“It is my book,” Elizabeth Cellier told the buyer. A moment later, she took care to add that she had never claimed to have written it. In the courtroom of the Old Bailey, the trial of September 1680 hinged upon this very distinction: to whom does a text belong, who procured its printing, and who answers for the sentences it contains? The pamphlet Malice Defeated bore her name upon its title page, copies passed directly through her hands, yet the prisoner denied that the King’s witnesses had established every link in the chain of its production.
This question did not emerge in a city where the printed word was a tranquil matter. For several years, rumors and tales of conspiracies against Charles II had coursed between the Court, the prisons, and the printshops of London. Accusations of treason intertwined with religious rancor. Cellier, a Catholic midwife, had visited prisoners and publicly stepped forward in defense of several among them. Her book recounted these endeavors, her subsequent imprisonment, and the events she advanced as proof of a relentless persecution. Its title promised to lay bare the “Mystery of the Meal-Tub Plot”—a turn of phrase evoking the murky political intrigues in which she had found herself ensnared.
In June, she had already stood at the bar indicted for high treason. The printed report dates that hearing to June 11, 1680, before the Court of King’s Bench. The cornerstone of the prosecution’s case was then Thomas Dangerfield, an informer and government witness in the machinations of the alleged plot. During the trial, his royal pardon fell under scrutiny. Cellier and her counsel maintained that its wording failed to cover certain past felonies. The Lord Chief Justice concluded that the general pardon did not reach the outlawry for felony evident upon the records produced in court. Dangerfield’s testimony was accordingly set aside.
The charge of treason could not stand. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty. The presiding judge nevertheless ordered that Dangerfield be brought back before the bar; failing a prompt return, he was committed into custody. Yet this acquittal did not quiet the passions that had preceded the trial. Rather, it furnished Cellier with an added motive to publish her own narrative and publicly challenge those whose testimony had nearly brought her to the scaffold.
In Malice Defeated, she recounted in particular the brutal treatment she claimed to have heard from the lips of Francis Corral, a coachman suspected of having aided in carrying away the body of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. Cellier reported that Corral had spoken to her of heavy irons, starvation, and beatings, and had described offers of large sums of money meant to suborn an accusation. She also set down her own observations and words overheard at Newgate concerning Miles Prance, another witness to the Plot. These were the assertions of her book, not settled facts established by the June verdict.
A printer named William Downing received the sheets. His deposition placed the transaction around the 22nd or 23rd of August: summoned by a messenger, he heard Cellier declare that she wished to put her case into print. She affirmed, so he testified, that the work contained nothing but the truth, and promised to hold him harmless from any trouble. He struck an agreement with her at a set price per ream. Downing struck off the first two-and-twenty sheets; part of the copy was then withdrawn from his shop, and the printing carried on elsewhere. He stated that Cellier corrected the proof-sheets herself. Another printer, Robert Stevens, swore that she spoke of the book as her own and that she dictated its contents to an amanuensis.
The account rendered by the purchaser, William Penny, was more succinct. Presenting himself at Cellier’s lodging, he asked for a copy. She sold him one for two shillings. When he inquired whether the book was indeed hers, she replied that it was, adding, according to his recollection, that she might well have put more into it. The Crown read into this response a full acknowledgment of her role as author and publisher. Cellier dissected the phrasing: an object might well be hers without her having composed its text. She denied that Penny had ever asked whether she was its author.
This nuance of language proved insufficient to repel the indictment. The court instructed the jury that liability took several paths: writing the book, procuring it to be printed, or publishing it. The sale of a single copy, the judge explained, could in law amount to publication, even were the jurors unconvinced that Cellier had penned every line. The defense was thus hemmed in by the overt acts that the witnesses claimed to have seen. The pamphlet had been sold, printers had been engaged, proofs had been revised; the dispute concerned the legal weight of these acts and the degree of responsibility they established.
