The ‘state trials’ of early modern England have long been known, and often cited, due to the prominence of the mighty 34-volume collection of trial proceedings compiled by William Cobbett, Thomas Bayly Howell, and Thomas Jones Howell under the title A Complete Collection of State Trials and published over the course of nearly two decades from 1809 to 1828. While these trials have found their way into the footnotes of many volumes of scholarship, there have been precious few extended studies of the concept of a ‘state trial’ as it came to be known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This book seeks to investigate that concept in greater detail.

When this project was conceived, the editors of this volume were independently engaged in studies of politically charged trials during the later Stuart period. We quickly realized that the concept of a ‘state trial’ was worth studying at length, and that the legal proceedings that came to be understood as state trials were diverse and complicated enough that it would take more than just two historians to tackle the subject properly. We have deliberately taken an expansive view of the state trials. Rather than focusing solely on the formal legal proceedings that constituted a trial, we have looked at these trials as part of a longer process that began well before the defendants were taken to court and continued well after the formal proceedings had concluded. As such, the case studies collected in this book contribute to a social and cultural history of the politics of law in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The book is divided into three sections. The chapters in the first, ‘What Were the State Trials?’, address the genealogy of the concept of state trials as well as the history of politically charged trials in a period when English men and women struggled to come to terms with the experience of the great regicidal revolution of 1649 and experienced another, soi disant ‘glorious’ revolution in 1688–89. The second section is devoted to the state trials of the Restoration, an era that struggled and ultimately failed to restore either a sense of political normalcy or a uniformly accepted rule of law.