Judicial Murder Research Articles

Wie eine 1608 wegen Blasphemie verhängte Exekution das eidgenössische Bündnis auf den Prüfstand stellte

In September 1608, Martin Duvoysin, a reformed citizen of Basel, was accused of blasphemous speech in Sursee, Lucerne, and sentenced to death by beheading and cremation. Three Bernese who happened to be passing through witnessed the pronouncement of sentence and the execution which took place immediately afterwards. They were convinced that this sentence was not free of confessional resentment and that Martin Duvoysin had fallen innocently into the clutches of Sursee’s arbitrary justice. This assessment of the incident was made public by their spokesman Gabriel Hermann in two pamphlets, both of which were reprinted several times and caused a great uproar. The Basel church leader Johann Jakob Grynäus was also deeply convinced of Duvoysin’s innocence, which he expressed in a sermon that was also published in print. The grave accusation of judicial murder that circulated widely as a result of these writings forced the Sursee and Lucerne authorities to vehemently counter the accusation, which initially led to a months-long exchange of blows with the Basel and Bern councillors through diplomatic chan-nels, before Lucerne also had its justifications and counterattacks spread in several printed publications. The danger of a further escalation to the point of a full-blown quarrel between the two confessions was certainly in the air, and a Swiss Confederation divided into two camps would have had to worry seriously about its independence. It took the arbitration of the allies, who were not involved in the conflict, at the «gemeine Tagsatzung» of June 1609 to avert the threatening scenario just in time.

First judicial Murder of India: Raja Nand Kumar Case

Abstract: The famous case of Raja Nand Kumar is often called as “First Judicial Murder of Colonial India”. It is also called as the ‘Black Case’. This case was carried out between the Governor- General of Bengal Lord Warren Hastings and a Hindu Brahmin Zamindar Raja Nand Kumar. The case revolved around allegations from both sides of the party various times , which led to ugly situations and eventually disguised how a fair trial should be carried out. This case is a remark and a black spot of Judiciary. The arrogance of power and position led Warren hastings to proclaim an innocent man Raja Nand Kumar a defaulter leading further to his death sentence. This case will always be read on how immoral and blind a court can function and kill an innocent man based upon hollow statements and evidences.

Dragisa Stojadinovic’s Open letter regarding Miroslav Krleza’s “Serbian themes”

This article examines the reaction of Dragisa Stojadinovic to the feuilleton ?Serbian themes? done by the writer Miroslav Krleza. Krleza?s feuilleton was being published in newspaper Politika during April, May and June of 1963. It consisted of fragments from his earlier writings organized in thematic units and concerning different topics from Serbian history. Dragisa Stojadinovic, former soldier, chief of Cinematographic section of Serbian army on Salonica front during the First World War and politician in interwar Yugoslavia, responded to Krleza?s feuilleton by writting an Open letter to the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts (Zagreb), the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Belgrade) and the Matica Srpska (Novi Sad). Stojadinovic?s Open letter was sent on June 28th, 1963. It focused on scrutinizing Krleza?s article Pasic about the Salonika trial published in Politika on June 9th. Both informations stated by Krleza and criticism put forward by Stojadinovic are analyzed in the light of contemporary historiographical knowledge. Different interpretations presented by Krleza and Stojadinovic have their roots in opposed views on causes and results of Salonika trial. Stojadinovic defended the legitimacy of trial started by his father-in-law Ljuba Jovanovic Patak, he was involved in its organisation and later accused of witness tampering. Krleza saw trial in the light of ?counter-revolutionary? Yugoslav unification in 1918 and as an act of ?political and judicial murder?. Article also contains original documents from National Library of Serbia.

The murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa

Ken Wiwa heard of his father's execution in November 1995 while he was in New Zealand, as part of his campaign against the Nigerian government's planned judicial murder of his father and eight other Ogoni leaders. The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting was due to be held in Auckland the following week. At the time of his death Saro-Wiwa was the leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), which sought to challenge the situation whereby a community which had contributed to the exchequer an estimated $30 billion in oil revenue found itself without basic amenities, living in a wretched environment, and being daily assaulted by oil exploration. He had accused Shell Oil company, which had a very close relationship with the Nigerian government, of 'waging an ecological war against the Ogoni'. After the executions, Nigeria was roundly condemned by international leaders, as was Shell itself.