The indictment recited extensive passages. It did not merely charge Cellier with narrating her confinement. The prosecution portrayed the treatise as an infamous libel against the Crown, the established Protestant religion, and public justice itself. It seized upon the accusations of torture brought against the keepers of Newgate and the imputations that Crown witnesses had received bribes or favors to swear falsely. The text struck with equal venom at the conduct of Thomas Dangerfield. Within the confines of these proceedings, the issue narrowed to whether the publication was a defamatory libel and whether the prisoner was answerable for its dissemination; the absolute truth of the scenes recounted was not submitted for a separate finding of fact.
The argument nonetheless lingered over the persons impugned by the book. Miles Prance took the stand to deny that he had ever been put to the torture, swearing he had been treated civilly while in custody. Fowler explained how Corral’s name had been drawn into the fray, stating that a coachman had spoken to him, following Godfrey’s death, concerning the carriage of a corpse. He swore that he had never entered Newgate in the company of any duke or lord, that no sword had ever been drawn upon Corral, and that no purse of five hundred pounds had been tendered. Corral did not testify in person at the September sessions. Certain depositions annexed to the pamphlet, taken before the Lord Mayor on September 6, attributed to him a more sweeping disavowal of the alleged cruelties and inducements. These belonged, however, to the printed appendix, not to the oral testimony delivered at the bar.
Corral’s wife provided a more circumscribed account. She testified that she had seen her husband in irons and noticed marks upon his legs, yet she could not corroborate the scenes of torture set down by Cellier. Nor could she recall all the conversations her husband was said to have recounted afterward. Her words did not elevate the pamphlet’s claims to proven facts; yet they prevented the affair from dissolving into a mere collision of flat contradictions. Between the voices of the witnesses, the notable absences, and the frailties of memory, the evidence remained uneven and incomplete.
Cellier prayed that her own witnesses might be called. She named several persons whom she claimed to have sent for, only to concede that they were not in attendance. The judge asked what their testimony could establish. She answered that they would have aided her defense, but that she had been denied the time needed to prepare her cause. Her counsel offered no substantive plea. The presiding magistrate then reminded the jury that their inquiry was narrow: had the allegations of the indictment—writing, printing, or publishing the book—been proved to their satisfaction?
The trial was even marked by a procedural irregularity. The jurors declared that they had failed to hear part of the proceedings. The court inquired how much they had followed; they replied that they had heard the first three witnesses, who spoke to the printing and the sale. For the remainder, the record consists primarily of the comparison between the passages in Malice Defeated and those set out in the indictment. The jury withdrew for a brief space. Upon their return, their verdict was pronounced: guilty. The contemporary pamphlet notes that a great shout arose in the hall.
Cellier begged leave to speak. She pleaded that she had acted out of ignorance, prayed that no other persons might suffer on her account, and invoked the steadfast loyalty of her parents and kin. Judgment was not rendered that day. On Monday, September 13, the Recorder pronounced sentence: a fine of one thousand pounds, imprisonment until it should be paid, three appearances in the pillory at three public places, the requirement to furnish sureties for her good behavior for the remainder of her life, and the burning of several copies of her book by the common hangman at each exposure. The printed record attests the sentence; it does not, of itself, establish that every measure was subsequently carried into execution.
The two trials had thus run entirely different courses. In June, the charge of treason had collapsed with the disqualification of the chief witness. In September, the jury convicted her of the publication of the pamphlet. This second verdict did not determine whether the cruelties alleged in Newgate had indeed occurred, nor whether every charge Cellier brought against the King’s witnesses was true. It decided another question altogether: the legal liability for a text sent into the world under her name.
The book possessed an author proclaimed upon its title page, a printer of its sheets, eager buyers, sworn depositions disputing its narratives, and magistrates who adjudged its words to be libelous. Cellier had sought to make her voice heard; the court transformed the sale and the printing into evidence sufficient to condemn her. Between the voice she claimed as her own and that which the court imputed to her, there remained the enduring question of who truly owns a book when it is made into an instrument of accusation.