And what was the prosecution doing? It was resorting to artificial rules of construction so that the words of the United States Constitution would be made to take an artificial meaning based on the statute law and common law of England. Mr. Wickham denied emphatically that the statute and common law of England could properly be applied to the Constitution of the United States. Mr. Wickham would go even farther than that. He would assert that no rule which holds a person guilty of treason who is absent from the scene of the overt act had ever practically obtained even in England. Oh yes, Mr. Wickham, master of precedent that he was, knew that there were instances in English history which might be cited by the prosecution. But he had a remedy for that. He would mention them himself before the prosecution had a chance to do so. So he frankly admitted that Lord Coke, eminent English jurist and legal authority, and other writers after him, had laid down that there are no accessories in treason either before or after the fact, but that all are principals. However, said Mr. Wickham, in spite of the principle declared by the authorities, no actual adjudications bear them out except that in the case of Sir Nicholas Throgmorton in the reign of Bloody Mary. Mr. Wickham was well aware that there was not a lawyer of any standing at the Virginia bar who was not conversant with the account of the Throgmorton case as presented by Judge St. George Tucker in his appendix to _4th Blackstone’s Commentaries_. Throgmorton had been charged with imagining the Queen’s death. At his trial the doctrine of constructive treason was insisted on by the prosecution and sanctioned by the judges. When Throgmorton requested that the law books be consulted the court told him none might be brought in, that they knew the law sufficiently without a book. And when the jury brought in a verdict of not guilty contrary to the wishes of the judges, the court committed them all to prison and fined them heavily. But, said Mr. Wickham, the court on that occasion was so contrary, not only to the rules of law and justice, but even to those of decency, that he persuaded himself counsel on the other side would not rely on it as authority. Mr. Wickham, intimating that he had made a diligent and exhaustive search of all the authorities, declared that he could find no case in English law where a person who was not present at the scene of the overt act had been convicted or even brought to trial, except that of Mary Speke, in the fourth year of the reign of King James II, at the time of Monmouth’s Rebellion. But that, Mr. Wickham made clear, was when the spirit of persecution was high. He thought it probable that it was one of the cases decided by the execrable Judge Jefferies at the Bloody Assizes.