Quaker Socialists at Three Demonstrations for Jury Rights and Free Speech

by Graham Taylor

In 1670 persecution of Quakers by the Puritan government was in full flood. Meeting Houses were being closed, or totally destroyed, and Quakers imprisoned. Yet Quakers did not falter but insisted on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly . Unlike most at the time, they not only insisted on free speech for Protestant sects but asked that Catholics , Jews and Muslims be allowed freedom of speech as well. Their reward after the Revolution of 1688 was the Toleration Act which, although it granted freedoms only to Protestants, nonetheless is still one of the foundation-stones for the civil liberties we enjoy today.

The persecution was severe. In August of that year soldiers closed down their Meeting House in Gracechurch St, in the City of London, but Quakers pursued their customary tactic of meeting and speaking as close as possible to the building where they are forbidden to speak. This tactic is still practised even today. The organisers in 1670 were William Penn and William Mead, both leading Quakers, and after they refused to end the meeting they called in the street outside, they were arrested and charged with unlawful assembly. Presiding at their trial in September was Samuel Starling, the Lord Mayor of London, acting in his role of Sheriff. The trial showed that Starling was no fan of free speech and no fan of Quakers.

There was conflict at the trial from the beginning but at first it was rather comic . Starling knew that one well-known aspect of Quaker egalitarianism was that they refused to remove their hats to their ‘social superiors’. When they did that, he had planned to fine them for contempt of court, but to his evident annoyance Penn and Mead appeared before him without their hats. He had to order court officers to put their hats back onto their heads, so they would then refuse to remove them in his presence when he asked them to, so he could then fine them for contempt.

That was the last light moment in the trial. Starling then, very unwisely, took on William Penn in a battle of wits. Penn had enquired under which law they were charged and Starling declined to make any answer but merely said it was “common law”. Penn then asked which specific part of common law he meant because if he was using an interpretation of common law that ruled out freedom of speech and assembly, this was a threat to “the rights and privileges of every Englishman”. When Starling tried to brush him off, perhaps unsure himself of the answer, Penn then revealed to the court his line of defence in the now famous sentence: “The question is not whether I am guilty of this indictment, but whether this indictment be legal.”

On hearing this, Starling ordered Penn removed from the dock and returned to the ‘bail-dock’, a cage where prisoners sat waiting to be called. But William Mead was up next, and he found Mead pursued the same line as Penn, this time citing learnedly the Institutes of Edward Coke, regarded in the 17th century as England’s leading legal authority. Mead too was sent to the cage.

Starling then proceeded to the conviction and imprisonment of Penn and Mead by instructing the jury on the obvious guilt of the defendants. However, to his astonishment it appears, he found the jury no more compliant than Penn. They refused repeatedly to obey the instructions given. The jurors found a spokesperson for their principled stand in one of their number, Edward Bushel. Eventually, in exasperation, Starling had the jury locked up without food and water until they produced the verdict he wanted. The Court Recorder, John Howel, told the jury: “you shall not be dismist, till we have a verdict that the court will accept; and you shall be lock’d up, without meat, drink, fire, and tobacco: You shall not think thus to abuse the court; we will have a verdict by the help of God, or you shall starve for it.”

Penn appealed to the jury to remain strong, and they did, and history was made when they endured the punishment for two days and still remained defiant. Starling fined them, as well as sending Penn and Mead back to jail for contempt of court, but he had gone too far. Later, in the face of extreme disquiet amongst members of the establishment who themselves might need the help of a jury one day, the Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, John Vaughan, made the historic ruling that in future a jury could not be punished for any judgements they chose to make.

The modern reader should not be too contemptuous of Sheriff Starling, as if they would have acted differently if they had been alive at that time. For a start, there are cases similar to the Penn-Mead case taking place today and usually only a few individuals protest. Secondly, there were historical circumstances constraining Starling, Howel and the Puritan government. The courts at that time had no presumption of innocence, no exclusion of hearsay evidence, and no burden of proof on the prosecution. From Starling’s point of view he was trying to keep order in the City of London (there were no police in those days) and here was a bunch of trouble-makers (Quakers) clearly guilty of what today would be called a breach of the peace. The jury surely must have heard of the Quakers’ appalling reputation, Starling would have thought: Quakers were extreme egalitarians, refusing to address their superiors by ‘you’; refusing to take off their hats to clergy, judges and other eminent people; refusing to pay taxes for the upkeep of the state Church; and refusing to swear oaths just because their social superiors did not have to swear oaths. Starling must have felt it very unlikely, in the City of London, that the solid citizens who sat on juries, reliant for their livelihoods on law and order, would countenance in their own City such unruly behaviour.

The recent cases today with a similarity to the Penn-Mead case were those of climate activists not allowed by judges to communicate to a jury the motives for their protests. This meant the actions of which they were accused looked to the jury like random criminal damage. In addition, there has also been a general trend in recent years towards an erosion of the right to a fair trial by jury. That was the reason for the ‘re-enactment’ demos by Quakers and others in London last weekend and why there is a National Week of Action called by the campaign, ‘Defend Our Juries’, for April 13-21. The aim is that every court in the country will be picketed. These tactics try to draw public attention to the undermining of juries but it is doubtful whether any other protest will be as colourful as the ‘fancy-dress’ re-enactment last Sunday. About 70 protesters, some in traditional Quaker dress, sat around the Monument at London Bridge in an impressive Quaker silence before they marched to the site in Gracechurch St close to where the trial of 1670 took place, and then moved on to a third demo outside the Ministry of Justice in Petty France.

An article by Rebecca Hardy in the Friend, the weekly Quaker magazine, written before the event, described the dramatic ‘re-enactment demo’ in this way: “The London event at Gracechurch Street is in support of the Defend our Juries campaign, which was sparked by a wave of restrictions in climate activist court cases. These prevented defendants from mentioning climate change in front of a jury, sometimes resulting in imprisonment. The re-enactment will depict the trial of William Penn and William Mead, which became a legal precedent for the rights of juries. Quaker Phil Laurie, one of the organisers of the event, told the Friend: It’s basically to alert Quakers to the fact that one of the great gifts of Quaker activism in the early days was the jury system – and it’s under threat. Quakers need to wake up to this and defend it. A jury was threatened with prison last month if they acquitted someone according to their conscience. We’re reminding people that this was hard won by the sacrifice of Quakers in the 1670s…”

There were several Quaker Socialists among the demonstrators last Sunday who went to all three protests. Starting from the impressive Quaker silence at the Monument, they proceeded to the re-enactment in Gracechurch St, then to the demonstration outside the Ministry of Justice, before finally arriving, weary but happy, at the Westminster Quaker Meeting House in St Martin’s Lane, where they were greeted by warm hospitality and hot soup. Trudi Warner, a climate activist, then gave a filmed account of why she was at the Penn-Mead demo. She herself was one of those soon to be on trial, and she told the camera that the case, and the subsequent ruling, “had established the really important legal principle about jurors being able to give a verdict according to their conscience”. That victory she pointed out – now commemorated on a plaque in the Old Bailey – was all due to some persecuted Quakers who 354 years ago “held a protest meeting in the street”.

Graham Taylor 2024.04.13