Monday, April 28, 2008

Richard II and Calais

Rightly or wrongly, the US government has used the military base at Guantanamo Bay to detain people it believes to be terrorists. The fact that it is not on US soil makes it easier to set aside the question of whether or not these detainees are entitled to the protections of the US Constitution.

Calais plays a similar though not identical purpose in the story of Richard and the Duke of Gloucester. Gloucester is arrested in London and then quickly taken to Calais, an English possession in what is now France. It is worth considering why Gloucester was imprisoned in Calais.

In his History of England, David Hume says that Gloucester is taken to Calais because this is the only place that the duke, "by reason of his numerous partizans...could safely be detained in custody" (II.XVII.308). In other words, if people found out that Gloucester was imprisoned in London, they would have risen up against Richard and demanded that Gloucester be released. But they would be helpless to free him if he were imprisoned in Calais.

In the play Thomas of Woodstock, the author suggests that the purpose of imprisoning Gloucester (that is, Woodstock) in Calais is to prevent people from knowing what happened to him. One of Richard's evil counselors, Sir Henry Greene, is the one who advises it:

...So clappe hime under haches,
hoyst sayles & secrettly convay hime out ath Realme to Callys.
And so by this meanes ye shall prevent all mischeife,
For neither of your uncles nor any of the kingdome,
Shall know whats become of hime.

The author of this play is more inclined than Hume to view Richard as a tyrant. The act of secretly imprisoning one's political enemies is a charactertistic mark of tyrannical governments, as the gulags of the former Soviet Union attest. Blackstone sees this kind of wrongful imprisonment as the most dangerous threat of all to liberty:

‘To bereave a man of life or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.” (William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, as quoted by Hamilton in Federalist 84)

After quoting this passage from Blackstone, Hamilton comments that this is precisely what makes the writ of habeas corpus so important: "And as a remedy for this fatal evil he is everywhere peculiarly emphatical in his encomiums on the habeas corpus act, which in one place he calls 'the BULWARK of the British Constitution'"

So, by Blackstone's standards (and those of the Founders), Richard's action of "secretly hurring" Gloucester to jail, "where his sufferings are unknown" is a "dangerous engine of arbitrary government" and precisely the kind of action that the British and US Constitutions are designed to guard against. This again marks Richard as the kind of king who deserves to be overthrown.

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