The Trial: A History from Socrates to O. J. Simpson

The spread of corporal punishment was not unusual. Rulers across Europe were relying on the appearance of power to magnify its reality, and in Elizabeth’s realm – riddled by spies, convulsed by rebellions and consumed by crime – the need to show subjects who was in control was a pressing one. But English criminal justice underwent a second, unique, transformation – for it did not use just human bodies as billboards for government authority. At the very same time that the rulers of France and Germany were ending the last vestiges of courtroom publicity, the English government embarked on a deliberate policy of using not just punishments but trials to show where power lay.

Henry VIII had sown the seeds with condemnations of, for example, Thomas More and Anne Boleyn, but it was during the reign of Elizabeth that the strategy reached fruition. Under the hammerbeam roofs and stone vaults of England’s palaces, traitors stood behind solemn pikemen to hear their crimes described and their protestations of innocence ridiculed by some of the finest advocates of Renaissance England. Vast crowds were permitted to attend, and although witnesses were still forbidden to defendants, they increasingly appeared on behalf of the Crown – often very suddenly. At the trial of the Earl of Essex, for example, the Lord Chief Justice stepped down from the benches to testify at the behest of the Attorney-General while a Privy Councillor emerged at one point from a secret listening post to interrupt and contradict the defendant. And when it was all over, convocations of robed judges invited the jurors to consider the question of innocence or guilt. The verdicts rarely surprised. Records of the proceedings, transcribed by squads of stenographers, were then turned into anti-Catholic propaganda and published in English and Latin for the benefit of audiences domestic and European.

The hearings were rituals of condemnation rather than inquiry, and only a handful of acquittals ever occurred – but the insistence on public articulation meant that even the most careful preparations could suddenly go awry. When William Parry appeared at Westminster Hall in 1585 to answer charges of attempting to assassinate Elizabeth, he wearily entered a guilty plea and declared that, ‘I desire not life, but desire to die’. But the court was packed with Londoners anxious to see Parry get his comeuppance, and instead of moving directly to sentence his judges ordered that his confession be read aloud, ‘that everyone may see that the matter is as bad as the Indictment purporteth’. As Parry heard his words repeated, steel returned to his broken frame. ‘Your Honours know…how my confession was extorted,’ he declared. They fired back that torture had not been used. It had been threatened, he retorted. Charge and counter-charge spiralled, until Parry was denying any intention to kill the queen at all and promising to ‘lay his blood’ amongst the judges if they condemned him to death. The rattled men of the bench, warning him against such ‘dark speeches’, ordered that he be hanged, drawn, and quartered. A process that would have remained behind closed doors on the continent ended with the defendant being pulled down the riverside steps past a hooting mob, demanding ‘in his rage and passion’ that Elizabeth be summonsed ‘to answer for my blood before God’.

No trial better illustrated the unpredictable force of publicity than one that occurred under the reign of Elizabeth’s successor, King James I, in November 1603: the prosecution for treason of Sir Walter Raleigh. Drama was virtually guaranteed from the outset. Until Elizabeth’s death in March 1603, Raleigh had enjoyed a charmed existence. Tall and elegant, he had shimmered like a peacock in a court where looks had mattered. After sponsoring England’s first American colony at Roanoke in 1585, he had introduced Elizabeth’s entourage to the pleasures of tobacco, and done more than any man alive to popularize the potato. Most heroic of all were his exploits against Spain, whose fleet he had taken on in battle three times. As England had flexed its maritime muscles he had trespassed even further into the heart of Spanish darkness, returning from one voyage in 1595 with tales of a land called Guyana where the natives’ heads grew beneath their shoulders and precious metals veined every rock. El Dorado, he had reported, was just a return trip away.

All the derring-do came with an arrogance that lost friends as easily as it won them, however. Even Elizabeth sent Raleigh to the doghouse for several years when he breached palace protocol by impregnating one of her maids of honour, and the fastidious James took against him almost instantly. Though unequivocally Protestant, the king was always more concerned to steady his wobbly throne than to fight the old religion, and was as underwhelmed by Raleigh’s anti-Spanish credentials as he was unimpressed by his fondness for tobacco. Within months of James assuming the throne, the monopolies, patents, and privileges dispensed by Elizabeth were suspended and Raleigh had lost his grace-and-favour mansion. Although inconvenient, it seemed no more than a routine shake-up – until in the summer, one of Raleigh’s closest friends, Lord Henry Cobham, was implicated in a Catholic plot to overthrow the king. No evidence linked Raleigh to the conspiracy, but he too found himself under arrest in mid July on suspicion of treason. The rogue of the old dispensation was about to turn into the whipping boy of the new.

