TRIAL of Mr THOMAS WALKER of Manchester, Merchant, and

six other Persons, indicted for a Conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution and Government of this Kingdom, and to aid and assist the French, being the King's enemies, in case they should invade this Kingdom. Tried at Lancaster, before Mr Justice HEATH, one of the Judges of the Court of Common Pleas, and a Special Jury, on the 2d of April 1794.

THE SUBJECT.

WE have not found it necessary, for the full understanding of this interesting and extraordinary case, to print the evidence given upon the trial; because, to the honour of Lord Ellenborough, then Mr Law, who conducted the prosecution for the Crown, after hearing positive contradiction of the only witness in support of it, by several unexceptionable persons, he expressed himself as follows:

"I know the characters of several of the gentlemen who have been examined, particularly of Mr Jones. I cannot expect one witness alone, unconfirmed, to stand against the testimony of all these witnesses: I ought not to desire it." To which just declaration, which ended the trial, Mr Justice Heath said, "You act very properly, Mr Law."

The jury found Mr Walker Not Guilty; and the witness was immediately committed, indicted for perjury, and convicted at the same assizes.

We have printed Mr Law's able and manly speech to the jury, which contains the whole case, afterwards proved by the witness who was disbelieved. The speech of Mr Erskine in answer to it states the evidence afterwards given to contradict him.

Mr Walker was an eminent merchant at Manchester, and a truly honest and respectable man; and nothing can show the fever of those times more than the alarming prosecution of such a person upon such evidence. It is not to every Attorney-General that such a case could have been safely trusted. The conduct of Mr Law was highly to his honour, and a prognostic of his future character as a Judge.

MR LAW'S SPEECH.

The indictment having been opened by Mr James, Mr Law addressed the jury as follows:

GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY,The indictment which has been read to you, imputes to the defendants a species of treasonable misdemeanour second only in degree, and inferior only in malignity, to

the crime of high treason itself. It imputes to them a conspiracy for the purpose of adhering with effect to the King's enemies, in case the calamity of foreign invasion, or of internal and domestic tumult, should afford them the desired opportunity of so doinga conspiracy for the purpose of employing against our country those arms which should be devoted to its defence; and of overthrowing a constitution, the work of long-continued wisdom and virtue in the ages that have gone before us, and which, I trust, the sober-minded virtue and wisdom of the present age will transmit unimpaired to ages that are yet to succeed us. It imputes to them a conspiracy, not indeed levelled at the person and life of our Sovereign, but at that constitution at the head of which he is placed, and at that system of beneficial laws which it is his pride and his duty to administer; at that constitution which makes us what we are-a great, free, and, I trust, with a few exceptions only, a happy and united people. Gentlemen, a conspiracy formed for these purposes, and to be effected eventually by means of arms; a conspiracy which had either for its immediate aim or probable consequence the introduction into this country, upon the model of France, of all the miseries that disgrace and desolate that unhappy land, is the crime for which the defendants stand arraigned before you this day: and it is for you to say, in the first instance, and for my Lord hereafter, what shall be the result and effect in respect to persons against whom a conspiracy of such enormous magnitude and mischief shall be substantiated in evidence.

Gentlemen, whatever subjects of political difference may subsist amongst us, I trust we are in general agreed in venerating the great principles of our constitution, and in wishing to sustain and render them permanent. Whatever toleration and indulgence we may be willing to allow to differences in matters of less importance, upon some subjects we can allow none. To the friends of France, leagued in unity of council, inclination, and interest with France, against the arms and interests of our country, however tolerant in other respects, we can afford no grains of allowance-no sentiments of indulgence or toleration whatsoever. To do so at a time when those arms and councils are directed against our political and civil-against not our national only, but natural existence (and at such a period you will find that the very conspiracy now under consideration was formed), would be equally inconsistent with every rule of law and every principle of self-preservation: it would be at once to authorise every description of mischievous persons to carry their destructive principles into immediate and fatal effect; in other words, it would be to sign the doom and downfall of that constitution which protects us all.

I am sure, therefore, that for the crime, such as I have represented it to be, my learned friend will not, in the exercise of his own good sense, choose to offer any defence or apology; but he

will endeavour to make the evidence I shall lay before you appear in another point of view: he will endeavour to conceal and soften much of that malignity which I impute, and I think justly, to the intentions and actings of these defendants.

It was about the close of the year 1792 that the French nation thought fit to hold out to all the nations on the globe, or rather, I should say, to the discontented subjects of all those nations, an encouragement to confederate and combine together for the purpose of subverting all regular established authority amongst them, by a decree of the 19th of November 1792, which I consider as the immediate source and origin of this and other mischievous societies. That nation, in convention, pledged to the discontented inhabitants of other countries its protection and assistance, in case they should be disposed to innovate and change the form of government under which they had heretofore lived. Under the influence of this fostering encouragement, and meaning, I must suppose, to avail themselves of the protection and assistance thus held out to them, this and other dangerous societies sprung up and spread themselves within the bosom of this realm.

