Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/703

 19. ZANE: THE FIVE AGES 689 rule of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth shows many a cruel in- stance of judicial sycophancy. Yet it is a fact that both these rulers were always popular among the lawyers. Even to-day, on every state occasion at Gray's Inn, " the glorious, pious, and immortal memory " of Queen Elizabeth is toasted by the benchers, the barristers, and the students rising, three at a time, and taking up the toast in succession. Yet it was Henry VIII. who reduced to an infallible system the art of murder by the forms of law. The judges certified Anne Boleyn to be guilty of high treason, because she was reported to have said the king never had her heart. A jury found the Earl of Surrey guilty of high treason, because he quar- tered the arms of Edward the Confessor ; it is needless to say that Edward never had a coat of arms. The grey- haired, blameless Countess of Salisbury was executed, be- cause her son Reginald Pole had become a Roman cardinal. The king adopted the ingenious methods of Chinese justice, by which, if the offender is not available, his nearest relative suffers in his stead. The judges certified that Catherine Howard, Henry's fifth queen, was guilty of high treason, because she was not a virgin when she espoused the elderly and battered rake. Cromwell, Earl of Essex, committed high treason, because he had not warned Henry that Anne of Cleves, the king's fourth bride, was hideously ugly. Even torture was resorted to in criminal trials. Fox, in his Book of Martyrs (which is embellished by numberless falsehoods), says that Sir Thomas More tortured a pris- oner. Elizabeth ordered Campion the Jesuit to be put upon the rack; and Chief Justice Wray presided over the trial. Throgmorton was convicted on confessions obtained by threats of torture. The evidence, where any was taken, was often worthless hearsay. The trial of Sir Thomas More was a travesty on justice. But the conviction of Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, stamps the judges with infamy. In that trial it appeared that Bishop Fisher, mindful of the act of Parliament which made it high treason to dispute the king's headship of the Church, had steadily refused either to admit or deny the king's supremacy. At last the Attorney General, Richard Rich, who by the most degrading subservi-