Note 701 — Chapter XLVI · CONSTITUTIONAL AND JUDICIAL CHANGES AT ATHENS UNDER PERIKLES.

Mr. Jardine, in his interesting and valuable publication, Criminal Trials, vol. i, p. 115, after giving an account of the trial of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton in 1553, for high treason, and his acquittal, observes: “There is one circumstance in this trial, which ought not to be passed over without an observation. It appears that after the trial was over, the jury were required to give recognizances to answer for their verdict, and were afterwards imprisoned for nearly eight months, and heavily fined, by a sentence of the Star-chamber. Such was the security which the trial by jury afforded to the subject in those times: and such were the perils to which juries were then exposed, who ventured to act upon their conscientious opinions in state prosecutions! But even these proceedings against the jury, monstrous as they appear to our improved notions of the administration of justice, must not be considered as a wanton exercise of unlawful power on this particular occasion. The fact is, that the judges of England had for centuries before exercised a similar authority, though not without some murmuring against it; and it was not until more than a century after it, in the reign of Charles the Second, that a solemn decision was pronounced against its legality.”

... “In the reign of James the First, it was held by the Lord Chancellor Egerton, together with the two Chief Justices and the Chief Baron, that when a party indicted is found guilty on the trial, the jury shall not be questioned; but on the other side, when a jury hath acquitted a felon or a traitor against manifest proof, they may be charged in the Star-chamber for their partiality in finding a manifest offender not guilty. After the abolition of the Star-chamber, there were several instances in the reign of Charles the Second, in which it was resolved, that both grand and petit juries might be fined for giving verdicts against plain evidence and the directions of the court.” Compare Mr. Amos’s Notes on Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliæ, c. 27.