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trials had become a standard part of the way in which modern Britons imagined how their constitutional monarchy had superseded the absolutist pretensions of the Stuart monarchs.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

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

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

Mark Goldie is Emeritus Professor of Intellectual History in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College. He has edited or authored 12 books and published more than 60 essays on British political, religious, and intellectual history in the period 1650-1800. Two of his books are published by Boydell and Brewer: The Entring Book of Roger Morrice and Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs.

ANDREA MCKENZIE is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria, Canada