William Atwood. ceived to impeach a record, and knowing this to be untenable, declared he would hear no further argument, and ordered the trial to proceed. Bayard's counsel then asked for an adjournment until the following Mon day, to which Atwood answered : " No. We will not give Mr. Vesey " (who was then the pastor of Trinity Church) " the oppor tunity of another sermon against us." And as the trial was about to proceed an inci dent took place showing the character of the man who was presiding over it. Per ceiving that Jameson, a lawyer who was present, was about to take notes, Atwood forbid him to do so. Jameson said he was exercising the right that every attorney had to take notes of a trial for his own private use. Atwood : " You are no longer, sir, an attorney of this court, nor shall you prac tice until you have purged yourself for sign ing the addresses. Put up your pen and ink." With difficulty an adjournment was obtained for a day, and on the adjourned day Bayard presented a written statement that the indictment was not found by twelve grand jurors; that the foreman had no power to hand in the one endorsed by him as a true bill; that it had not been agreed to by twelve of the jurors; that there was not one Englishman on the grand jury when the bill was presented, but that they were all of Dutch extraction, many of whom could neither read, write, nor even under stand the English language; to which Atwood's answer was, " Let it be entered that it appears to the court that the bill was found by more than twelve jurors." When the trial was brought on, the proof against Bayard was that his name was signed to one of the addresses, and that he and hfe son were present at the tavern when they were signed by soldiers and others. The addresses were not put in evidence, but some loose testimony as to their contents was given, which Atwood held was sufficient to show their treasonable character, stress being laid upon the failure of Bayard, in
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whose possession or under whose control they were assumed to be, to produce them. Nicholls, in a very able argument, main tained, citing many authorities, that it was no crime to petition the king and the House of Commons. " I don't say," said Atwood, "that it is a crime to petition the king, but it is to petition the House of Commons, in the plantations, for there the king governs by his prerogative, and with the government there the House of Commons have nothing to do." Nicholls replied that it was an every day practice. He argued that it was not only an ancient right, but was expressly given by an act passed in the reign of Charles II., and that an act in the reign of William and Mary declared that all prosecu tions for exercising it were illegal. He quoted the remark of an English judge that to petition is an Englishman's birthright, and especially insisted that the right to petition the governor of a province was apparent, as he was made amenable by statute for any miscarriage of his govern ment that was brought to the attention of the crown. The ground taken by Atwood that the House of Commons had nothing to do with the government of the colony, and that in New York it was a crime to address a peti tion to it, as the king alone governed in the colony, involved the anomaly that although an English subject, while in England, had guaranteed to him, both by ancient usage and by acts of Parliament, the right to peti tion the House of Commons; yet if he became a resident of the British colony of New York, he could be indicted for high treason if he dared to exercise it. From Atwood's point of view the crime against the king was in appealing to another branch of the government, when the power to rule the colony was vested solely and absolutely in the king under his prerogative. Blackstone says that, in the reign of James I., the unreasonable exercise of what was deemed the king's prerogative — the claim