‘Murdered Man’: Re-Examining Keats in The Examiner

ABSTRACT In John Keats’s Isabella; or the Pot of Basil (1820), Isabella’s mercantile brothers plot to murder her suitor, their clerk Lorenzo, for spoiling their plans to marry her to ‘some high noble and his olive–trees’. Having invited him for a day of hunting in the local forests, ‘the two brothers and their murder’d man’ (XXVII) head out – an epithet admired by Charles Lamb, and much afterwards, for Keats’s skill in narrative anticipation. Lamb’s praise was published in a review of the 1820 volume, reprinted in The Examiner, 30 July, 494-5. This appreciation is on page 494. On page 495, just below the review, is a report of ‘Executions’ at Newgate prison. One of the condemned is a ‘black man’, William Wilkinson, who insisted that he was framed and convicted on flimsy testimony, protesting that ‘he was a murdered man, and that he should die innocently’. This was an accidental discovery on our part, but once discovered a magnetic curiosity. Our essay examines what Lamb calls Keats’s ‘wonderfully conceived’ epithet, in the capital contexts of Keats’s day, most especially in reports in The Examiner and other newspapers. Making no claim for allusion on Keats’s part, or for Lamb’s admiration of this epithet, we shine an unexpected light on the urgent currency of this epithet, a potent rhetorical alliance among victims of ‘judicial murder’, and its new cast on economic power and tyranny in Isabella.

WHIGS AND HUNTERS: THE PATH NOT TAKEN

AbstractE. P. Thompson's Whigs and Hunters has had an enormous impact on African historiography in its articulation of the relationship between property and law and the subsequent criminalization of customary practices. Some of the other themes in this book – indistinct bands of law-breaking peasants, people and animals, notions of the wild, and the near impossibility of commonplace judicial murder in peacetime – have not been taken up. This article argues for a broader engagement with this book and to remind African historians that the many facets and eras of Thompson's scholarship should encourage a more flexible reading of his work.

State Killing, the Stage of Innocence, and The Exonerated

Ryan's essay analyzes the coordination of the innocence argument and sentimentality in Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's TheExonerated (2003), a documentary play based on interviews with people sentenced to die for crimes they did not commit. The play's composition, performance, and reception reveal the challenges of creating art that is aimed at social reform and confirm the difficulty in assessing the political function or, in Fredric Jameson's sense, the political unconscious of American literature. As a celebrated example of political theater, The Exonerated also provides a forum for thinking through the contemporary terms and framework of conversations about state killing. Ryan argues that the play stimulates reform and elicits sympathy by substituting a false rhetoric of universal vulnerability for a more accurate assessment of imprisonment and judicial murder. The attempt to make the play accessible, emotional, and persuasive also sets real limits on how audience members are asked think about personal and social responsibility. Some of these efforts include a focus on the wrongly convicted instead of the guilty, a balance of white and black interviewees in the face of a racially unbalanced justice system, a rendering of pain as uplifting for audiences, and an encouragement of personal and financial solutions rather than structural and political ones.

On Vulnerability as Judith Butler’s Language of Politics: From Excitable Speech to Precarious Life

