Peter Rushton - Treason and Rebellion in the British Atlantic, 1685-1800: Legal Responses to Threatening the State

Treason and Rebellion in the British Atlantic, 16851800

This is a study of treason and rebellion in the British Atlantic, an area which consisted of a diverse collection of jurisdictions and territories, different kinds of societies and political systems, with each unit posing difficulties of consistency in law and administration. Moreover, the territory under British control was continually expanding, often rather haphazardly, a process that repeatedly produced difficulties in relations between natives and European settlers. With British authority, it might be thought, went a single body of law and administrative policies: but, as Lauren Benton has pointed out, something as apparently simple as a law of treason, which focussed on actions of disloyalty and threats to the state, proved impossible to render consistently in so many different contexts. Geographic expansion undermined every such attempt at imperial standardization in many European empires, but particularly that of the British. Treason far from kings proved an adaptable but slightly unpredictable strategy for authorities in far-flung colonies.entirely without any procedures of enforcement. Laws of treason, on the other hand, had a long history in each state. In civil wars and rebellions, both were in danger of becoming blurred. Britain experienced at least five civil wars between 1642 and 1800 in Britain and Ireland in the 1640s and 1650s; in Scotland and Ireland in 168890; in Scotland and England in 171516, and again in 17456; and in North America in 177683. If the Irish rising of 1798 is included, war and rebellion, and various forms of treasonable actions against the British State, were almost an accustomed experience of rule in the first empire. As Barbara Donegan has shown, the civil wars of the 1640s and 1650s were only to some extent governed by the rudimentary laws of war. The rivals viewed each other with hostility, and proclaimed very different loyalties, to King or Parliament. For the Royalists, opponents of the king were generally regarded, but rarely prosecuted, as traitors. Parliamentarians inflicted civil and economic penalties on Royalists, attacking their estates and other economic assets, but little more. With prisoners on both sides, paroles of various kinds in force and exchanges continually being agreed, the protagonists generally conducted the war as though it was between foreign powers. There were terrible exceptions, and the record in the age of atrocity is poor in both Britain and Ireland most famously, the massacre by Cromwell at the end of the siege of Drogheda in 1649. Yet in the subsequent 100 years both the laws of war and treason were refined and clarified, the latter in both legislation and practice. The beginning of Britains sequence of wars, initially against the Dutch and then against the French, entrenched a gentlemanly common culture of courtesy and agreement in the matter of prisoners, paroles and exchanges. The law of treason, however, was radically reformed by the two parliamentary acts enshrining rights in statute law for the first time: Habeas Corpus in 1679 and the Treason Act of 1696. While, as we shall see, there were doubts about whether these operated in the colonies, they shaped the policies of the colonial authorities and the assertiveness of those they ruled. This book is therefore concerned with those incidents where rebellion and treason law converged, rather than with rebellions as such. In many ways, the question arises as to why the British state characteristically resorted to legal strategies at all. Rebels had few rights in any political philosophy of the time, and in other empires, such as that of the Turks (the Ottoman Empire), or the ancient Roman Empire, rebels were annihilated militarily and their noncombatant dependants enslaved. Going to court would not have occurred to the rulers of such imperial states. The legal details will be examined in the next chapter, but the characteristic of the British Empire at least was that it was defined by its ruling circles, as an empire of law.