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The Constitution’s Deep Roots
the world have learned the lessons of history as well as the Americans. Invoking so-called ‘‘emergency powers’’ has been a favorite executive device for seizing ‘‘temporary’’—and then permanent—dictatorial control
of government in modern democracies, and to this day there are foreign
constitutions which confer this dangerous power on the chief executive.
Algernon Sidney, beheaded on a London scaffold in 1683 for the crime
of treason, left a different mark on the American mind. Falsely accused of
participating in a plot to murder the King, he was arrested and brought to
trial by his political opponents before the infamous Chief Justice George
Jeffreys, whose cruelty and misconduct on the bench were a disgrace to
the English judiciary. Throughout much of the seventeenth century, the
courts of England were subjected to political manipulation and control.
The Stuart kings had begun the policy of removing judges who disagreed
with them, but the Puritans under Cromwell went further by filling the
bench with subservient judges, Jeffreys being the worst of the lot.
The Puritans treated Magna Charta, parliamentary government, and
the rule of law with contempt, acting in a far more arbitrary fashion than
any English king had ever dared to attempt. In the trial of Sidney, principles of due process and established rules of criminal procedure were
deliberately violated by the court. The indictment charging Sidney with
treason was issued without a grand jury proceeding. He was refused a
copy of the indictment. The jury was handpicked to exclude jurors who
might declare him innocent. Perjured testimony and hearsay (secondhand) evidence were introduced against him. Sidney had committed no
overt act against Charles II, but the court devised a farfetched interpretation of the treason statute to gain a conviction. An unpublished manuscript found among Sidney’s personal papers was then produced in court
as proof of his treasonous behavior. This was the Discourses Concerning
Government, a treatise on liberty which praised limited and ‘‘mixed’’ government, denied the divine right of kings, and asserted that ‘‘power is
originally in the people’’ and that ‘‘the king is subject to the law of God.’’
These and similar non-treasonous statements were interpreted by the
court as proof that Sidney was involved in a plot against the King’s life,
and he was convicted on that fraudulent basis.
The Discourses were later published in 1698 and again in 1763 and
1772. The work was hailed in America by Jefferson and other colonial