Gentlemen, it was about the period I mentioned, or shortly after, I mean in the month of December, which followed close upon the promulgation of this detestable decree, that the society on which I am about to comment-ten members of which are now presented in trial before you-was formed.* The vigilance of those to whom the administration of justice and the immediate care of the police of the country is primarily intrusted, had already prevented or dispersed every numerous assembly of persons which resorted to public-houses for such purposes; it therefore became necessary for persons thus disposed to assemble themselves, if at all, within the walls of some private mansion. The president and head of this society, Mr Thomas Walker, raised to that bad eminence by a species of merit which will not meet with much favour or encouragement here, opened his doors to receive a society of this sort at Manchester, miscalled the Reformation Society. The name may, in some senses, indeed, import and be understood to mean a society formed for the purpose of beneficial reform; but what the real purposes of this society were you will presently learn from their declared sentiments and criminal actings. He opened his doors, then, to receive this society: they assembled, night after night, in numbers, to an amount which you will hear from the witnesses: sometimes, I believe, the extended number of such assemblies amounting to more than a hundred persons. There were three considerable rooms allotted for their reception. In the lower part of the house, where they were first admitted, they sat upon business of less moment, and requiring the presence of smaller numbers. In

The Manchester Constitutional Society was instituted in October 1790, the Reformation Society in March 1792; the Patriotic Society in April 1792. 2 F

VOL. I.

the upper part, they assembled in greater multitudes, and read, as in a school, and, as it were, to fashion and perfect themselves in everything that is seditious and mischievous, those writings which have been already reprobated by other juries sitting in this and other places, by the courts of law, and, in effect, by the united voice of both Houses of Parliament. They read, amongst other works, particularly the works of an author whose name is in the mouth of everybody in this country-I mean the works of Thomas Paine: an author who, in the gloom of a French prison, is now contemplating the full effects, and experiencing all the miseries, of that disorganising system of which he is, in some respects, the parent-certainly the great advocate and promoter.

The works of this author, and many other works of a similar tendency, were read aloud by a person of the name of Jackson, who exercised, upon those occasions, the mischievous function of reader to this society. Others of the defendants had different functions assigned them: some were busy in training them to the use of arms, for the purpose, avowedly, in case there should be either a landing of the French, with whom we were then, I think, actually at war, or about immediately to be at war; or in case there should take place a revolt in the kingdoms of Ireland or Scotland, to minister to their assistance, either to such invasion or to such revolt, That they met for such purposes is not only clear from the writings that were read aloud to them, and the conversations that were held, but by the purposes which were expressly declared and avowed by those who may be considered as the mouthpieces and organs of the society upon these occasions.

The first time, I think, that the witness Dunn, whom I shall presently produce to you, saw the defendant Mr Walker, Mr Walker declared to him, "that he hoped they should soon overthrow the constitution." The witness I have alluded to was introduced to the society by two persons, I think, of the names of M'Callum and Smith, and who, if I am not misinformed, have since taken their flight from this country to America. The first night he was there he did not see their president, Mr Walker; but on the second night that he went there, Mr Walker met him as he entered the door, and observing from his dialect that he was a native of Ireland, Mr Walker inquired of him how the volunteers went on; and said, with a smile, as he passed him in his way up-stairs to the rest of the associated members, "We shall overthrow the constitution by and by." The witness was then ushered into this room, where he saw assembled nearly to the number of a hundred or a hundred and fifty persons. The room was, I understand, a large warehouse at the top of the house; there were about fourteen or fifteen persons then actually under arms, and some of those whose names are to be found in this record were employed in teaching others the military exercise. It would

be endless, as well as useless, to relate to you the whole of what passed at these several meetings.

Upon some occasions Mr Walker would talk in the most contumelious and abominable language of the sacred person of our Sovereign. In one instance, when talking of monarchy, he said, "Damn kings! what have we to do with them? what are they to us?" and, to show the contempt in which he held the lives of all kings, and particularly that of our own Sovereign, taking a piece of paper in his hand and tearing it, he said, "If I had the King here, I would cut off his head as readily as I tear this paper."

Upon other occasions, others of the members, and particularly a person of the name of Paul, who I believe is now in court, held similar language; damning the King, reviling and defaming him in the execution of his high office, representing the whole system of our public government as a system of plunder and rapacity, representing particularly the administration of a neighbouring kingdom by a Lord-Lieutenant as a scheme and device merely invented to corrupt the people, and to enrich and aggrandise the individual to whose care the government of that kingdom is more immediately delegated; in short, arraigning every part of our public economy as directly productive of misgovernment and oppression. The King himself was sometimes more particularly pointed at by Mr Walker. He related of him a strange, incredible, and foolish fable, which I never heard suggested from any other quarter:-"That his Majesty was possessed of seventeen millions of money in some bank or other at Vienna, which he kept locked up there, and would not bestow a single penny of it to relieve the distresses and indigence of any part of his own subjects." Many other assertions of this sort were made, and conversations of a similar import held between Mr Walker and the persons thus assembled.

About three months after the formation, as far as I can collect it, of this society, that is, about the month of March 1793, a person of the name of Yorke-Yorke, of Derby, I think he is called-arrived at Manchester, with all the apparatus of a kind of apostolic mission, addressed to the various assemblies of seditious persons in that quarter of the kingdom. He harangued them upon such topics as were most likely to interest and inflame them; he explained to them the object of the journey he was then making through the country; he said he was come to visit all the combined societies, in order to learn the numbers they could respectively muster, in case there should be an invasion by the French, which was then talked of, and is yet, I am afraid, talked of but upon too much foundation; to know, in short, what number they could add to the arms of France, in case these arms should be hostilely directed against Great Britain itself. He stated that the French were about to land in this country, to the number of forty or fifty