In November 1603, with a plague epidemic claiming two thousand lives a week in London, the entire court decamped to the ancient city of Winchester for the trials. The city traced its history back to Rome and its mythology back to Camelot, but this was the grandest show that it had seen in a long while. Scholars were thrown out of their cathedral lodgings to accommodate the jurists, James set up field headquarters at a nearby mansion, and carriages laden with judges, jurors, lawyers, and defendants were soon streaming through its gates. Raleigh took up residence at the castle dungeon on 15 November, and arrived to the news that several of the Catholics charged with conspiring against James had just been tried, and that all but one had been sentenced to death. Although Raleigh’s own interrogators had never sought to link him to a broader plot, it was not a good sign.

Early in the morning of 17 November Raleigh was escorted by pikewielding guards down to the Bishop’s Palace, and led into its sepulchral courtroom. His plummeting fortunes had been entertaining the country for months, and popular interest in his anticipated destruction was immense. On the five-day journey from London, his carriage had been received with abuse, rocks and showers of clay pipes throughout (inspiring Raleigh laconically to observe that ‘dogs do always bark at those they know not’), and the pillars, bays, and benches were now filled. Aristocrats and commoners sat cheek to cheek, exhaling large clouds of tobacco smoke if other trials of the time are a guide, as they waited for the show to begin. Almost all would have been hoping to see the final act of an epic life.

All seemed set fair to sink Raleigh. A phalanx of eleven royal commissioners, all of whom had helped investigate the plot against James, sat at the front of the court, four wearing the scarlet robes and black cornercaps of high judicial office. Local legend tells that the king himself was concealed in a cubbyhole, his ear to a listening hole, and although unlikely (because James had specifically sent reporters to court) it would not have been out of character; he secretly eavesdropped at many other major trials that occured during his reign. And at the prosecution benches, flanked by his fellow lawyers, was the most feared advocate of the day: Attorney-General Sir Edward Coke.

The lawyer, in his early fifties like Raleigh, was in many ways the mirror image of his adversary. Equally imposing physically and no less confident personally, he epitomized just as Raleigh did a social type that was emerging for the first time in England: the self-made man. Each was born into a comfortable but non-aristocratic family; and although they had frequented different types of court, both had clambered up the hierarchy with a judicious combination of back-stabbing, fawning, and charm. Like many Elizabethans on the make, both were also masterful rhetoricians. In a fluid society where a commoner could no longer become a monk but could be appointed Attorney-General or mount a search for El Dorado if he sounded convincing enough, the ability to persuade was becoming an essential skill. Raleigh was a talented poet and writer while Coke, though always more likely to censor England’s theatres than to attend them, had an eloquence renowned even among contemporaries who were rarely tongue-tied. Elizabethan schoolboys were taught adoxography, the art of eruditely praising worthless things.* Coke mastered a converse skill – and with his words, he sent scores of men careening to their deaths.

The power was one that he exercised with pleasure. When the Earl of Essex told his treason jury in 1600 that Coke was ‘play[ing] the orator’ and displaying ‘the trade and talent of those who value themselves upon their skill in pleading innocent men out of their lives’, the remarks contained the soupçon of an aristocratic sneer. But the trade and talent of the commoner from Norwich Grammar School was enough to persuade twelve peers to despatch Essex to the chopping block, and Coke would only have taken the complaint as a compliment. For he prosecuted with a passion that went beyond the call of professional duty. It was a quality exemplified in his verbal duel with Raleigh, which has good claim to be the most abusive courtroom battle in England’s history.

