Judge Parry on ‘The Bloody Assize’

Extract

When it was known that His Honour Judge Parry had written a new volume on The Bloody Assize, it seemed that at long last we should have a really judicial and temperate record of events that until now had been presented from no satisfactory point of view. Writers hitherto have generally been biassed by party feeling or swayed by modern prejudice; they have regarded the seventeenth century through the eyes—and the conventions—of the nineteenth, and they have been content (worst sin of all in a historical writer) to reproduce earlier statements without any honest endeavour to authenticate them or trace their origin. That they were clever men only made matters worse; who of us has not been swayed by Macaulay or Campbell, till we began to examine their ‘facts’ and enquire into their authorities? We find in them—and still more in lesser writers copying them—the same old suggestions, the same old stories, the same old accusations repeated time and again; often without acknowledgement, generally without question, and almost always without any judicial balance. But now that not only a lawyer but a judge, a man of our own days of cooler tolerance and understanding, was to tell the story once again it seemed that we might hope for a very different treatment. Unfortunately, in the book that lies before me now, we do not get it.

It is a pleasantly-written volume, light enough to interest the casual reader, serious enough to deserve attention. It is intended to appeal to a wide public, and is, therefore, the more dangerous. Frankly, it contains no new matter, and does not, I think, fairly or judicially present the old; once again we are given what we know already—and once again we are given it all on one side.