Aims
This course aims to:
• introduce you to the complex relationship of history and law
• help you to place and understand a series of landmark legal cases in their historical, social and political contexts
• help you to discuss and make an informed assessment of the continuing historical significance of these legal cases and their continuing relevance today
Content
The path from studying history to practising law is one which many history graduates have taken, and it is not difficult to see why: both depend on the use and interpretation of evidence to support the presentation of a case. But the relationship between the two can go much deeper: many historical trials can also act as doorways into an understanding of their historical context and of its relevance to today.
This course considers five celebrated trials, each very different from the others yet each also illuminating many aspects of the society that produced it.
17th-century Britain was a land of religious and revolutionary ferment, which the rest of Europe looked at with shock and amazement. Rebellions are hardly unknown, nor even civil wars, but for a rebellion to succeed and then to put an anointed King on public trial on the novel and disturbing charge of treason against his own people, as the English did in 1649, called into question a whole series of assumptions about the God-given hierarchy of society. Did a people have a right to put a king on trial, and what sort of a precedent were they creating?
Another royal trial, in 1820, was a very different affair but with similar implications. On one level, the ‘trial’ of Queen Caroline, wife of George IV, for adultery (strictly speaking, a hearing connected with the passage of a divorce bill through parliament) was a piece of royal tittle-tattle and scandalmongering, but in the highly-charged atmosphere of Britain after Waterloo it had the potential to spark off a revolutionary and republican uprising – and nearly did. Equally revolutionary were the implications of Charles Darwin’s ideas which led, in 1925, to the trial of a young schoolteacher, John Scopes, in the sweltering heat of a Tennessee summer. This was a test case deliberately brought to see how far the State would go to uphold its anti-evolution laws; it pitted America’s most celebrated defence lawyer, Clarence Darrow, against William Jennings Bryan, former Secretary of State and ardent defender of the literal Truth of the Bible.
Postwar Britain saw two highly controversial trials. William Joyce, widely known by his nickname ‘Lord Haw Haw’, had nightly broadcast Nazi propaganda to Britain from Berlin and when he was captured at the end of the war there were widespread calls for him to be executed for treason. But was Joyce actually a British subject? And if he wasn’t, had he committed treason? And if he hadn’t, how could he be executed for it? His trial raised uncomfortable issues about law, vengeance and morality. A few years later another trial raised echoes of the Scopes one when the respected publisher, Penguin, was prosecuted for obscenity for having published D H Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Eminent literary critics were called to testify to the merit of Lawrence’s work but what was really at issue was the question of public morality and whether anyone had the right to decide what it should be – and enforce it.
Presentation of the course
The main method of presentation will be illustrated lectures, with time built in for class discussion.
Course sessions
1. The Trial of King Charles I, 1649
The trial of a king by his own people should not have been possible: kings were answerable only to God. Charles I’s trial was the clearest sign possible of a Britain in revolutionary turmoil.
2. The Trial of Queen Caroline and the Bill of Pains and Penalties, 1820
With Britain apparently poised to plunge into revolution, the government’s failed attempt to deprive Caroline, wife of the detested King George IV, of her title as Queen could not have been more perilous.
3. The ‘Monkey Trial’ – John Scopes on Trial, Tennessee, 1925
When Tennessee banned the teaching of Darwin’s theories in schools, a young schoolteacher agreed to a test case. His dramatic trial pitched two heavyweights of American law against each other and put cast America’s very idea of itself in the dock.
4. Treason on Trial – William Joyce, 1945
Joyce was a leading Fascist in pre-war Britain and an unashamed supporter of Nazi Germany, broadcasting propaganda over German radio. But was he a British citizen? Could he legally be tried – and executed – for treason?
5. ‘Your Wife or Your Servant’ – the ‘Lady Chatterley’ Trial
The trial of the respected publisher, Penguin books, for obscenity for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not only a literary controversy, but a trial of radically British ideas
of morality and class.
Learning outcomes
You are expected to gain from this series of classroom sessions a greater understanding of the subject and of the core issues and arguments central to the course.
The learning outcomes for this course are:
• to talk with confidence and knowledge about major themes relating to the trials covered
in the course
• to discuss with insight and understanding the historical issues and questions the trials raise
for the historian
• to reach an informed assessment of the ways in which history and law can relate to, and learn from, each other
