Defoe was unusual for a man of his time. He was remarkably individualistic in his relationships with others, and his relationships tended to be more transactional and ‘weak’ than those of contemporaries with less expansive, but more intensive, social networks built on ‘strong ties’. In this way, Defoe’s connections were much more modern than was customary for his contemporaries. Defoe was also singular in his energies, his self-confidence, and, of course, his literary talents. Defoe’s relative ‘modernity’ and his personal distinctiveness surely accounts for the enduring interest his writings have held ever since he began to publish, but they also set him apart from his contemporaries, and these qualities (along with his well-known pugnaciousness and love for duplicity) help to explain why he was such a controversial figure in his lifetime.

The ‘state trials’ of early modern England have long been known, and often cited, due to the prominence of the mighty 34-volume collection of trial proceedings compiled by William Cobbett, Thomas Bayly Howell, and Thomas Jones Howell under the title A Complete Collection of State Trials and published over the course of nearly two decades from 1809 to 1828. While these trials have found their way into the footnotes of many volumes of scholarship, there have been precious few extended studies of the concept of a ‘state trial’ as it came to be known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This book seeks to investigate that concept in greater detail.

When this project was conceived, the editors of this volume were independently engaged in studies of politically charged trials during the later Stuart period. We quickly realized that the concept of a ‘state trial’ was worth studying at length, and that the legal proceedings that came to be understood as state trials were diverse and complicated enough that it would take more than just two historians to tackle the subject properly. We have deliberately taken an expansive view of the state trials. Rather than focusing solely on the formal legal proceedings that constituted a trial, we have looked at these trials as part of a longer process that began well before the defendants were taken to court and continued well after the formal proceedings had concluded. As such, the case studies collected in this book contribute to a social and cultural history of the politics of law in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The book is divided into three sections. The chapters in the first, ‘What Were the State Trials?’, address the genealogy of the concept of state trials as well as the history of politically charged trials in a period when English men and women struggled to come to terms with the experience of the great regicidal revolution of 1649 and experienced another, soi disant ‘glorious’ revolution in 1688–89. The second section is devoted to the state trials of the Restoration, an era that struggled and ultimately failed to restore either a sense of political normalcy or a uniformly accepted rule of law.

In a formal sense, the celebrated and contentious trial of the Tory clergyman, Doctor Henry Sacheverell, ended on the 23rd of March 1710. But if one takes a broader view of the turmoil surrounding the controversies provoked by Sacheverell’s prosecution, it is better to say that the real contest had only just begun. The contested nature of the guilty verdict, which was obtained only after a prolonged and hotly debated trial, along with the ideological debates about the nature of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the so-called ‘Toleration Act’ which followed in its wake, made it clear to all concerned that the Doctor’s trial had really settled nothing. Indeed, if anything, Sacheverell and his supporters acted as if they had won an acquittal. By contrast, the Whig regime that had managed to eke out a lukewarm guilty verdict played up Sacheverell’s conviction as proof that the political doctrines espoused by the Tories had been effectively refuted and condemned by the highest court in the kingdom.

The questions raised at Sacheverell’s trial were substantial: they aimed at the heart of the Glorious Revolution and the tenuous ‘Revolution Settlement’ that had developed, more by circumstance than by design, during the two decades after James Stuart made the fateful decision to abandon his supporters in Britain and move his court to France. Was the accession of William and Mary an instance of legitimate resistance to tyrannical authority or not? With regard to the ‘toleration’ of Protestant dissent enacted by law, Sacheverell’s prosecution raised the question: Was the Toleration Act something like a new amendment to the ancient constitution, or was it (as Sacheverell and his Tory supporters would have it) a begrudging indulgence granted to heretics and sinners for the time being, but certainly subject to further alteration by new legislation?

Although he had been found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours by the House of Lords, Sacheverell’s punishment was ultimately more symbolic than anything else: his infamous sermon The Perils of False Brethren (1709) was ordered to be burned by the common hangman, and he was banned from preaching for three years.

The term ‘state trial’ was most likely invented by Thomas Salmon in the title for his compilation, A Compleat Collection of State-Tryals, and Proceedings upon Impeachments for High Treason, and other Crimes and Misdemeanours; from the Reign of King Henry the Fourth, to the End of the Reign of Queen Anne, published in four volumes in 1719. He used the term only in the title and not at all in the rest of the work, which perhaps indicates that he saw it as more of a marketing device than a formal legal category worth explicating. It might be said, in fact, that the term has no precise legal meaning at all. While Salmon did not offer a definition of the term ‘state trial’, one potential definition would be a legal proceeding in which matters of constitutional importance were at stake. It is hard to operationalize this definition, however, given that constitutional matters were often at stake in early modern trials, either explicitly or implicitly. If all legal proceedings regarding matters of constitutional importance were deemed to be ‘State-Tryals’, a mere four volumes could hardly represent a ‘Compleat Collection’ of them, as Salmon himself implicitly admitted by continuing to edit and reissue new collections, abridgements, and critical reviews of the state trials for several decades after the publication of the first Compleat Collection of State-Tryals. Another potential definition, under which a ‘state trial’ was any prosecution at law of an offense committed against the state, suffers from an even greater degree of capaciousness. It is perhaps best to adopt a nominal rather than a substantive definition, in which a state trial was any legal proceeding that Salmon and his collaborators deemed to be sufficiently weighty or notorious to include in their publishing ventures. The concept of a ‘state trial’ was ultimately a marketing device, and an enormously successful one at that. It signalled to readers that an anthology of such trials would be politically relevant and oriented to the talk of the town, not dry as dust in the manner of legal dictionaries and formularies. Salmon’s compilation was followed by Sollom Emlyn’s in 1730, Francis Hargrave’s in 1776–81, and eventually the great compilation by William Cobbett, Thomas Bayly Howell, and Thomas Jones Howell in 1809–26.

THE RESTORATION has always held a somewhat awkward place in the broader narrative of English history. On the one hand, it has been seen as the endpoint to a turbulent Stuart century riven by civil wars and revolutionary regime changes. William of Orange's invasion by invitation and the Glorious Revolution that gave him the crowns to England, Scotland and Ireland is remarkable, in this perspective, only because the constitutional settlement which it provoked happened to endure for much longer than that of the previous Stuart regimes. Because of the significance accorded here to the Glorious Revolution, this perspective has mainly been adopted by political historians, particularly those with Whiggish sympathies. Its most famous articulation may be found in Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England from the Accession of James II (1848), but it remains alive and well in the work of contemporary historians such as Steven Pincus and Tim Harris.

On the other hand, the Restoration era is sometimes understood not as the ending but, rather, as the beginning of a new era: the soi disant ‘long eighteenth century’. Here, the Restoration era inaugurates the construction of a distinctly English old regime, one which managed to survive the age of the French revolution and persisted until at least the passing of the First Reform Act of 1832, and perhaps even longer than that. While the most vociferous promulgator of this argument for a long eighteenth-century English old regime has been Jonathan Clark, for whom the pillars of eighteenth-century society were the monarchy, the established church and the aristocracy, he has found unlikely fellow travellers amongst a host of cultural and social historians who may disagree with Clark's argument for Anglican monarcho-aristocratic hegemony but who nevertheless see lines of continuity from the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 until at least the long reign of George III. Historians such as Clark and Roy Porter disagreed deeply about the nature of English society in the long eighteenth century, but they agreed that the period began not in 1700, or even 1688–89, but decades earlier, with the Restoration in 1660.