Description
Book SynopsisHigh treason - the breach of allegiance which a subject owes to his or her sovereign - has always been regarded as the most serious of all criminal offences. Even today it still carries the death penalty. In addition, all the property of a person convicted of treason was, until the eighteenth century, forfeited to the Crown. Wartime aside, there have been no prosecutions for treason for well over a century and the topic has almost, but not quite, disappeared from legal text books.
In this revealing study, Alan Wharam relates the intriguing stories behind a dozen treason trials encompassing the Earl of Essex in 1601 to ''Lord Haw Haw'' in 1946. The accounts are all based on the reports, believed in most cases to be the verbatim records of the evidence given, and of the speeches of Counsel and the directions of the judges, which appear in the State Trials and other similar works. Some of the cases are famous, some infamous: some, such as the trial in 1781 of de
