrines
of folly are of great use to the professors of vice. We know that it is
one of the signs of a corrupt and degenerate age, and one of the means
of insuring its further corruption and degeneracy, to give mild and
lenient epithets to vices and to crimes. The world is much influenced by
names. And as terms are the representatives of sentiments, when persons
who exercise any censorial magistracy seem in their language to
compromise with crimes and criminals by expressing no horror of the one
or detestation of the other, the world will naturally think that they
act merely to acquit themselves in its sight in form, but in reality to
evade their duty. Yes, my Lords, the world must think that such persons
palter with their sacred trust, and are tender to crimes because they
look forward to the future possession of the same power which they now
prosecute, and purpose to abuse it in the manner it has been abused by
the criminal of whom they are so tender.
To remove such an imputation from us, we assert that the Commons of
Great Britain are not to receive instructions about the language which
they ought to hold from the gentlemen who have made profitable studies
in the academies of Benares and of Oude. We know, and therefore do not
want to learn, how to comport ourselves in prosecuting the haughty and
overgrown delinquents of the East. We cannot require to be instructed by
them in what words we shall express just indignation at enormous crimes;
for we have the example of our great ancestors to teach us: we tread in
their steps, and we speak in their language.
Your Lordships well know, for you must be conversant in this kind of
reading, that you once had before you a man of the highest rank in this
country, one of the greatest men of the law and one of the greatest men
of the state, a peer of your own body, Lord Macclesfield. Yet, my Lords,
when that peer did but just modestly hint that he had received hard
measure from the Commons and their Managers, those Managers thought
themselves bound _seriatim_, one after another, to express the utmost
indignation at the charge, in the harshest language that could be used.
Why did they do so? They knew it was the language that became them. They
lived in an age in which politeness was as well understood and as much
cultivated as it is at present; but they knew what they were doing, and
they were resolved to use no language but what their ancestors had used,
and to suffer no insolence which their ancestors would not have
suffered. We tread in their steps; we pursue their method; we learn of
them: and we shall never learn at any other school.
We know from history and the records of this House, that a Lord Bacon
has been before you. Who is there, that, upon hearing this name, does
not instantly recognize everything of genius the most profound,
everything of literature the most extensive, everything of discovery the
most penetrating, everything of observation on human life the most
distinguishing and refined? All these must be instantly recognized, for
they are all inseparably associated with the name of Lord Verulam. Yet,
when this prodigy was brought before your Lordships by the Commons of
Great Britain for having permitted his menial servant to receive
presents, what was his demeanor? Did he require his counsel not "to let
down the dignity of his defence"? No. That Lord Bacon, whose least
distinction was, that he was a peer of England, a Lord High Chancellor,
and the son of a Lord Keeper, behaved like a man who knew himself, like
a man who was conscious of merits of the highest kind, but who was at
the same time conscious of having fallen into guilt. The House of
Commons did not spare him. They brought him to your bar. They found
spots in that sun. And what, I again ask, was his behavior? That of
contrition, that of humility, that of repentance, that which belongs to
the greatest men lapsed and fallen through human infirmity into error.
He did not hurl defiance at the accusations of his country; he bowed
himself before it. Yet, with all his penitence, he could not escape the
pursuit of the House of Commons, and the inflexible justice of this
Court. Your Lordships fined him forty thousand pounds, notwithstanding
all his merits, notwithstanding his humility, notwithstanding his
contrition, notwithstanding the decorum of his behavior, so well suited
to a man under the prosecution of the Commons of England before the
Peers of England. You fined him in a sum fully equal to one hundred
thousand pounds of the present day; you imprisoned him during the King's
pleasure; and you disqualified him forever from having a seat in this
House and any office in this kingdom. This is the way in which the
Commons behaved formerly, and in which your Lordships acted formerly,
when no culprit at this bar dared to hurl a recriminatory accusation
against his prosecutors, or dared to censure the language in which they
expressed their indignation at his crimes.
The Commons of Great Britain, following these examples and fortified by
them, abhor all compromise with guilt either in act or in language.
They will not disclaim any one word that they have spoken, because, my
Lords, they have said nothing abusive or illiberal. It has been, said
that we have used such language as was used to Sir Walter Raleigh, when
he was called, not by the Commons, but by a certain person of a learned
profession, "a spider of hell." My Lords, Sir Walter was a great
soldier, a great mariner, and one of the first scholars of his age. To
call him a spider of hell was not only indecent in itself, but perfectly
foolish, from the term being totally inapplicable to the object, and fit
only for the very pedantic eloquence of the person who used it. But if
Sir Walter Raleigh had been guilty of numberless frauds and
prevarications, if he had clandestinely picked up other men's money,
concealed his peculation by false bonds, and afterwards attempted to
cover it by the cobwebs of the law, then my Lord Coke would have
trespassed a great deal more against decorum than against propriety of
similitude and metaphor.
My Lords, the Managers for the Commons have not used any _inapplicable_
language. We have indeed used, and will again use, such expressions as
are proper to portray guilt. After describing the magnitude of the
crime, we describe the magnitude of the criminal. We have declared him
to be not only a public robber himself, but the head of a system of
robbery, the captain-general of the gang, the chief under whom a whole
predatory band was arrayed, disciplined, and paid. This, my Lords, is
what we offered to prove fully to you, what in part we have proved, and
the whole of which I believe we could prove. In developing such a mass
of criminality and in describing a criminal of such magnitude as we
have now brought before you, we could not use lenient epithets without
compromising with crime. We therefore shall not relax in our pursuits
nor in our language. No, my Lords, no! we shall not fail to feel
indignation, wherever our moral nature has taught us to feel it; nor
shall we hesitate to speak the language which is dictated by that
indignation. Whenever men are oppressed where they ought to be
protected, we called [call?] it tyranny, and we call the actor a tyrant.
Whenever goods are taken by violence from the possessor, we call it a
robbery, and the person who takes it we call a robber. Money
clandestinely taken from the proprietor we call theft, and the person
who takes it we call a thief. When a false paper is made out to obtain
money, we call the act a forgery. That steward who takes bribes from his
master's tenants, and then, pretending the money to be his own, lends it
to that master and takes bonds for it to himself, we consider guilty of
a breach of trust; and the person who commits such crimes we call a
cheat, a swindler, and a forger of bonds. All these offences, without
the least softening, under all these names, we charge upon this man. We
have so charged in our record, we have so charged in our speeches; and
we are sorry that our language does not furnish terms of sufficient
force and compass to mark the multitude, the magnitude, and the atrocity
of his crimes.