At Dean Park, near Kilmarnock, the wind and driving hail made speech difficult to discern. On the 7th of December 1816, a witness estimated at four thousand the number of persons gathered to deliberate upon a petition for parliamentary reform. Alexander M’Laren, a weaver, was the first to speak. That brief address, delivered amidst the tumult of foul weather, was destined to become the most contested piece of evidence in a trial for sedition.
The assembly had not been improvised that morning. Inhabitants of Kilmarnock had formed a committee to prepare a public meeting and consider how best to make their grievances heard. Witnesses described a manufacturing population hard pressed by the dearth of employment. A muslin agent, called to depose upon the rate of wages, estimated that an industrious weaver could then earn no more than a few shillings a week, and that at the price of long days. The men of the committee wished to lay petitions before the Prince Regent and both Houses of Parliament; several witnesses affirmed that the meeting had been convened for that sole purpose.
M’Laren was not, according to the witnesses for the defense, a practiced orator. He had been asked to open the proceedings only after others had declined. He hesitated still shortly before the outset and, according to a member of the committee, retired briefly to a public house to note down a few observations. The rain, wind, and hail impeded hearing. Witnesses caught varying fragments. Andrew Finnie recalled an exhortation to lay their petitions at the foot of the throne, before the Prince Regent, whose benevolence, the passage ran, ought to incline him to hear the voice of his people. He remembered next a phrase linking a refusal to listen with the allegiance of the subjects, yet he wavered between the “cries” and the “voice” of the people. William Merrie, likewise, remembered the close—“to hell with” or “for allegiance”—without being able to reconstruct the rest with any precision.
The phrase took on another life at the trial. The printed account of the meeting offered a version both fuller and more explicit: should the Prince turn aside from the petition, he would forfeit the allegiance of his subjects. The sequel—“to hell with our allegiance,” the rendering of the reported words—was alleged to have been spoken aloud, yet it found no place in the printed text: the copy produced at the trial exhibited a blank space at that point. Thomas Murray, a journeyman in the printing-office of Hugh Crawford, testified that the original manuscript had been destroyed after the setting of the type, and recalled a passage scored out, rewritten, and interlined; being unable to decipher it, he said he had left the space blank. When the exclamation fell under discussion, the defense objected that the word nowhere appeared in the publication. The surviving pamphlet thus afforded no means of comparing the disputed words with their original state.
The committee had debated the expediency of printing the speeches and resolutions. M’Laren, it was said, would have preferred that his address remain unpublished; Thomas Baird, a grocer and committee member, likewise objected to the passage concerning allegiance, which he deemed improper. Yet these objections did not arrest the design. Baird acknowledged having taken a hand in superintending the printing, having corrected grammatical errors, and having received a parcel of the pamphlets at his shop. He sold them at fourpence a copy. The printer estimated that some four hundred copies had been struck off, though he could not say how many Baird had taken.
During the committee’s discussions, the question of the passage shifted once more. James Samson stated that he had attended a meeting at which M’Laren’s manuscript was examined. According to him, Baird added words in pencil intended to complete the account of the assembly. M’Laren was present, yet Samson reported no objection on his part. Other witnesses maintained that Baird had condemned the phrase and desired its omission. The trial record does not entirely reconcile this contradiction: the man who had opposed the printing of a passage was also said, by Samson, to have helped insert it into the manuscript delivered to the printer.
The indictment did not confine itself to that single sentence. It charged M’Laren with delivering a speech calculated to degrade the Government and the Legislature, and Baird with publishing a tract that also contained speeches and resolutions from the assembly. The Crown presented these pages as a seditious whole. It contended that the animadversions on the House of Commons, the calls for reform, and the image of an allegiance that might be cast off tended to excite discontent against the established order. The defense answered that the inhabitants had met to prepare a petition; they possessed the right to represent their grievances, to discuss the measures they desired, and to address their requests to the proper authorities.
At the bar, the contest turned as much upon meaning as upon proof. Finnie maintained that he had heard the concluding phrase, yet the conditions for hearing had been adverse, and the precise words wavered in his recollection. M’Laren had admitted to delivering a speech and handing over a manuscript for publication; he had nevertheless declared that the printed account was merely “near” what he had spoken, and he contested the drafting of the passage on allegiance. He acknowledged, too, having written certain paragraphs of the address while maintaining he had not delivered them at the meeting. Baird, for his part, had not addressed the crowd, yet his role in preparing and selling the pamphlet was established by several witnesses and by his own declaration.
Counsel for the defense insisted upon the distinction between petitioning for reform and inciting to violence. They cited the petitions actually transmitted to the Regent and to Parliament, the peaceful conduct of the gathering, the general character of the two men, and the absence of any disturbance in Kilmarnock following the meeting. Their argument was not that every sentence in the tract was temperate: they conceded the coarse tone of certain passages, but contended that rude language was insufficient to establish seditious intent. The prosecution, on the other hand, read the passages as a connected whole, maintaining that the censure of the Commons and the conditional threat against allegiance went far beyond the bounds of petitioning.
The running heading bears the dates of the 5th to the 7th of March 1817. For the verdict, the volume gives a subheading of the 7th of April, while the verdict of the assize is dated the 6th; counsel for the defense, Mr. Jeffrey, remarked that this day fell upon a Sunday. At the close of the proceedings, the jury found M’Laren guilty by a majority of voices, and Baird guilty unanimously. The jurors recommended both men to the clemency of the court on account of their previous good character.
The court sentenced them to six months’ imprisonment in the Canongate Tolbooth at Edinburgh, and thereafter to find caution for their good behavior during a period of three years. The written interlocutor fixed the caution at two hundred pounds for Baird and forty pounds for M’Laren. One judge had proposed three hundred pounds from the bench for Baird, before the final judgment settled upon two hundred. The variance is not indifferent: the record preserves both the oral deliberation of the judges and the sum that was ultimately decreed.
The gathering at Dean Park had begun with a design to petition; in the printed book, it concluded with the conviction of two men for sedition. Between those two events lay a destroyed manuscript, a phrase reported amidst a storm of hail, contested corrections, and a pamphlet sold over the counter of a grocery shop. The verdict determines guilt as the law defined it. Yet it does not transmute every recollection into certainty, nor every printed word into an indisputable utterance. In this cause, the paper is at once the subject of the trial and the missing piece—the original draft—whose absence forbids the controversy from ever being wholly closed.