“Resolved by the majority that the Bill of Attainder against the Earl of Strafford should pass as a law.” Thus, on May 7, 1641, the House of Lords enacted that Thomas, Earl of Strafford, should “undergo the pains and forfeitures of high treason by law.”The passage of the Bill of Attainder against Strafford has subsequently engendered one of the perennial controversies of English political and legal history. On one side of the issue, it is claimed that the answer of the judges and the decision of the Lords were warranted by generally-accepted doctrines of law and constitutional theory. The other side claims that the charges against Strafford had no basis in statute or common law, that the abandonment of the impeachment proves the weakness of the case against the accused, and that in going by way of the Bill, the Commons “slaughtered a man they could not convict.”Resolution of the controversy over Strafford's case has been hampered by a lack of historical data because at the restoration Charles II ordered all proceedings of the trial to be stricken from the Journals of the House of Lords. The Journal Manuscripts were rendered almost totally unreadable and, as a result, the official record of the trial has been missing for over three hundred years. Until recently, Rushworth has been the main source for histories of the Strafford trial. However, the usefulness of Rushworth has been marred by many lapses and errors, the most significant being that he was absent for several days at the climax of the trial. Consequently, the conclusion of the trial, the proceedings of which would help to resolve the legal controversy, has been reconstructed from fragmentary sources.
Shaftesbury, Locke, and Their Revolutionary Letter? [Corrigendum]