392 THE TRIAL OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, ESQ., M.P. AND EIGHT OTHERS, IN THE COURT OF QUEEN'S BENCH, IRELAND, FOR CONSPIRACY. Judges: The Right Hon. Edward Pennefather, Chief Justice, the Hon. Charles Burton, the Hon. Philip Cecil Crampton, the Right Hon. Louis Perrin. Counsel for the Crown: The Right Hon. Thomas Berry Cusack Smith, Attorney-General, Richard Wilson Greene, Esq., Solicitor-General, Richard Benson Warren, Esq., Second Serjeant, George Bennet, Esq., Q. C., Abraham Brewster, Esq., Q. C., William Deane Freeman, Esq., Q. C., Henry Martley, Esq., Q. C., George Tomb, Esq., Q. C., Robert Holmes, Esq., John George Smyly, Esq., Matthew Baker, Esq., Joseph Napier, Esq. Counsel for the Traversers: Richard Moore, Esq., Q. C., the Right Hon. R. Lalor Sheil, Q. C., John Hatchell, Esq., Q. C., Jonathan Henn, Esq., Q. C., Right Hon. David R. Pigot, Q. C., James Henry Monahan, Esq., Q. C., Gerald Fitzgibbon, Esq., Q. C., James Whiteside, Esq., Q. C., Francis M'Donogh, Esq., Q. C., Alexander McCarthy, Esq., Edward Clements, Esq., James Stratherne Close, Esq., Thomas O'Hagan, Esq., James O'Hea, Esq., John Perrin, Esq., Sir Colman M. O'Loghlen, Bart. A QUOTATION from Milton applied to the monster meetings, which the prosecution of O'Connell and the eight minor defendants sought to repress, "Behemoth, biggest born of earth, TRIAL OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, ESQ., M. P. 393 will describe, not inappropriately, a trial, from the commencement to the close, in length, and extent, and importance, without precedent or parallel. The indictment filled fifty-eight folio pages-a very winding-sheet of law, charged fifty-eight overt acts committed between February 13th and October 9th, 1843, and occupied the Grand Jury five days before they could write upon it "a true bill." The Attorney-General took eleven hours in opening the case, and could scarcely have condensed his ample matter within a smaller space, as, in the magnitude and complexity of its details, and the range of time and space which the transactions traversed, his prosecution far transcended all former examples in the history of criminal jurisprudence. The counsel for the traversers and O'Connell himself spoke successively for eight days. The Solicitor-General, in his reply, absorbed two days and five hours; and the charge of the Lord Chief Justice seemed comparatively brief, as it only comprehended a day and a half. The Jury, after taking only five hours to agree in their verdict, required three or four more to settle it, that their finding might accord with the eleven counts of the indictment, and succeeded so well in their uncommon pains to render their meaning distinct, as to make the verdict null and void. When the first Earl of Lonsdale brought an action at Carlisle, he started by retaining all the barristers on the Northern Circuit: the Traversers were not such extortionate monopolists, but modestly retained no more than nine Queen's Counsel and seven learned gentlemen in stuff! the Crown taking the field with twelve only. The magnitude of the topics to be discussed, and the national importance of the result, justified this extraordinary array of gentlemen of the long robe. Upon the battle-field of the Four Courts was to be decided the momentous struggle between the population of the two countries for or against a repeal of the Union; and the result, like a question of peace or war, was watched, during the three months' delay that the Fabian policy of the Traversers interposed between the commencement of the prosecution and trial, with earnest curiosity and solicitude. Never, since the Peace, had so many couriers been despatched to Paris and Petersburgh as during the few weeks that followed the actual commencement of the trial, that eventful 15th of January, when the Court of Queen's Bench was crowded with persons of distinction who had been fortunate enough to procure tickets of admission, and thousands thronged the doors. To represent the fourth estate, thirty reporters attended from London. Mr. O'Connell proceeded, as if in triumphal procession, from his house in Merrion Square to the Court, accompanied by the Lord Mayor in his robes, bearing his wand of office, and escorted by a procession which comprehended forty carriages. On his arrival at the Hall, the air was rent with cries of "God bless him!" The mass of the population had identified themselves with his cause. The importance of the result could scarcely be overrated, for the trial and its consequences might affect the tranquillity of Europe. The Attorney-General for Ireland, Mr. T. B. Cusack Smith, an admirable lawyer in the third generation, (for his father had been a baron of the Exchequer, and his grandfather Master of the Rolls,) determined on proving the virtue of the common law, whether it was strong enough to put down what he considered a gigantic conspiracy to intimidate the government into a surrender of the Union, by the continuous collection of myriads of people, thousands of fighting men, unarmed, but resolute and demonstrative; who, according to O'Connell, had a perfect right to meet —as undoubtedly they had, and in congregating whom, there