On Vulnerability as Judith Butler’s Language of Politics: From Excitable Speech to Precarious Life George Shulman (bio) It is often said that philosophy begins in wonder, but it may be the case that political theory begins in a sense of danger—in emotions of fear or dread, in perceptions of impending or potential harm, in experiences of vulnerability or injury. Most famously, Thomas Hobbes made the English Revolution a “state of nature” to elicit and mobilize fear of premature, violent death in the service of a state-building project promising safety. So also, after Socrates’s judicial murder, Plato dreamed a republic in which philosophy (and its practitioners) would be safe, not vulnerable. And did Marx not depict communism as the “specter” of destruction haunting the European bourgeoisie? If canonical political thought is animated by representations of danger and harm, which must be apprehended at all to be addressed by action, so political theorists often speak in a voice of warning about “what is to be done.” Of course the other side of warning and injury is (the hope for) safety, even plenitude. So Plato imagines a world safe for philosophy, while Hobbes promises that mortal safety, and indeed material well-being, are possible if people consent to a sovereign power that “overawes them all.” The capacity of this mortal god to terrify is the condition of its capacity to protect. As these examples suggest, however, the move from dangerous vulnerability to abiding safety may come at the expense of (democratic) politics itself as a distinctive human practice. Plato and Hobbes seem to seek safety by imagining sovereign states and extrapolitical truths: by these absolutes they promise to overcome or at least contain the conflict arising from human plurality and social inequality. On the one hand they argue that the absence of sovereign [End Page 227] power and truth—and so the messy pervasiveness of politics because justice is not self-evident nor order automatic—is the major cause of human suffering. On the other hand, their critics say, by wedding philosophy and power to secure a sovereign framework of life, they would rescue human beings from danger at too high a cost. Indeed, theorists who value politics depict Plato and Hobbes as making impossible promises: that philosophy can generate a principle of (absolute, extrapolitical) authority that can give political life a secure “foundation,” and thereby end it. If it is impossible to transcend conditions of finitude and plurality, however, then politics is not only inescapable, but valuable. For as Machiavelli argues, human beings do face mortal danger unless they generate durable political forms, but they must create order from among themselves by political means, and their capacity to do so is jeopardized—we should say endangered—by despair in their capacity to act, by excessive fear of conflict and by fantasies of escaping the contingencies that make action and choice at once necessary and costly. For Machiavelli, then, the price of false promises of safety is freedom, but conceived politically as an agonistic practice of fashioning a common world out of plural (and often acute) differences, freedom is also the best means to sustain a durable framework for human life in all of its dimensions. Accordingly, a central element in the “genre” of political theory is argument about danger and how to forestall it. When figures like Machiavelli and Arendt take up the “vocation” of political theory, therefore, they take on the rhetorically complex task of persuading people to face what they are invested in denying: the importance of dangers not yet visible; the necessity (and fatefulness) of choices people would rather defer; the impossibility of moral purity in making them; the burdens, risks, and suffering that inhere to human freedom. Judith Butler surely places herself among those who challenge the illusions and longings that generate subjugation in the name of an impossible safety. Let us assess, then, the value but also the dangers in her argument about the chimera of safety, by reading Excitable Speech, published in 1997, in tandem with her more recent work, especially Precarious Life, published in 2005. It is typically said that Butler’s work has shifted from a critique of identity politics...

The Justification on the Abolition of Death Penalty - The Judicial Murder and Wrongful Convictions of the Death Penalty -

The Justification on the Abolition of Death Penalty - The Judicial Murder and Wrongful Convictions of the Death Penalty -

In and Out of Time (Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Borges)

IN the Western tradition of storytelling, time is as much a mystery as a revelation. Willingly or not, author and reader confront it. It is the writer's, the artist's, and the musician's indispensable abstraction, a recurrent measurement or focal point in their imagination. And the imagination in its basic, creative function manipulates, expands, or (in the Eastern tradition) eliminates time at will. In that enigmatic process human drives that are either difficult or impossible to control-love, hate, dreams, hope, ecstasy, sorrow-become the mind's vital accomplices. Time, in the spirit of Borges, is inevitably our plaything. An exploration of the mysteries of clock, calendar, heritage, and future await the reader in the most revealing episodes of Don Quijote (for example, in the Cave of Montesinos and in the Duke's and Duchess's palace); in the amnesia epidemic and the extended existences of people and things in Cien anos de soledad; in Dostoevsky's deepest thoughts on the perception of death in life in several of his novels; in the ambiguous circumstances of Borges's stories; and in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, a fantasy in which the Time Traveller describes his view of the world in the year 802,701 A.D. Early in Part I of The Idiot, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin comments on the intensity and fullness of time experienced by a condemned man in Lyon who is scheduled to die by the guillotine a few minutes later. In his story milagro secreto, and in characteristically circuitous detail, Jorge Luis Borges creates a representative yet unique protagonist who through his circumstances is analogous to the figure mentioned by Prince Myshkin. Jaromir Hladik is a Jewish writer in Prague who is arrested in his apartment by the German Gestapo on March 19, 1939, and imprisoned. Ten days later, he is executed by a firing squad. Is Borges with Hladik taking up where Dostoevsky left off? Whether or not he had the Russian's text in mind, he clearly shared his curiosity over the mental effects of imminent death and came upon the imaginary event he needed as a literary counteraction to one of the terrifying realities of Nazi power before and during World War II. With Borges's timely encouragement, God grants Hladik's special request: a year's writing time to complete his unfinished play, Los enemigos, before the fusillade that will wipe him out within two minutes of that psychologically agitated yet intellectually serene prayer. Singular as it was, Hladik's experience had important antecedents. Two of them are executions referred to in The Idiot. As is well known, Fyodor Dostoyevsky-then a political dissident in his twenties-was escorted to a scaffold in St. Petersburg for his own execution on December 22, 1849; but the sentence was commuted just before the appointed moment and later reduced to four years in a Siberian prison. So the author knew what he and Prince Myshkin were talking about. His reference to the execution in Lyon reflects his commitment to social justice. Dostoevsky's fascination with individual human depravities did not deter him from denouncing institutionalized capital punishment as the worst of crimes. The Prince declares: To kill for murder is an immeasurably greater evil than the crime itself. Judicial murder is immeasurably more horrible than one committed by a robber (23). But judicial murder is also appropriate food for narrative thought (as in three of the best known Hispanic-American novels: Garcia Marquez's El general en su laberinto, Carpentier's El recurso del metodo, and Asturias's El senor Presidente); and, further on in The Idiot, Dostoevsky tells of a case in which a Borgesian kind of motif is clearly discernible. Keeping in mind Jaromir Hladik's postponable death, we hear Myshkin again during his first visit with the Yepanchin family. The episode he recalls this time-that of a 27-year-old prisoner who is reprieved minutes before his scheduled execution-is the author's reliving of his own traumatic experience (and at the same age) in St. …

