‘Hanged, drawn, quar- tered, beheaded, shot – even boiled…” From its outset, the National Archive’s exhibition Treason: People, Power and Plot makes clear the stakes in- volved in being caught up in conspir-acies against the state – including being attached to a stake oneself.
This is a creditably unbloodthirsty exhibition, though, despite its portentous beginning. There are few grisly depictions of executions or displays of racks and axes – those more inclined to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood of the scaffold might prefer to swing by Executions at the Museum of London Docklands, which was reviewed in these pages last month. Instead, Treason is a thoughtful and at times highly affecting exploration of state power and its maintenance, as well as those people who – wittingly or not – found themselves drawn into its toils.
The exhibition draws on the National Archives’ collections to document the tales of traitors both well-known and obscure, showing through a mixture of official and personal papers how treason was conceived, prosecuted and punished. Though less immediately chilling, these legal instruments are just as deadly as instruments of torture; the paper trail becomes a powder trail, setting out the steps by which the state could execute its will on those it deemed – rightly or wrongly – to be a threat.
An excellent opening video sets out the exhibition’s central premise: that treason is an elusive, ever-changing concept that depends on luck as much as law. It is “a thought, an act of imagination” that is highly contingent on place and time – a notion that will surely hit home for many Herald readers, whose regular worship could well have rendered them candidates for a prison cell, or far worse, in times past.
From its starting point in the 1352 Treason Act – site of the first definit-ion of the crime, much reinterpreted but never repealed to this day – the exhibition’s displays show how treason has manifested itself across six centuries from Richard II to Lord Haw-Haw. Court documents, state papers and personal correspondence demonstrate how this most serious of crimes morphed in conjunction with political and religious belief and the shape of the state to intervene, mostly catastrophically, in the lives of its subjects.
Panels on the wall set out starkly how each traitor, or “traitor”, fared. In some rare cases treason even prospers, with the rebel Henry VII performing the brazen constitutional switcheroo in having his predecessor Richard III retrospectively condemned and himself confirmed as the rightful king; the American revolutionaries’ declaration of independence in 1776 – which the exhibition justifiably calls “the most successful treason in history” – was accompanied by their levying a charge of treason against George III.
The documents on display in the exhibition are extraordinary: truly a treasury of treason. Visitors are shown the trial papers of Anne Boleyn, and the record of the trial of Charles I accompanied by Charles II’s act of attainder in 1660 that made traitors of the regicides themselves, having unwittingly signed their own death warrant with their late King’s.
The biggest stars of the exhibition reside in the “Power and Faith” section, addressing the fates of those caught up in the struggles for political and religious authority between 1534 and 1606. The trial papers of St Thomas More are here, and the confession of Elizabeth Barton (“the Maid of Kent”). The audio stations that stand by each of the displays give voice to the state and traitor alike, as well as providing elucidatory comment from the exhibition’s curators.
The most spectacular display, though – worth the trip to Kew on its own – concerns the Gunpowder Plot. In it a Bag of Secrets (not a metaphor – the actual leather bag in which sensitive King’s Bench documents were kept) concerning the plot is opened to show how the plot was discovered, investigated, punished and remembered: from the anonymous note passed to Lord Monteagle warning him of the “great blow” to be struck against Parliament, to the Act for Public Thanksgiving passed to ensure that the Fifth of November would “never be forgot”.
It is one of the crowning examples of the exhibition’s dramatisation of terror and violence framed in the inexorable procedures of the state. The chillingly calm voice of James I directs the interrogation – “is he a Papist?” – of Guy Fawkes and authorises “the gentler tortures” to be used on him, while the shaky signature of Fawkes himself appears on a document confessing to the crime and implicating his co-conspirators.
As the exhibition moves through the centuries, its focus shifts away from the punishment of crimes against religion or the person of the monarch to the subjugation of political agitation and colonial unrest, including a well-illustrated section on Sharpe’s Rebellion in Jamaica – treason as well as trade followed the British Empire across the globe.
There is particular focus on the deployment of treason as a tool to quell rebellion in Ireland, from Wolfe Tone’s uprising in 1798 to the Easter Rising of 1916. The latter is illustrated with a substantial display that places the republican leader Patrick Pearse’s official sentencing document (recording his sentence to death by being shot) alongside his last letter to his mother – also affectingly read over audio.
The manner of Pearse and his com-rades’ deaths – tried and executed at speed and in secret – demonstrates the way in which perceptions of treason had changed by the beginning of the 20th century. With juries growing increasingly less willing to convict traitors and condemn them to death, the crime had become more a martial than a civil matter, to be deployed in time of war.
The exhibition thus ends with William Joyce – Lord Haw-Haw – providing a rare opportunity to witness treason in action through a recording of one of his propaganda broadcasts from Nazi Germany to Britain.
As with many of the other examples in Treason, we are able to witness the document that sealed his fate – self-inflicted in his case, as the falsified application for a British passport that features in the display is what enabled the American-born Joyce to be tried and then hanged for treason as a British subject. Joyce’s belongings were confiscated by the state, an echo (as the exhibition incisively points out) of the medieval acts of attainder that rendered all a traitor’s goods the property of the Crown.
This exhibition is a fascinating survey of the shape-shifting nature of treason, the forms it took and the people whose lives it touched, underpinned by an exceptional assortment of material – audio as well as documentary – that rewards close poring over. In an exhibition that runs through six centuries the succession of traitors under consideration can feel a little swift.
There could have been a little more context provided for each historical period, for example some more backdrop on the doctrinal and political contentions that made the Reformation such a bloody period, but a high-level view is understandable given the limits of space and the richness of the collections on display.
As an examination of Crown and State’s efforts to preserve themselves, and orchestrate the destruction of their enemies, it is tremendous.
Treason: People, Power and Plot is at the National Archives, Kew, until April 6
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