| Book Review | Law and History Review, 21.2

Book Review

John Barrell, Imagining the King's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xvii + 737. $125.00 (ISBN 0-19-811292-0).

In this splendid book, John Barrell, a professor of English at the University of York, offers a close analysis of the tumultuous years of the mid-1790s in Britain. William Pitt's government, convinced that a dangerous revolution on the French model was being fomented on Albion's side of the Channel, became increasingly concerned with several radical societies that had made repeated calls for a "convention" representing all the British people. Believing that the purpose of these conventions was to overthrow the British constitution and establish a republic, the government unsuccessfully tried the leaders of these societies for treason.

The charges were brought under the first clause of the act of 25 Edward III (1351) that made it treason to "compass or imagine the death of our lord the king." This provision was never satisfactorily adapted from its original law French and few legal commentators had analyzed it in any depth. The fundamental problem was the malleability of the term "imagine." Did it have the narrow meaning of "intend," or could it be read more broadly, to include even merely thinking about the king's death? And if the government erroneously believed that an individual was "imagining the king's death," was it not itself guilty of the same crime?

Barrell's book is an eloquent exploration of these issues and of the contemporary valence of "imagination" more generally. The book opens with British representations of the death of Louis XVI and with an analysis of heated political debates, in which opponents routinely accused each other of operating under overwrought and deluded imaginations. The heart of the book is a careful study of the treason trials themselves. Barrell argues that over the course of 1794, the government developed a number of novel legal arguments to address what it perceived to be the problem of "modern" or "French" treason (129)—that is, treason that aimed not at replacing the current king with someone more pleasing, but with destroying kingship itself. Although the government had treated the plotting of a convention as a mere misdemeanor in early 1794, by the end of the year it argued that such plotting was a clear act of imagining the king's death. One such argument was the suggestion that any act that "might" lead to the king's death was treason. This was linked to the ingenious theory that Barrell terms the "Coronation Oath" argument—the notion that since the king had taken an oath to defend the constitution, he would necessarily expose himself to death in resisting any attempts at constitutional reform. The strained quality of some of these arguments leads Barrell to describe them as defining little more than "figurative treason against a figurative king" (230). The concluding portions of the book deal with the comical "pop-gun plot" (an alleged scheme to assassinate George III with an air gun) and with the arrest of Richard Brothers, a "prophet" who had supposedly prophesied George's death. The culmination of the government's efforts came in December 1795, when Parliament enacted expansive new treason legislation. Barrell concludes with an essay tying the political events of the 1790s to Coleridge's subsequent account of the poetic imagination.

A self-described "historian of literature" (37), Barrell wields his considerable erudition with a deft and magisterial touch, seamlessly melding law, politics, history, literature, and art into a riveting narrative Gesamtkunstwerk. The book is exhaustively researched, vigorously argued, and peppered with a mischievously droll wit. Although Barrell does not disguise his liberal sympathies and subjects the government to considerable criticism, his judgments never lack evidentiary support. A number of well-chosen illustrations and poems add significant period color. Barrell is not a legal scholar, but he handles the complex body of English treason law with care and precision. More importantly, he recognizes that the law has an internal logic and dynamic of its own, even if it is ultimately a social process, grounded in what Holmes so aptly termed the "felt necessities of the time."

Although this is already a lengthy book, several issues might have been more fully explored. A greater attention to the role and the composition of the juries that decided the treason cases would have been useful. The State Trials volumes, for example, contain the names and occupations of all the jurors, yet for all the detail that Barrell offers elsewhere he refers only to a homogenous "jury." It is also unclear whether the radicals were merely a fringe group or whether they were the noisy vanguard of a much broader popular dissatisfaction with the government. The answer to this question is the key to the meaning of the verdicts themselves, as the verdicts could be alternatively seen as rejections of the government's mediocre evidence in particular cases, as rejections of particularly expansive theories of treason, or as fundamental rejections of the government itself.

This book deserves a wide readership, and scholars in many disciplines will find much that is instructive. In the light of the events of September 11, it is also a valuable meditation on the enduring problem of balancing individual liberty with the security needs of the state.

Carlton F. W. Larson

Washington, D.C.

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