The term state trial refers to legal proceedings before the law courts or in parliament that were linked to political issues such as treason, charges of political corruption, or general maladministration. In itself the term is slightly vague, as it was coined initially by a number of editors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who collected various material of cases that they considered state trials in one way or another, often making choices in their selection that could be quite arbitrary. It remains a fact, though, that particularly from the 1620s to the early eighteenth century, legal proceedings were used with impressive frequency to attack political opponents or whip up public sentiments against policies and political factions which one disliked or hated.

The 1620s saw impeachments against prominent ministers of the Crown, including the royal favorite, Buckingham, while the conflicts of the 1640s led to the execution of the Earl of Strafford, Archbishop Laud, and finally the king himself in January 1649. But it was the Restoration period that was marked by particularly frequent state trials. Not only were the surviving regicides tried and executed after 1660, but the Whigs later orchestrated proceedings in law courts as great media events designed to undermine their opponents. Some of these trials were not much different from straightforward judicial murders, such as the trial and subsequent execution in 1681 of Oliver Plunket, Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, a case analyzed in this collection by John Marshall.

During the last years of Charles II's reign the Tories took their turn in destroying their enemies, with the help of the law courts and loyal judges such as the infamous George Jeffries. Getting rid of political enemies was an important objective in itself, but these widely publicized trials could also be used to tar political opponents with the brush of treason and conspiracy. As Newton Key demonstrates in his chapter on “Constructing Conspiracy: Reporting the Rye House Trials,” the records of such proceedings provided a lot of ammunition in the battle between Whigs and Tories in the 1680s. After 1688 the nature of state trials changed to a certain extent. Defendants were allowed legal counsel even when charged with treason, and the judges, now appointed for life and not easily dismissed for having the wrong political attitude, were less partisan than in the past. Paradoxically, it might be argued that their greater objectivity made legal proceedings against alleged traitors and conspirators more effective as a demonstration of state power, as they could now be seen as proof that the king or queen was ruling “according to the law rather than subverting it” (37), as Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor emphasize in their chapter on “State Trials and the Rule of Law.”

Nevertheless, after 1688 the Whigs tried to take judicial revenge on the Tories, who had been in ascendancy since 1681. However, William III intervened and made sure that very little came of such plans (Mark Goldie, “Revolutionary Justice and Whig Retribution in 1689”). Some Whigs—the less pragmatic country Whigs—never forgave him; for them, the new order created by the Glorious Revolution would have required an exemplary punishment of all politicians who had supported the Stuart monarchy between 1681 and 1688, although that might have raised awkward questions about the Whigs who had initially cooperated with James II. But legal proceedings could also be used to sort out rules and norms for the behavior of officeholders. Charges of corruption figured prominently in many state trials, but mostly, as Mark Knights states, “the conviction of an individual seemed to excuse the need to examine the wider problems of which those individuals were simply a series of representatives” (66). In the last resort, the line dividing mere gratuities and legitimate gifts from downright bribes remained blurred at least until the end of the eighteenth century. Overall, this collection of essays edited by Brian Cowan and Scott Sowerby offers a nuanced and rich insight into an important aspect of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English political culture.