As was usual, Raleigh had not seen the indictment before coming into court, and he now heard for the first time that he had supposedly agreed with Cobham to raise rebellion on behalf of Spain’s king and hand James’s crown to a Catholic pretender. That came as little surprise, but Coke then continued, apropos of nothing very much, with lurid accounts of the conspiracies of which the other plotters had been convicted two days before. Raleigh listened in silence for several minutes, before pointing out that their crimes had nothing to do with him. Coke did not deign to reply directly. ‘Like Sampson’s foxes, [the treasons] were joined in the tails though their heads were severed,’ he pronounced, before stitching together several non sequiturs of his own. Treason, he explained to the jury, had its root, bud, blossom, and fruit, and this was treachery so radical that it had not even been put into effect. The others had already been convicted of plotting against ‘the [king] and his cubs’, he pointed out, before swivelling towards Raleigh. ‘But to whom, Sir Walter, did you bear malice? To the royal children?’ As though accosted by a drunkard with a knife, Raleigh’s reply was nervous courtesy itself. ‘Mr. Attorney, I pray you to whom, or to what end speak you all this?…What is the treason of [the others] to me?’

Oozing a vitriol that still hisses from the page, Coke finally homed in on his quarry. ‘I will then come close to you. I will prove you to be the most notorious traitor that ever came to the bar.’ Raleigh replied that if the lawyer could prove anything at all, he would admit not just that he was a traitor but that he was ‘worthy to be crucified with a thousand torments’. ‘Nay, I will prove all,’ growled Coke. ‘Thou art a monster; thou hast an English face, but a Spanish heart.’ He continued with another sustained attack on various betrayals supposedly committed by Lord Cobham, who was awaiting his own trial in a dungeon below the court. ‘What is that to me?’ Raleigh demanded. ‘If my Lord Cobham be a traitor, what is that to me?’ Coke erupted with anger. ‘All that he did was by thy instigation thou viper, for I thou thee, thou traitor!’ All the thouing, a form of address conventionally used for children, servants, and animals, threatened to turn the exchange into a slanging match, but Raleigh’s retaliation remained restrained. ‘You may call me a traitor at your pleasure, yet it becomes not a man of quality and virtue to do so,’ he replied, ‘but I take comfort in it, it is all that you can do.’ Lord Chief Justice Sir John Popham – a massive presence in a blood-red gown – stepped in to separate the men. ‘Mr. Attorney speaks out of the zeal of his duty for the service of the King; and you for your life,’ he told Raleigh, ‘be patient on both sides.’

Any hope of a clean fight was, however, doomed from the start – for it very soon emerged that the combatants did not even agree on the contest’s rules. In particular, they had diametrically opposed ideas about what constituted evidence. When Coke responded to Raleigh’s challenge by declaring that he would turn to his proofs, he read aloud an unsigned statement in which Lord Cobham was said to have confessed, four months earlier, that Raleigh had incited him to serve Spain. Raleigh, after reminding the jurors that he had done more than most to subvert Spanish interests, asked that Cobham make the claim to his face. Every defendant, he argued, had the right to confront his accuser. The law of England, like the Book of Deuteronomy, guaranteed that no one could be convicted of treason unless publicly charged by at least two witnesses.

The claim caused consternation among the judges; and although one reason was that Raleigh was simply wrong under the law of the time, the discombobulation reflected more than disagreement over the technicalities of treason. It was still just a few decades since witnesses had first begun to appear in trials – and the judges thought it preposterous to propose that criminal allegations required testimony at all. ‘I marvel, Sir Walter, that you, being of such experience and wit, should stand on this point,’ said Justice Warburton, ‘for many horse-stealers should escape if they may not be condemned without witnesses.’ When Raleigh insisted that the whole purpose of a trial was to allow a jury to weigh up the prosecution’s evidence, Lord Popham hoisted his bulky frame back into the fray. He had already told the jury that he could personally vouch for the truth of Cobham’s confession, having taken it himself, and his intervention was as predictable as it was decisive. No, he declared abruptly, trials did not require witnesses. A person could be convicted on the strength of confessions and statements that had been recorded before the hearing. ‘I know not, my Lord, how you conceive the law,’ responded Raleigh, ‘but if you affirm it, it must be a law to all posterity.’ ‘Nay, we do not conceive the law,’ boomed Popham. ‘We know the law.’*

Any doubts that Coke might have had about his case were finally dispelled. He returned to the attack, now reciting from statements made by the men already convicted, in which they repeated rumours, second- and third-hand, about Raleigh’s willingness to betray England. ‘O barbarous!’ exploded Raleigh. ‘Do you bring the words of these hellish spiders against me?…I find not myself touched, scarce named; and the course of proof is strange; if witnesses are to speak by relation to one another, by this means you may have any man’s life in a week; and I may be massacred by mere hearsay.’ He pleaded again for Cobham to be produced in court but Popham held firm, pointing out – plausibly, if unhelpfully – that he might recant and confuse the jury.