The Limits of Indemnity: The Earl of Derby, Sovereignty and Retribution at the Trial of William Christian, 1660–63

IOn 2 January 1663, William Christian, one-time Governor and Receiver-General of the Isle of Man, went to his death on Hango Hill, 'most penitently and ... curragiously'.1 Having prayed, addressed the assembled crowd and refused the offer of a blindfold, his last view of the world was of a people and a political landscape made familiar to him throughout both his long public career and private life. The boundaries of his own estate of Ronaldsway ran right up to the foot of the hill, while the gates of his manor house were only a few hundred yards distant. Clearly visible to the west, were the towers of Castle Rushen, the centre of Manx government and home to the House of Keys, where before his fall he had collected tithes and administered justice. To the east, guarding the straits, lay the coastal fort of Derbyhaven, a potent symbol of the power of the Stanley family which he had at one time served, and had latterly come to oppose. His execution, ordered by Charles the 8th Earl of Derby, would therefore seem to have been staged as an unambiguous piece of political theatre. It served not only as a stark warning to any future rebellious subjects, but also as a grim testimony to the Earl's ruthless commitment to the maintenance of his family's dominant hold over the politics of the Isle and to his determination to resist any attempt at outside interference in his affairs.2Unfortunately for the Earl, a death is far easier to order than to choreograph and, through the making of a 'good end', the myth of Illiam Dhone - 'Brown haired William' - the patriot martyred in the name of Manx liberty, soon became established throughout the Isle. Souvenirs were sought of him and tales of his deeds, which bore precious little relation to the historical record, were immortalised in folklore, popular song, and broadside ballads, as well as in the pages of romantic novels.3 However if the appropriation of Christian as a nationalist hero, whose example and endeavour could henceforth be appealed to by islanders straining under the pressures of proprietorial government, was not already bad enough for the heirs of the House of Stanley, worse still was the fracturing of its relations with the Crown occasioned by this judicial murder and the long-term political marginalisation of the 8th Earl, and his descendants, which resulted from it. The reasons which led Charles Stanley, as a committed Royalist and fervent Anglican, to break with his king over the issue of Christian's death, and to pursue such a single-minded and disastrous course of action, will become clear only upon a closer examination of the Earl's career and of the tensions inherent in Manx politics, from the Interregnum through to the return of the monarchy.The Restoration of May 1660 was initially welcomed right across the Isle of Man. The proclamation of Charles II as king was greeted, in each of the major towns in turn, with 'shouting, shooting of muskets and ordnance [sic], drinking of beer, [and] with great rejoicing'.4 In this heady atmosphere it was comparatively easy for Charles, as the new Earl of Derby, to reassert the traditional rights of the House of Stanley as Lords of Man, even after an absence of some nine years. The administration of the Isle, under both Commonwealth and Protectorate governments, had left most of the pre-existing social structures intact and had allowed the local elites to continue largely unmolested in their offices, while Sir Thomas Fairfax had simply assumed the prerogatives of the Stanley Lords and had ruled largely according to their precedents.5 In contrast to his return to his Lancashire estates, where he had to fight hard to impose his authority and to guarantee the election of his placemen, Earl Charles appeared to have inherited an extremely favourable set of circumstances on Man.6 The Island was capable of supporting a large population through agriculture and fishing, while its strategic position, commanding the trade and invasion routes across the Irish Sea, ensured it a value and an importance that far exceeded its modest geographical size. …