lay the difficulty, he boldly defied his accusers to prove a legal crime. The object sought to be attained by this Mammoth prosecution, and the vast expenditure of matériel, and time, and labour, and learning, which it involved, was truly national, to strike at the heart of an immense confederacy—to crush and put down with the strong hand of the law, a continuous systematic agitation, concerted with the object of overawing the government,—of making ministers start, as Mr. Sheil dramatically described it, of alienating the body of the Irish people from the state by seditious songs, speeches, and paragraphs in newspapers of coercing the legislature, by the silent menace of a giant's pleasure and a giant's strength, into repeal of the Union. Even yet the fierce throes of national excitement have not sufficiently subsided to allow in the majority a calm and dispassionate opinion; but, considering this as a mere question of law, distinct from technical objections to the indictment and errors on the record, the decision to which most lawyers have come appears to be that a conspiracy at common law did exist, and was legally proved. The emancipation of the Roman Catholics had been yielded, as the Duke of Wellington declared, under the dread of seeing a country he loved visited with the unutterable horrors of civil war. The motives for concession were avowed, and acted on. It seemed like cause and effect to form a combination for demonstrating, by a collection of the masses, the demand of the Irish people for repeal, and compelling the prime minister to grant it against his better judgment, in defiance of the reason of the legislature under the pressure of panic, the agonies of fear. The great ringleader made no secret of this being his real design. No statesman would dare to refuse what so much bone and sinew demanded. He would break no law, he would bring about peaceably and constitutionally the repeal of the Union; he would place Tipperary on a peaceful parade, and make it unsafe to refuse compliance with the people's wish. There should not be a single drop of blood shed. It would be worse than a crime, a wretched blunder, to be betrayed into violence. The fallacy of his reasoning lay in this, that so long as the peace was unbroken and the assembly could not be prosecuted as seditious, the law supposed no crime in those who concerted to collect it, to prevent the great council from exercising an independent voice, and to produce an unconstitutional terrorism in the minds of government. Had a number of persons combined to collect immense crowds round the two Houses of Parliament for the purpose of overawing their deliberations, the conspiracy would not have been denied; yet was the effect of "the million shout" at Tara, Longford, and Kilkenny, equally calculated to affect the strongest mind; and the guilt of those who concerted how best to collect the myriads at forty such meetings with the avowed object of checkmating the government by the show of physical might, equally clear. The scheme of his peaceful campaign was admirably sketched and adroitly executed by that veteran in agitation, who, perhaps more than any other, "wielded at will the fierce democracy." At the first meeting of the Loyal National Repeal Association, (stat magni nominis umbra, said the Chief Justice) on the 2nd of January, 1843, in the Corn Exchange, Dublin, the Cerberus of agitation, as Baron Smith described him, proclaimed that to be the Repeal Year; and extensive as the ridicule which accompanied the prophecy, were his profound arrangements for ensuring its fulfilment. Aided by the spirit-stirring songs and enthusiastic appeals of the Nation newspaper— "Be bold, united, firmly set, Nor flinch in word or tone; the rebel genius of Emmet or Wolf Tone might have brooded over and inspired the verse,-encouraged by large supplies from the sympathisers in America and France, and the steady increase of the weekly returns, now that people began to think their leader in earnest, and goaded on by Young Ireland, ardent, impulsive, eager for action, O'Connell commenced in March, at a meeting of the corporation (where a petition for dissolving the Union was agreed on), his system of agitation for Repeal. It was only by slow degrees, by hints and innuendoes, sensim sine sensu, that he revealed the concerted plan to compel the assembling of a parliament on College Green by such displays as should prevent the government from exercising a free will on the measure-by the circulating of inflammatory speeches and writings-by mottoes and devices exaggerating their woes, oppressions, and wrongs, admirably adapted to stir up to mutiny a proud and sensitive people- by procuring an affiliation of three million repealers, and collecting together at the command of one man any number of persons at one place from almost any distance; he wished to make it known to the least observant, that there would be danger of convulsion in refusing compliance with his behest. By preaching peace, where there was no peace at heart, by fostering bitter hatred to the people of England, The Saxon and stranger, whose accursed foot had polluted ir soil, by darkening the page of history with the battles, |