As if to taunt Raleigh, Coke then produced a second statement from Cobham in which he apparently claimed that Raleigh had written to tell him that traitors were immune from punishment in the absence of two accusers. When Raleigh vehemently denied writing such a letter, the prosecutor announced that he would, after all, call a live witness. All heads turned – to see an unknown character step forward. The man identified himself as a sailor called Dyer, and told the jurors that someone in Lisbon had once told him that James would never be crowned king of England because Don Raleigh and Don Cobham would slit his throat first. He then drifted away as mysteriously as he had arrived. A flabbergasted Raleigh inquired how the supposed ramblings of an unknown person in Portugal could possibly implicate him. ‘Your treason’, snarled Coke, ‘had wings.’

As the hearing neared its conclusion and Raleigh pleaded with the jury to judge him as they would want to be judged, Coke demanded ‘the last word for the King’. ‘Nay, I will have the last word for my life,’ replied Raleigh. ‘Go to,’ exploded the Attorney-General.’ I will lay thee upon thy back for the confidentest traitor that ever came to the bar!’ Even the judges now sided with Raleigh until Coke sat down and petulantly accused them of encouraging treachery. They relented, like bad parents with a worse child, and begged him to carry on – which he did, at length. His summary of all the statements that everyone had already heard elicited yet another protest, and Coke let loose with one final spray of abuse. Addressing Raleigh to his face, he condemned him as ‘the most vile and execrable traitor that ever lived’, ‘an odious fellow’ whose ‘name is hateful to all the realm of England for thy pride’. As cool as his opponent was incontinent, Raleigh wondered which of them deserved the superlatives. ‘It will go near to prove a measuring cast between you and me, Mr. Attorney.’

The sympathies of the spectators had indeed shifted. One of James’s courtiers later told the king that ‘he would have gone a thousand miles to have seen [Raleigh] hanged’ at the beginning of the trial, but ‘would…have gone a thousand to save his life’ by its end. ‘In half a day’, another observer reported, ‘the mind of all the company was changed from the extremest hate to the greatest pity.’ Coke’s attacks inspired such hostility among bystanders, wrote someone else, that ‘calling hym base trash [they] begann to hyss’ while Coke himself looked ‘to be something daunted’. But the lawyer also had the thick skin of a seasoned showman – and the nous to save the best till last. Like a knife thrower with one final trick, Coke now pulled a scroll from his pocket, and the crowd hushed.

He had in his hand, he announced, a signed letter that Cobham had written just the day before. The prisoner had been so troubled by a guilty conscience that he had been unable to sleep and he had now chosen finally to unburden himself. ‘I have thought it fit’, recited Coke in his powerful voice, ‘to write nothing but what is true; for I am not ignorant of my present condition, and now to dissemble with God is no time.’ Raleigh, the letter continued, had written to him in his jail cell – not just once, but twice – and urged him to withdraw his accusations of treason. But Cobham would not do so. Indeed, ‘craving humble pardon’ for his ‘double dealing’, he now claimed that Raleigh had solicited an annual payment of £1500 from the Spanish government in exchange for his services as a spy.

Raleigh was visibly shaken. He eventually handed up a letter, smuggled out of Cobham’s cell, in which the prisoner said precisely the opposite, protesting Raleigh’s innocence, but it came as a damp squib after Coke’s pyrotechnics. Raleigh admitted also that he had indeed written twice to his old friend, that he had been offered £1500 to be a spy and that he had been wrong to conceal that fact from the court. ‘But for attempting or conspiring any treason against the King or the State,’ he insisted, ‘I still deny it to the death, and it can never be proved against me.’ It was all too late. Even if Cobham was a double-dealer on his own admission, Raleigh’s own words suddenly sounded like those of a man with secrets to hide.

After the jurors were told by one of Coke’s colleagues that the defendant had to prove his innocence, a common view in the seventeenth century, it took them just fifteen minutes to return a guilty verdict. Lord Popham then delivered the standard sentence for traitors, ordering that Raleigh be dragged to the scaffold and half-hanged, before being made to watch while his intestines and penis were tossed onto a fire. He was then to be decapitated and cut into quarters, each flank to be disposed of at the king’s pleasure.