The Cross of Christ, Sacrifice and Sacred Violence

A witness to the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus on a hill outside Jerusalem in the early first century would not have been able to identify any aspect of what was going on as sacrifice. Here was merely a judicial murder performed with some cynicism by the Roman administration of a difficult province. For the Temple administration Jesus’s death was understood as a matter of an expediency pointedly ironised by the author of John’s Gospel: ‘You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed’ (John 11.50). There seems little doubt, on the other hand, that the gospels, as well as Paul, place the death of Jesus firmly within a hermeneutical framework provided by the sacrifice of Passover; this, in turn, leads to the early claim that Christ’s death is to be understood in relation to the forgiveness of sins. This theme is already present in the primitive credal statement preserved in I Cor. 15.3, which Paul seems to have inherited from Palestinian Christians and most probably from the Jerusalem church itself.Such a reading of the New Testament material has been challenged by René Girard in a body of work which represents one of the most profound of recent attempts to explore the meaning of sacrifice in the roots of human society. At the danger of oversimplifying the complexity of Girard’s argument, he suggests, in a series of powerful studies, that human society is born in violence.

Domestic terrorism: Notes on the state system of oppression*

Twenty‐five years after the Watergate affair culminated in the resignation of Richard Nixon, the country continues to be animated by the spirit of scandal—even if the alleged offenses against William Jefferson Clinton involved sexual misconduct rather than illegal bombings, break‐ins, and other non‐"crimes and misdemeanors.” In this article, Noam Chomsky discusses a more basic threat to the Constitution than Watergate found in the pattern of FBI break‐ins and illegal actions first revealed to the public in 1973. (Illegal actions by the national police are known to have continued in the 1980s as a tactic used against activists in the Central America solidarity movement.) Not only does Chomsky locate a pattern in the FBI's actions since the founding of the Bureau, he discusses historical antecedents in the Alien and Sedition Acts, the judicial murder of the Haymarket anarchists, and the Palmer raids. For Chomsky, the real meaning of these actions is that the system routinely works to stifle dissent using means far more problematic than those employed by the Watergate burglars. In Chomsky's view, the purpose of these criminal actions is to frustrate preliminary stages of organization before more advanced forms of “revolutionary radicalism” can develop.

Mary's Obedience and Power in the Trial of Mary and Joseph

Mary's Obedience and Power in the Trial of Mary and Joseph Cindy L. Carlson The N-town cycle has long been recognized as concerning itself with the centrality and glory of the Virgin Mary and the conflicts between man's and God's justice. These two subjects have been treated together only seldom and never at great length. The iconography of Mary in this cycle play has been examined by Theresa Coletti,1 the issues oflaw andjustice by Lynn Squires and Robert Potter.2 Most of the treatment of legal matters has centered on the trial of Jesus where human law is quite thoroughly perverted by its adepts in order to perform the judicial murder of Jesus. But this trial has misled modern readers to view human law in the cycle as hypocritical and hateful. The examinations of Mary, however, show a human law capable ofjustice as well as of perversion. The presence ofjudges able to discern the humility of Mary and to see God's power surrounding her, particularly in the Trial ofMary and Joseph (Play 14), allows for justice to be done. Mary's own humility can purify the workings of the corrupted and corruptible human law. Modern feminists, in examining the lives of women in earlier times and the literature about them, have noted for us the variations in women's political power and the restraints on their ability to speak publicly.3 Particularly for the Renaissance, literary historians have studied Shakespeare's heroines and Queen Elizabeth in terms of modern feminism's concern with political power and personal rights.4 But in earlier periods, a concentration on political and publicly exercised power and speech may lead us to miss concerns about power that are not precisely our own.5 Even though Mary has very few individual legal rights, she is a figure of imposing power during her submission to judicial examination .6 In her humility, Mary responds with a perfect obedience to the demands the powerful make of her, yet she embodies power —she gives birth to Jesus—and she models a powerful humility and virginal integrity.7 She has experienced a spiritual conversion 348 Cindy Carlson349 and understanding that have focused her aspirations on a power and reward far beyond the worldly political power of institutions that are under the uncertain dominion of fortune. In this essay, I want to read the Mary pageants of the N-town cycle in light of fifteenth-century theories of legality and justice —especially those of Sir John Fortescue.8 After an examination of Fortescue's commonplaces concerning justice and the law administered by human beings in the first part ofthis essay, I will turn, in the second part, to the overwhelming example of Mary as a participant in human trials that ultimately reach just results. Mary's trials subject her and the legal system in which she is involved to judgment. Both are validated not through an analysis of rights and their protection but through an examination of essences and sources and an exploration of protected relationships . Questions of jurisdictional impositions of power are less important than demonstrations ofobedience, circumspection, and self-control—both in Mary and in the functionaries of the court. I To a thoughtful lawyer and politician of the fifteenth century as also to the thoughtful compiler of the N-town cycle, the various laws administered by various jurisdictions posed a serious threat to the dignity of law. Surely law is, or ought to be, one thing, even if it is administered by various human agencies. Fortescue in his treatise on the law of nature admits that the civil and ecclesiastical legal systems fall short ofthe universality desirable in the law. In De Natura Legis Naturae, Fortescue sees the natural law as prior to and forming the foundation for human civil law (Works, I, 200). In the absence of any acknowledged and specific human civii law, the law of nature is sufficient to decide controversies and disputes. While the law of nature is unitary and immutable, its effects can vary according to the various human circumstances to which it is applied. That law is the same when it decrees the innocent man to enjoy...

