The United Kingdom and Human Rights - College of Social ...

Significance of the United Kingdom's Contribution 43
conducting conferences in his Inn about the succession to the throne.
See J. E. Neale, "Peter Wentworth" in Historical Studies of the English
Parliament 1399-1603, vol. 2, E. B. Fryde and E. Miller, ed.,
(Cambridge University Press, 1970), at 253 et seq. So far as concerns
Milton, the Areopagitica later became widely read in Europe after
Milton had acquired fame as defender of regicide. It is convenient
here to note that British literary figures spread conceptions of liberty
in Europe. The diffusion of ideas of liberty and of rights through
plays, poetry, essays, tracts and novels is itself a major topic for
study. I merely drop the names of More, Shakespeare, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Southey, Dickens, Carlyle and Ruskin, not even mentioning
the great figures of the Scottish Enlightenment better known
in Europe than south of the border.
21 Locke was prudent in not publishing, although he did associate with
revolutionary circles. Algernon Sidney (1622-executed 1683), an active
republican in the Commonwealth and later Earl of Leicester, was
sentenced by Jeffreys for complicity in the Rye House plot. The only
overt evidence of Sidney's alleged treasonable libel was his
documents, which he claimed were not for publication and which
asserted that the King was subject to law and might be deposed. As
Dicey pointed out: "In times of passion ... trial by jury cannot
secure respect for justice. The worst iniquities committed by Jeffreys
at the Bloody Assize would have been impossible, had he not found
willing accomplices in the jurors ... ": An Introduction to the Study of
the Law of the Constitution (1885), (Macmillan, 10th ed., 1967), p. 395.
22 Polybius (c.200 B.C.—c. 118 B.C.) Greek historian of the rise of
Rome, left the earliest existing history of Rome. His Histories (c.150
B.C.) explain the constitution's part in Rome's success (Book 6).
Polybius much influenced thinkers from Cicero to Montesquieu.
23 Burke's splendid rhetorical prose in Reflections on the French Revolution
(1791) was provoked by a sermon given on November 4, 1789,
"Discourse on the love of our country" to the London Revolution
Society, a Gentlemen's club founded in 1788 upon the centenary of
the 1688 English Revolution. (Did the founders of Charter 88 also
have this in mind?) Price had supported the ideas of the
revolutionaries and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Society had thereupon sent a congratulatory address to the National
Assembly for storming the Bastille. Price (1723-1791) was a Unitarian
divine and thinker. Priestley (1733-1804) was a scientist and
theologian, virtual inventor of Unitarianism, discover of oxygen,
carbon monoxide and soda water and a political thinker. Burke
accused them both of viewing with a steady eye the greatest
calamities that could befall their country. Part of Burke's aim in
writing Reflections was to expose what he saw as the evil designs of