Such a sight would have made a great many people very happy in 1603, but Raleigh’s life had further to run. He was spared by James and spent more than a decade confined to quarters in the Tower of London, conducting chemistry experiments, writing a history of the world and imagining lands and times far away. Then, in 1616, opportunity knocked. James, ruminating on Raleigh’s claims to have stumbled upon the route to El Dorado, had decided that a little unfathomable wealth would be no bad thing. He could, declared the king, set off to find the fabled city – a fifth of all receipts to go to the Crown. Raleigh, presented with one last glimpse of glory, set sail on 12 June 1617. By the time he returned a year later, the dream had turned to dust. Skirmishes and smallpox had devastated his crew. Among the scores of men that he had left buried on the banks of the Orinoco were his lifelong servant and his eldest son. And instead of cargoes of bounty, he trailed in his wake only furious complaints from Spain’s ambassador that he had attacked one of that country’s colonial outposts.

James, deeply unimpressed with his fifth of nothing, now judged it politic to appease the national enemy. The man who had been condemned for serving Spain was about to pay a heavy price for having offended it, for instead of giving Raleigh another trial the king decided simply to enforce the penalty that he had stayed fifteen years before. Sentence was pronounced at a hearing at which Attorney-General Sir Henry Yelverton delivered a Luciferian epitaph for Raleigh. He had lived ‘as a star at which the world hath gazed’, he told the judges, ‘but stars may fall, nay, they must fall when they trouble the sphere wherein they abide’.

The end came on a chilly morning in late October 1618. The crowd’s sympathies were this time squarely with Raleigh. At a time when Elizabethan England was already receding into mythology, his erstwhile arrogance had come to seem fitting to an age of giants, and the doomed quest for El Dorado had tempered its edge with tragedy. The panache with which he now lost his head would propel him into the pantheon of great dead Englishmen. After a long speech that ended with an invitation to the spectators to join him in prayer, the sexagenarian, etched and grey, thumbed the blade of the axe that would kill him. It was ‘a sharp medicine’, he murmured, ‘but it will cure all diseases’. He knelt at the block and, told that he was facing westwards – away from the traditionally presumed direction of the Last Judgment – declined to switch direction. ‘What matter how the head lie, so [long as] the heart be right?’ he asked. His last words, refusing the headsman’s offer of a blindfold, were suitably swashbuckling: ‘Think you I fear the shadow of the axe, when I fear not the axe itself?’ The show was over – and with a final flourish, Raleigh threw his arms above his shoulders to call down the curtain.

Whether Raleigh was in fact innocent of the treason charges laid against him in 1603 is as questionable today as it was four centuries ago. He certainly had reason to fear that his influence would decline after Elizabeth’s death, and although his score sheet against Spain was impressive, he lived in an age when allegiances were honoured in the breach as much as in the observance. For what it was worth, Cobham reasserted Raleigh’s guilt at his own trial and maintained the accusation ‘upon the hope of his soul’s resurrection’ as he stood upon his scaffold.

Raleigh’s trial was important, however, for reasons that transcended the truth or falsity of the charges. The sight of him struggling for his life against a phantom accuser, damned by documents that were dealt out like a blackjack hand, was so palpably unfair that it almost immediately became a model for how things ought not to be done. Several of the king’s advisers – including Edward Coke – urged James in 1618 to give him a second trial, with witnesses; and although the monarch remained ruthless as ever, reminding them that Raleigh had ‘by his wit…turned the hatred of men into compassion,’ the proceedings would fall ever deeper into disrepute. Raleigh himself claimed at his condemnation that one of the judges had repented of his role at Winchester from his deathbed. By 1656, an anonymous pamphleteer was swearing that Coke had privately expressed shock at the jury’s verdict, while another writer recorded that the jurors had knelt to beg Raleigh’s forgiveness after convicting him. All the stories were as incredible as they sound, but the speed with which they were recounted and believed is a sign of just how emblematic the trial had become. The myths would in time contribute to ideas even more far-reaching: that courts were there to limit state power as much as to express it; that prosecutions could be unfair even if a defendant was guilty; and that justice was done only if seen to be done. And they did so simply because transparency had made the unfairness of the alternative so manifest.