FAMOUS TRIALS

Evening Star, Issue 19409, 18 November 1926, Page 1

FAMOUS TRIALS

LORD BIRKENHEAD'S BOOK A famou sergeant at law of the seventeenth century used to say. that he knew no better travelling companion on assize than a good stoat blajk-lotter volume of our medieval law reports. To-day ther; are probably not more than half a dozen lawyers in England who could even read then NormanFrench dialects (writes Professor J. EL Morgan, in reviewing the Rt. Hon. Lord Birkenhead’s recent book, ‘Famous Trials of Histoi ■ ’). But when it comes to those reports of a later date known as the “ State Trials,” then, indeed, no traveller, even though ho know nothing of law, will find ms jouriiey too long if he has one of thoss poignant volumes to beguile it. They are the very stuff of which tragedy is made. They are richer in “ plot ” than the most ingenious novel, more dramatic, in climax than any play, and the duel between judge and prisoner at the bar is often as dazzling as a clash of swords. And, more often than not, the last scene or these strange, eventful histories is laid at Tyburn. For in those days, as Stephen has somewhere remarked, it was by no means a presumption of law that a man was innocent until he was proved to he guilty. With a servile Bench, a jury either timid or intimidated, without the aid of counsed or even a copy of the indictment, the prisoner entered the dock with an invisible halter round his neck, and the narrative of the trial is “ breathless ” in more senses than one—the reader seems to divine in each stage of it a gradual tightening of the nooso round the unhappy prisoner’s n6C ’ DRAMAS OF THE LAW. Many writers with an eye for drama have quarried in those volumes. Many an author has, to quote Augustine Birrell’s happy phrase “ lived like a gentleman ’’ upon the State Trials. But Lord Birkenhead’s fascinating book puts all such literary paraphrases on the shelfThe explanation is simple; no lawyer of his eminence hits ever yet essayed the task ot sifting the wheat from the chaff in those famous volumes, and it requires an unerring legal instinct like Ills own to divine what is significant in the long verbatim reports and what is not, to weigh the evidence for or against the almost inevitable convictions, :..td to arraign all the actors in theye < (trailing dramas at tho bar ot history. Very notably in this the case in his chapters on tht murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey and the trial of Eugene Aram. Tho result i-> that many of these chapters read like a tale of De Maupassant. Th nook; however, is by no means confined to the “ State Trials.” It contains ten chapters dealing with cases, of more or less moment, in which Lord Birkenhead has liimself held a brief r-nota lily that sombre story of the sea, the ‘‘ Veronica murders,” the story of Ethel 1c Neve, the friend of. the notorious Crippen, aid, in particular! tlie trial of Roger Casement. THE IRISH BRIGADE. '

The. trial of Roger Casement was ono of tiie great treason trials of history, weighty in law and dramatic in quality. Two great lawyers, both destined to ocupy the Woolsack —Lord Birkenhead and " Lord Cave—appeared for 'the Crown; another illustrious laywer, Lord Reading, presided as Chief Justice, with two puisne judges; and a setrongßench of seven judges sat to hear the appeal. Lord Birkenhead’s chapter on the trial is a model of discretion, and his tribute to counsel for' the defence is characteristically generous. The ful' story of the Casement ad; venture has never been told, the trial was fair, the conviction just, the end inevitable; but soni- of the more dramatic features have never been made public, ir particular the extraordinary adventures of the “ Irish . Brigade ” whom he recruited in Germany. I will not attempt to tell that story hero, but it may interest the public to know that, the “Irish Brigade” ; 'ed their fond Go •wan hosts a devil of a life, cheering British victories and singing 1 God Save the King ’ in the Unter den Linden. Such was the element of catastrophic laughter present, as in many anothei tragedy, in the tragic story ot Roger Casement. To quote fr m this book is a temptation, but exigencies of space and time make q rotation impossible. The reader must turn to the book, itself, beginning, by preference, with the amazing story of ‘ The Wardens di the Fleet.., That the same mind which has given lawyers a masterly volume of judgments from the Woolsack on Iho doctrine of “superstitious uses” and the mysteries of “contributory negligence” should, with such effortless ease, now present tire holiday-making public with a volume that roads like a romance, is yet another example of Lord Birkenhead’s astonish! ig versatility-