The trial of Lord William Russell (1683): Judicial murder?

The trial of Lord William Russell (1683): Judicial murder?

Popular Disturbance and the Fall of Thomas Cromwell and the Reformers, 1539–1540

On 28 July 1540 Thomas Cromwell went to execution, and two days later Robert Barnes, Thomas Garret and William Jerome, leading protestant preachers and the minister's protégés, were burned at the stake.1 These reformers were sacrificed to implicate Cromwell in apostasy, but their deaths were more than judicial murder; they died for making a reality of the conservatives’ old fears that religious radicalism would engender social disorder. With the coming of the Reformation issues of faith for the first time deeply divided the people, and the rift went beyond the schism between orthodox and reformed alone. Many who witnessed the confusion thought that ‘the devyll reyneth over us nowe’ and believed that ‘alle thys devysyon comyth through that ffalse knave that heretyke Doctor Barnys and such other heretiks as he ys’.2 The faction struggles in court and council which dominated the last years of Henry VIII's reign produced the shifting policies of reaction or toleration towards reform, but while political intrigue determined the incidence of persecution and decided the victims the events of 1540 were to reveal that Protestantism was spreading independently, thwarting the restoration of Catholic orthodoxy, whatever the policy of government. The religious history of London was inextricably linked with the feuds of contending factions at court in the confused months of the spring and summer of 1540, not least because many of the protagonists and persecuted were Londoners themselves. The tensions witnessed in the capital between orthodox and reformed, and popular disturbance there, underlay all the machinations in high politics and influenced the outcome.

Popular Canonization as Political Propaganda: The Cult of Archbishop Scrope

RECENT attempts to explore the failure of governance in fifteenth-century England have tended to concentrate on the opposition to Henry IV in the years from 1403 to 1408. This opposition, and the royal concessions to parliament which resulted in part from it, were instrumental in misleading Bishop Stubbs into notions of a premature Lancastrian constitutionalism. This critical era established the balance between the monarchy and the Parliament which was a hallmark of the Lancastrian dispensation. Its importance has since drawn the attention of modern scholars to the northern rebellions of the Percies and of Archbishop Richard Scrope of York, which challenged the tottering authority of the first Lancastrian monarch, and contributed to the weakness of his dynasty.' The execution of Archbishop Scrope after the rebellion of 1405 and his posthumous elevation as a popular political saint have rightly been viewed as critical factors in political opposition to the crown. Stubbs himself considered the judicial murder of the northern primate unparalleled in English history, and thought that the death of Becket was thrown into the shade by the execution of Scrope.2 The immediate aftermath of the execution brought about political events which have, however, obscured the equal importance of Scrope as the central figure of a durable anti-Lancastrian cult which was to outlive the dynasty itself. This uncanonical veneration of the martyr to Lancastrian oppression served as a rallying point for opposition to Henry IV, his son, and his grandson. It would survive to buttress the authority and the prestige of Edward IV. In the threequarters of a century between the execution of Scrope and the death of Edward IV adherence to the cult of Richard Scrope and support of his shrine at York Minster was a touchstone of opposition to Lancastrian rule. The rise and fall in the popularity and intensity of this veneration is one measure of the waxing and waning of opposition to the crown in those years. The popular canonization of Archbishop Scrope was a notable instance of that political manipulation of popular religious enthusiasm which distinguishes the history of England from the death of Thomas Becket under Henry II to the sorry case of the Nun of Kent in the reign of Henry VIII. In a seminal essay published over forty years ago, Josiah Cox Russell analysed the phenomenon of