Thomas Muir, a Glasgow advocate, alarmed the authorities by his association with French revolutionaries and his outspoken anti-establishment views. He was declared a rebel after visiting France in 1793, and when he returned to Scotland he was imprisoned on various charges, including making public speeches vilifying the King and Constitution, and spreading such seditious books and pamphlets as Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. Tried by the notoriously harsh judge, Lord Braxfield, he was sentenced to fourteen years’ deportation to Botany Bay, but escaped. He settled in France where he died at the age of thirty-four in 1799. At his trial Muir defended himself with great aplomb. No doubt anticipating the outcome, he told the jury, ‘When our ashes shall be scattered by the winds of heaven, the impartial voice of future times will rejudge your verdict.’
Gentlemen of the Jury, Let us this night throw away vain pretext: Let us act fairly and candidly. I smile at the charge of sedition. You yourselves are conscious that no sedition has existed in this country, and in your own minds you decried the accusation. I know for what I am brought to this bar, it is for having strenuously and actively engaged in the course of Parliamentary Reform; for having exerted every effort, by constitutional measures, to procure an equal representation of the people, in the House of the People.
Let not the Prosecutor skulk in darkness: Let him come manfully forward, and avow the cause which has impelled him to bring me here. I will give you little trouble: I will prevent the lassitude of the Judges: I will save you, the Jury, from the wretched mockery of a trial, the sad necessity of condemning a man, when the cause of his condemnation must be concealed, and cannot be explained.
Yes, I plead guilty. I openly, actively, and sincerely embarked in the cause of Parliamentary Reform, in the vindication and in the restoration of the rights of the people. Nor will I blush to unfold to you my motives; they are supported by their own intrinsic strength, but they are likewise held up by the great and the venerable names of the living and of the dead. I contended for an equal representation of the people, in what I shall ever call the House of the People, because I considered it a measure essentially necessary to the salvation of the State, and to the stability of your boasted constitution.
Wherein then consists the excellency of that time-tried fabric, cemented by the blood of your fathers, flowing from the field and from the scaffold? I will tell you: It consists in the due balance of its three impelling powers, KING, LORDS, and COMMONS; if one of these powers loses its vigour, the constitution in proportion loses its vigour; if one of these powers becomes only a shadow of what it ought to be, if it becomes merged and absorbed into any of the other two, your constitution then also becomes a shadow, and it is annihilated. And do you not know, and does all the world not know that if any where the proud structure of the constitution has suffered the ravages of time or of corruption, it is in its popular branch.
Is it not a fact indisputable, that the representation of the people is not such as it once was, and is not such, as I trust in God, one day it shall be. The man then who sounds the alarm, when he discovers the approach of danger, who summons all who may be concerned in its reparation, is surely no enemy to the country, no foe to the constitution, because he labours in its preservation and protection.
Such were the motives of my conduct. If I am guilty, I have in my guilt many associates, men who now enjoy the repose of eternity, whom your fathers admired while living, and to whom you, their children, have erected statues. I have no time to run over all the venerable catalogue. But, is there a man ignorant of the illustrious Locke? And was not this sage in philosophy, this advanced champion in the cause of liberty, and of man; this friend to the British constitution, who wrote his Treatise on Government in its defence … was not he an advocate for a reform in Parliament, for a more equal representation of the Commons in the House of Commons? Will you venture to tear the records of his fame, to stigmatize his memory, and to brand him with the epithet of seditious? …
But if the attempt to procure a Reform in Parliament be criminal, your accusation must extend far and wide. It must implicate the Ministers of the Crown and the lowest subjects. Have you forgotten that in the year 1782, the Duke of Richmond, the present Commander of the forces, was a flaming advocate for the universal right of suffrage? Do you not know, that he presided in societies, and like Mr Pitt, advised an universal formation of such societies all over the kingdom? Have you never read his famous letter to Colonel Sherwin; in which his principles, his testimony, to a full and complete representation of the people, are indelibly recorded? Is guilt the passing insubstantial fashion of the day? Does it vary according to times, and to seasons, and to circumstances? Shall what was patriotism in 1782 be criminal in 1793?