Enemies of the state
TRYING TIMES
1 William Wallace’s watershed case
The Scot’s trial proved there was little to prevent kings from using treason laws to pursue vendettas
On 23 August 1305, William Wallace was convicted of treason at Westminster Hall in London. He then suffered the gruesome fate of the male traitor: hanging, drawing and quartering. King Edward I was determined to revenge himself brutally on this tiresome figurehead of Scottish independence – who had famously defeated English forces at Stirling Bridge in 1297 – and the Wallace case proved to be a watershed. It signified an extension by Edward I of the crime of treason, which now meant not just plotting the death of the king, but also the act of “levying war” (rebellion). In this way, England’s monarchs by the 14th century were defining “treason” arbitrarily to suit their own purposes.
In the 1350s the English barons finally acted to curb such royal behaviour. As part of a number of political concessions, they used Edward III’s request for money for his wars in France to leverage a special parliamentary law that would define treason more precisely. According to the 1351 Treason Act, treason above all meant a crime against the monarch. It occurred “when a man doth compass or imagine the death of our lord the king, of our lady his queen, or of their eldest son”. Here, to plot treason (compass or imagine) was the same as to carry out the deed. But it was also treason to “levy war against our lord the king in his realm”, or to aid the king’s enemies, “giving to them aid and comfort in the realm or elsewhere”.
This might sound like precise language, guaranteed to restrain royal tyranny. In fact it proved to be remarkably vague. And an extra clause in the 1351 act offered unscrupulous monarchs still further latitude. It stipulated that, if judges could not decide what was “treason”, they had to refer the case to king and parliament.
Monarchs exploited this new clause to create “Acts of Attainder”, by which an individual was simply declared to be a “traitor” and found
