[1]William Hawkins was, during Zenger’s own period, probably the
outstanding author of legal textbooks. Delancey’s quotations are
from his _Treatise of the Pleas to the Crown_ (London, 1724), I,
192-193.
[2]Henry Sacheverell, a Tory divine, attacked the Whig Ministry for not
being Royalist or High Church enough. He was tried for seditious
libel and found guilty (1710), but his case was instrumental in the
decline of the Whigs and the rise of the Tories under Queen Anne.
See G. N. Clark, _The Later Stuarts_ (Oxford, 1940), pp. 216-217.
[3]Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, was the historian of his time as
well as one of its most controversial ecclesiastico-politicians. His
pastoral letter sounds innocuous enough now, but his enemies in
Parliament impugned it as too Royalist and too favorable to the
Dissenters (1693). See Macaulay’s _History of England_, “Fireside”
ed. (Boston and New York, 1910), IV, 464-466. Bishop Burnet was the
father of New York’s Governor William Burnet.
[4]Thomas Brewster, one of the many printers prosecuted during the reign
of Charles II, was convicted (1663) of violating the licensing laws
when he published _The Phoenix, or the Solemn League and Covenant_,
which defended the regicides who executed Charles I. For Chief
Justice Robert Hyde’s excoriating summing up, see J. W. Willis-Bund,
_A Selection of Cases from the State Trials_ (Cambridge, 1882), II,
415.
[5]Sir John Holt, one of the great chief justices in the history of
British law, handed down numerous important rulings on the subject
of libel. See Fredrick Seaton Siebert, _Freedom of the Press in
England, 1476-1776_ (Urbana, Ill., 1952), _passim_.
[6]John Tutchin, publisher of the _Observator_, made broad charges of
treason and corruption against the government, and was tried in a
court presided over by Chief Justice Holt (1704). See Siebert, _op.
cit._, p. 275.
[7]William Fuller was one of the notorious impostors who abounded in
England at the time of the Popish Plot. His grossly fictitious
account of a sinister scheme to restore the Stuarts was exposed by
the House of Commons (1692), and he was promptly arrested,
prosecuted, and convicted. Macaulay has a good description of the
Fuller incident, _op. cit._, pp. 280-289.
[8]These ecclesiastics, led by William Sancroft, Archbishop of
Canterbury, refused to promulgate from their pulpits the Declaration
of Indulgence by which James II would have granted freedom of
worship to his subjects. The Seven Bishops argued that he was
attempting to exercise a dispensing power that the crown did not
possess. They were prosecuted before Parliament, but acquitted
(1688). See Clark, _op. cit._, pp. 120-121.
[9]Francis Nicholson, a stormy petrel among colonial administrators, was
Governor of Virginia at the time of this episode (1704). His
intended victim was John Monroe, a clergyman of the Church of
England. The information against Monroe is in the _Executive
Journals of the Council of Virginia_ (Richmond, 1927), II, 451-452.
[10]Laurence Echard, Tory divine and historian, wrote the bitterly
anti-Williamite _History of the Revolution of 1688_. See Eugene
Lawrence, _Lives of the British Historians_ (New York, 1855), I,
312-315.
[11]Paul de Rapin de Thoyras, although a Frenchman, became the foremost
authority on English history. His _Histoire d’Angleterre_ appeared
in 1723, and long remained the standard work on the subject,
influencing a whole generation of British historians including Hume.
See Lawrence, _op. cit._, I, 226-229.
[12]Marcus Brutus, one of the assassins of Julius Caesar, is most
familiar to the English-speaking world as Shakespeare’s “noblest
Roman of them all.” Hamilton’s anecdote is based on the laudatory
picture of the man drawn in Plutarch’s _Lives_.
[13]Lucius Junius Brutus was the Roman patriot who, according to legend,
led the revolt that drove out Tarquin the Proud and put an end to
the Kings of Rome. The story of his execution of his sons is told
repeatedly by the Roman historians, the most familiar source being
Livy’s _History of Rome_, bk. I.
[14]John Hampden occupies a special niche in British history as the man
who refused to pay the Ship Money levied by Charles I for the
building of a fleet (1637). His defiance of the crown caught the
imagination of later generations as a major step toward the
development of parliamentary government in England. See George
Macaulay Trevelyan, _England Under the Stuarts_ (19th ed., London,
1947), p. 152.