  [1]William Hawkins was, during Zenger’s own period, probably the outstanding author of legal textbooks. Delancey’s quotations are from his Treatise of the Pleas to the Crown (London, 1724), I, 192-193. [2]Henry Sacheverell, a Tory divine, attacked the Whig Ministry for not being Royalist or High Church enough. He was tried for seditious libel and found guilty (1710), but his case was instrumental in the decline of the Whigs and the rise of the Tories under Queen Anne. See G. N. Clark, The Later Stuarts (Oxford, 1940), pp. 216-217. [3]Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, was the historian of his time as well as one of its most controversial ecclesiastico-politicians. His pastoral letter sounds innocuous enough now, but his enemies in Parliament impugned it as too Royalist and too favorable to the Dissenters (1693). See Macaulay’s History of England, “Fireside” ed. (Boston and New York, 1910), IV, 464-466. Bishop Burnet was the father of New York’s Governor William Burnet. [4]Thomas Brewster, one of the many printers prosecuted during the reign of Charles II, was convicted (1663) of violating the licensing laws when he published The Phoenix, or the Solemn League and Covenant, which defended the regicides who executed Charles I. For Chief Justice Robert Hyde’s excoriating summing up, see J. W. Willis-Bund, A Selection of Cases from the State Trials (Cambridge, 1882), II, 415. [5]Sir John Holt, one of the great chief justices in the history of British law, handed down numerous important rulings on the subject of libel. See Fredrick Seaton Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476-1776 (Urbana, Ill., 1952), passim. [6]John Tutchin, publisher of the Observator, made broad charges of treason and corruption against the government, and was tried in a court presided over by Chief Justice Holt (1704). See Siebert, op. cit., p. 275. [7]William Fuller was one of the notorious impostors who abounded in England at the time of the Popish Plot. His grossly fictitious account of a sinister scheme to restore the Stuarts was exposed by the House of Commons (1692), and he was promptly arrested, prosecuted, and convicted. Macaulay has a good description of the Fuller incident, op. cit., pp. 280-289. [8]These ecclesiastics, led by William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, refused to promulgate from their pulpits the Declaration of Indulgence by which James II would have granted freedom of worship to his subjects. The Seven Bishops argued that he was attempting to exercise a dispensing power that the crown did not possess. They were prosecuted before Parliament, but acquitted (1688). See Clark, op. cit., pp. 120-121. [9]Francis Nicholson, a stormy petrel among colonial administrators, was Governor of Virginia at the time of this episode (1704). His intended victim was John Monroe, a clergyman of the Church of England. The information against Monroe is in the Executive Journals of the Council of Virginia (Richmond, 1927), II, 451-452. [10]Laurence Echard, Tory divine and historian, wrote the bitterly anti-Williamite History of the Revolution of 1688. See Eugene Lawrence, Lives of the British Historians (New York, 1855), I, 312-315. [11]Paul de Rapin de Thoyras, although a Frenchman, became the foremost authority on English history. His Histoire d’Angleterre appeared in 1723, and long remained the standard work on the subject, influencing a whole generation of British historians including Hume. See Lawrence, op. cit., I, 226-229. [12]Marcus Brutus, one of the assassins of Julius Caesar, is most familiar to the English-speaking world as Shakespeare’s “noblest Roman of them all.” Hamilton’s anecdote is based on the laudatory picture of the man drawn in Plutarch’s Lives. [13]Lucius Junius Brutus was the Roman patriot who, according to legend, led the revolt that drove out Tarquin the Proud and put an end to the Kings of Rome. The story of his execution of his sons is told repeatedly by the Roman historians, the most familiar source being Livy’s History of Rome, bk. I. [14]John Hampden occupies a special niche in British history as the man who refused to pay the Ship Money levied by Charles I for the building of a fleet (1637). His defiance of the crown caught the imagination of later generations as a major step toward the development of parliamentary government in England. See George Macaulay Trevelyan, England Under the Stuarts (19th ed., London, 1947), p. 152. |
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