At Maidstone, the trial of James O’Coigley occupied two full days. On the 21st of May, 1798, the indictment was read before the court and subsequently expounded by Mr. Knapp. It distributed the charges across three distinct compassings of high treason and seven overt acts: compassing the death of the King, adhering to the King’s enemies, and inviting the rulers of France to invade Great Britain. Among the overt acts assigned were the transmission of intelligence to the foe, measures taken to hire vessels, and an attempt to quit the realm. Thus, ere the prisoner had uttered a single word, the proceedings presented the journey, the missive, and the politics as indivisible parts of one selfsame design.
In the 1887 edition consulted, Camden Pelham’s retrospective collection asserts that a substantial body of testimony was adduced in support of these counts. Yet it thrusts into the forefront a solitary object: the pocketbook discovered within O’Coigley’s greatcoat, which enclosed a letter addressed to the Executive Directory of France. Pelham styles this exhibit conclusive proof. The narrative does not here rehearse the depositions in their entirety; it records merely that the pocketbook had been found in an article of raiment, and that the letter appeared to furnish material form to the nexus which the Crown sought to establish between the prisoner and France.
When called upon for his defence, O’Coigley made no pretence of demonstrating an unprovable absence. “It is impossible for me to prove a negative,” he observed in substance, before proceeding to deny that he had ever borne any message or paper to France. He maintained that the letter was not his own, and likewise disclaimed every connection with the political societies mentioned in the instrument. Thereupon he committed his life to the verdict of the jury, trusting they would act according to their conscience, their country, and their God. Such a plea did not annihilate the material exhibit; it challenged its origin and its import, praying that the doubt might be resolved by those who heard it. This exhibit, which Pelham terms conclusive, is not transcribed at full length in the passage. The compilation specifies neither the complete circumstances of its discovery nor the detailed answers returned by the defence to the testimonies marshalled over those two days. One may trace how the collection constructs the proof; one cannot reconstitute the trial from this excerpt alone.
After deliberating for roughly half an hour, the jury returned a verdict of guilty. Mr. Justice Buller thereupon delivered a written allocution, which Pelham transcribes at considerable length. He characterised treason as the most heinous of crimes, reproaching the condemned man with having sought to invite a foreign enemy into the realm. His discourse reached far beyond the examination of the pocketbook: it set the British constitution in stark opposition to the regimes born of the French Revolution, depicting the conquests of France in Holland, Italy, and Switzerland as an admonition of the fate awaiting England. This portion of the narrative belongs to the judge’s own utterance as preserved by Pelham; it betrays the moral and political weight imparted to the verdict. Buller invoked Montesquieu as well, attributing to him the maxim that a conquest achieved by a democratic nation might leave less freedom in its wake than that of a monarchy. He cited the territories subjugated by France to give his warning an immediate urgency. Thence he shifted the ground to religion, expressing apprehension lest infidelity had extinguished in the prisoner all dread of a future judgment. These reflections are not findings returned by the jury: they belong to the magistrate’s address subsequent to the verdict. The chronicle preserves them as a second trial—a moral one—pronounced above the statutory sentence.
The judgment was that reserved for high treason: to be drawn from the gaol to the place of execution, there hanged by the neck but not until dead, and thereafter mutilated according to the capital penalty then decreed for such a crime. Pelham relates that O’Coigley heard his doom without perceptible perturbation. On the eve of his execution, he received the intelligence with no visible emotion, according to the same authority. One sole anxiety lingered, he remarked: he dreaded lest he be falsely represented after his death. He desired to be reported with fidelity. The sentiment assumes a singular resonance in a cause wherein the Crown, the defence, and the judicial address were to contest not merely the past deed, but the memory thereof.
On Thursday, the 7th of June, at a quarter past eleven, he departed the gaol. He was attired in black; his hair was cropped and powdered, his collar unfastened, without a cravat. His arms were pinioned behind him, and the halter of execution lay across his shoulders. An escort of the Kent Volunteers attended the hurdle unto Pennenden Heath. Throughout the passage, he read from a book of devotion, a circumstance which the chronicle has preserved with its customary precision. Upon their arrival, the military formed a hollow square. O’Coigley stood up in the cart and recited two prayers, the one being in the Latin tongue.
He had brought with him an orange and a penknife. His hands being bound, he could not sever the fruit; he made a sign to a friend to perform the office for him. Pelham thereupon attributes to him an observation regarding the mistrust of the authorities: a rumour had obtained currency that they refused him the use of a penknife lest he cut his own throat. The knife he handed to his friend gave the lie to this report; he protested that he would not rob himself of the glory of dying after this manner. The retort joins the most ordinary detail of his departure—a few morsels of fruit—to the extraordinary punishment that awaited him. He desired his friend to keep the penknife in remembrance of him, and thereupon finished the orange.
His devotions ended, a clergyman administered absolution. O’Coigley ascended the scaffold, bowed to the gaoler, and thanked him for the civilities shown him whilst in custody. When placed beneath the gallows, he delivered a final declaration. He once more denied ever having borne any letter or message to France, and denied having frequented any political society in Great Britain. He then affirmed that his life was unjustly taken away by false testimony, some arising from misapprehension, and some, he believed, from deliberate design. He asked forgiveness for his enemies and prayed that men would distinguish his private errors from the charge for which he suffered. The force of this declaration lies in its refusing to rest upon a bare denial: it asserts a claim to govern the narrative that should outlive the man.
A white cap was drawn over his countenance. He dropped his handkerchief; the board fell. Pelham records that he hung suspended for twelve or thirteen minutes. Having been cut down, a surgeon severed the head from the trunk; the executioner exhibited the head to the assembled multitude, proclaiming it to be the head of a traitor. The remains were deposited within a coffin and interred at the foot of the gallows. The body fulfilled the judicial ceremonial; the dying words, however, persisted in challenging what the ritual purported to render manifest.
It were easy to reduce this cause to a discovered missive or to a condemned man professing his innocence. Pelham’s account permits no such facility. It delivers the verdict and records the judge’s affirmation that the evidence had established the crime; it preserves likewise O’Coigley’s reiterated denials and his imputation of perjury. Deprived of the complete depositions and the instrument itself, the reader cannot re-try the cause from this compilation alone. Yet he may follow the conflict between an exhibit which the prosecution held decisive and a man who, unto the very scaffold, denied having written it. By the time the handkerchief fell, the tribunal had pronounced its judgment; the question of historical memory remained unresolved.