The National Register.
London, England, 1820-09-25 00:00:00

No. 1,270.—V0t. XIII.]

THE QUEEN.
Tan suspension of the proceedings against the
• Queen has not suspended the interest taken in the
event of them, and the popularity of her Majesty
has caused the Ministerial wrkeiste place .in requi-
lion all the arts of abuse and misrepresentation—
they say " the Queen demanded a trial, and she has
a trial"-true, bet the Queen demanded not simply
a trial, but a fair trial ; and how is it possible, where
a part of the jury in both houses are the really
responsible prosecutors, and where a vast propor-
tion of other jurors are either dependent upon, or
intimately connected, by private or political obliga-
tions,'with that part aforesaid, that such a jury can
be free from bias? and do her enemies dare to deny
that such is the situation of the parliamentary jurors?
If they do,we leave them to the contempt they merit;
. if they do not, they must, if they vindicate such a
jury, admit that circumstances necessarily calculated
to produce a particular bias, may exist in a jury
with all propriety. In the next place, if the reason-
ing of the Queen's opponents is worth anything, it
must contend, in effect, that a state-necessity at all
events exists, so as to make it necessary to adopt the
mode of trial by bill, though liable to such uljection
just stated.
We then ask, who is to judge of this necessity ?
The very ministers who, by imprudently making
themselves a party to the Milan commission of in-
quiry, made it certainly very awkward for them to
acknowledge the Queen as Queen Consort! But
though it might be awkward for them, they might
have resigned if they still thought further steps
inexpedient; or, if they really thought, as others
think, that the evidence was of a nature not fit to
ground a prosecution upon, even if the charges be
on the whole as true, as there are just grounds of
suspicion that they are wholly false, the ministers
might have told the King so, point blank, and left
the King to turn them out if he thought proper.--
And in considering the question of state-nem:4 it
must be asked, Is this state-necessity for " the good
of the people?" for unless it centre in this, it is
nonsense : and is it for the good of the people
that a precedent should be established of a sort of
evidence upon which to ground an extraordinary
judicial proceeding, composed almost wholly of thou
people whO have been domestics, or labourers in
employment under the party accused, and who ap-
pear to have been purposely made spies of her
actions, and who have received at least handsome
remunerations for their trouble in coining to Eng-
land? Is it for the good of the people that a
heap of filthy and immoral evidence should be laid
before the public against a Queen, tinder circum-
stances in which no other individual but a powerful
King could judicially have his wife visited, and thus
afford ground for surmise of malice in a quarter
where such vice ought, above other breasts, never to
exist? Is it fur the good of the public that impru-
dent or even criminal conduct,three years back,should
be made the foundation of a law to punish what
before was no legal offence, and establish a precedent
which absolutely subverts a governn.ent of known
law, and leaves it in the power of an administration
in future to weild a similar extrJortlinary po‘t er
against any one who may be particularly obnoxious
to them!
The rule of public good would, itmon the plea
of state necessity, much more justify Lord J. Rus-
sell in recommendieg that government at all events