Books of the Day
The Trial of John Frost
John Frost : A Study of Chartism. By David Williams. (Welsh University Press. los.)
ON January 16th, 1840, John Frost, the leader of the Welsh Chartists, was found guilty of high treason at the Monmouth Assize Court, and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Until the nineteenth century was well advanced this, the gravest crime known to our law, was distinguished from other capital offences by the ferocity of its punishment. To some extent this had been mitigated by the Treason Act of 1854, which put an end to the disembowelling and the entrails- btoning parts of the sentence. But the practice of dragging the traitor along the highway behind a horse-drawn sledge from prison to the place of execution, together with the beheading and the butchering of his body into four pieces before the gaze of a blood-thirsty rabble, continued, so to speak, to stain our Statute-book for more than half a century. The abolition of 'public executions in 1868 applied to cases of murder only, but with the Forfeiture Act of 1870, which extended the punishment of hanging imposed for other capital offences to high treason, an end was put at long last to the inhuman barbarity which had so long disgraced English justice. The change was due solely to the force of public opinion, and not in any way to the judiciary or the legal profession, whose attitude towards the humanities in the early years of the Victorian era is a little difficult to understand. Counsel had been allowed to the prisoner in cases of treason since the Treason Act of 1695, but no counsel was allowed in cases of felony to put the prisoner's case to the jury. Sydney Smith and Macaulay, among others, drew attention more than once to this flagrant disregard of fair play in our criminal code, yet when the Prisoners' Counsel Act of 1836 was introduced in Parliament twelve out of fifteen High Court judges opposed the change, and one of them, Sir James Allen Park, actually wrote to the Attorney-General threatening to resign if the Bill became law.
Three years later came the famous trial of John Frost, which marked virtually the collapse of the Chartist movement. Frost's and Smith O'Brien's in 1848 were the last cases in this country in which the ancient formula of condemning a man to be hung, drawn and quartered was delivered from the bench to the prisoner at the bar. A vivid account of the trial appears in this book, which has been published at the instance of the Chartist Centenary Committee of Newport. Most of the biographical accounts of Frost were written by authors hostile to his political views, and all lacked detachment. This book, founded on research into original documents, and a careful examination of contemporary records in the local Press, is the first objective account yet written of the remark- able man who led the insurrectionary march on Newport on November 4th, 1839. The rioters, some of whom were armed, attempted to enter an hotel, where the local magistrates were assembled, in order to demand the release of one of their im- prisoned leaders, Vincent, whom Frost had tried in vain to get free. The anti-Chartist local magistrates had called into the hotel about two dozen soldiers, and a number of special constables, who were also armed. Whether the first shot came from inside or outside the hotel is not clear, but the order to fire upon the crowd was given, and about twenty of the rioters were killed and many others wounded, though the sound of fire- arms soon caused the crowd to disperse.
Was Frost really guilty of high treason? After the lapse of a century the nature of the insurrection and its real pur- pose are seen today in a clearer perspective. The question springs to the mind quite naturally from the significant fact that the Lord Chief Justice of England, who presided over the trial, was of the firm opinion that high treason had not been established by the evidence. Sir Nicholas Tindal wa. one of the greatest lawyers of the nineteenth century. He summed up to the jury in favour of an acquittal, a fact which can now be easily understood in the light of the author's balanced analysis of the evidence. No difficulty had been experienced by the law officers in extracting enough material from the excited language used by the rioters, and in picking out sentences from the speeches of the leaders to build up a picture of a treasonable conspiracy. Its alleged object was to
force the Queen to change her measures and counsels," a fact which, if proved, would bring the case within the language of the Treason Act of 1796. But long before the trial ended the case for the Crown that the local insurrection was part of a general movement for a rising throughout the country had broken down. This turn of events had been in a sense anticipated by the Lord Chief Justice in his charge to the grand jury. He had explained what was treason and what fell short of it. The testimony was clearly more consistent with the view of the presiding judge that it was a district rising for the purpose of securing Vincent's release. But the prejudice of a local jury was unconquerable. The shopkeepers and traders from whose ranks the jury were drawn were filled with as much anti-Chartist alarm as the local justices and the summing-up fell on deaf ears.
An interesting feature of the trial was what Pollock described as " a magnificent point of law." It may appeal even today to those who love the pastime recently described in the Court of Appeal as " the gamble of forensic gymnastics." The Treason Act of 1695, which first allowed counsel to defend in trials for treason, requires the Crown to supply the accused with a copy of the indictment and a list of its witnesses ten days before the trial, and an Act of 1708 pro- vides that the documents must be delivered at the same time. Frost's case had been fixed for December 31st, 1839. In order to give the defence plenty of time, the solicitor for the Crown delivered the indictment on December 12th, and the list of the witnesses on the 17th. The point which Pollock enthusiastically described as "magnificent "—it emanated from the brain of the defending solicitor (Frost's step-son)—was that the statute required the documents to be delivered simul- taneously and had not been complied with! Later on fifteen judges solemnly assembled in London to discuss it. Nine considered the objection sound and six did not, but three of the majority sided with the minority in their view that Pollock had taken the point too late at the trial. The fortnight's delay between the verdict of the jury and the decision of the judges in London served to save Frost from the gallows. There is no doubt that he owed his life to the intervention of the Lord Chief Justice, who urged upon the Home Secretary weighty reasons for substituting transportation for the death sentence. To this a somewhat reluctant Cabinet agreed.
THOMAS ARTEMUS JONES.
Previous page
