LONDON, 18 March 2006 — The heat is off the UK Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell following her separation from her husband in the wake of revelations about her family’s financial arrangements. It will soon be on someone else. She joins Ruth Kelly, David Blunkett, Peter Mandelson and dozens of senior British politicians who have recently endured trial by the media.
The time has come to incorporate this ritual into the British Constitution, to stand resplendent alongside the Queen’s speech, the House of Lords and prime minister’s questions.
The procedure is hallowed by convention. It involves an accused minister being stalked 24 hours a day by photographers and reporters. They stake out the street, hide in dustbins and train telephoto lenses on upstairs windows. Any sign of life is greeted by a fusillade of flashes and shouted questions of such national import as “When are you going to apologize?” or “What color are your underpants today?” Once upon a time any self-respecting minister was protected from this indignity by a gatehouse, a porch, a mews exit, a valet, and a discreet call to the Times. Now he is lucky to have an answering machine. Getting to work involves fixing a grin, undoing the gate, fumbling for keys, mumbling incoherence into a furry microphone and attempting to drive away accompanied by shrieking hordes. Meanwhile neighbors peep from behind curtains and wonder what can have induced anyone to embark on such a career. If, praise be, the charge is of a sexual nature, relatives are telephoned at dead of night and asked if they think their loved one may be “too tired” for Cabinet responsibility.
None of this adds a jot to political enlightenment. It is not meant to do so. It is heat. Each evening an idiot news presenter asks an idiot reporter: “So, Mavis, how long do you think the minister can stand it?” Mavis updates us on the minister’s appearance and the visibility or invisibility of his friends. She then intones that “it is now a question of how much of a liability he is to Downing Street’’. As for the heat, it will continue until something more amusing comes along. The public can stand only so many pictures of Jowell’s husband getting into a car each morning.
Trial by ordeal has a long and respectable history. It was introduced in the early Middle Ages when ancient trial by combat was corrupted by subcontractors. To hire a thug to fight on one’s behalf made a mockery of the lord’s freedom to confer strength on justice. Ordeal was a clear improvement. It was particularly useful to test pleas of innocence in crimes lacking third-party witnesses, such as sodomy, heresy or infanticide. In addition it was voluntary, and a choice of methods was offered.
The accused could choose to immerse an arm in a boiling cauldron, step on five heated ploughshares, or walk three paces holding a searing iron ball. The wounds were bound up, and if they were judged by an adjudicating priest to be healing within three days, innocence was assumed. God protected His own. Ordeal by water involved being dropped in a flooded pit on a rope. Those who floated were filled with the devil, those who sank were godly. Innocent victims were dragged out before, it was hoped, they actually drowned. The most fearsome test was the “triple ordeal,” a mix-and-match of these various horrors.
Ordeal was outlawed by Innocent III at the fourth Lateran Council in 1215. It was found that rich accused were offering bribes to lower the temperature of the water or cool the iron balls. This rather spoiled the point. In addition, university-educated theologians deplored the use of the Almighty as an aid to justice. Modern jurisprudence should enter the 13th century and adopt best practice, which was torture. The technical authorities recommended the rack, the drop, and pumping the stomach full of water, which left no marks.
Conservatives were rightly appalled. Since the days of Athelstan, the English had been said to be “trustworthy men of good repute, who had never failed in oath or ordeal.” If a man denied a crime, “let him carry the hot iron.” As for torture, despite rules for its humane administration, late-medieval documents are rife with complaints. It was so unreliable, for obvious reasons, that only one application was permitted.
The guilty tended to lie and those protesting their innocence might well die on the rack. Torture, unlike ordeal, was administered by the prosecution. All this was a travesty of justice. (These objections have yet to reach the ears of the Pentagon or the British intelligence authorities.)
In his account of trial by ordeal, the historian Robert Bartlett points to some of its modest virtues. It was orderly and, for calloused medieval hands and feet, not as painful as it would be today. Ordeal was rarely fatal, unlike combat. Much depended on the decorum of the victims and the confidence they displayed in their innocence by choosing it. Over half of recorded ordeals led to acquittals. More significantly, they removed final decision from the hands of the mob and remitted it to authority. The inspection of wounds was in the hands of priests, who thus passed judgment. It sort of worked. Adam Smith applauded it as bringing “a speedy end to a dispute.”
Modern trial by ordeal uses language borrowed from its forebear. We speak of the accused “standing the heat,” “fighting for air,” and being in “deep water.” The world waits “to see if the wounds heal.”
Triple ordeal starts with some tabloid revelation, often partly fabricated, drawing the attention of the pack. When first blood is drawn, the world holds its breath to see if gangrene takes hold. The serious press then pitches in to discuss whether the victim “has become a political liability to the prime minister.” Does he sink like an honest man, resigning for a while to spend time with his family, or does he struggle guiltily to stay afloat? Even that once-rare Vatican favorite, “the ordeal of the blessed morsel,” is regularly administered. This involved the accused having to swallow something, which they do either cleanly or by “choking on their sins.” Nowadays the something is usually words and the swallowing takes place before that modern Inquisition, a television interviewer.
As of old, judgment is still reserved for higher authority. Downing Street waits and watches the wounds. The prime minister sniffs the air and takes the temperature of the mob. How did it react to the blistering arms and sizzling flesh? Any expression of support is examined for textual nuance. If the accused is acquitted all is forgotten, though the press will ever afterwards describe him as “scarred.”
The medieval mob was itself a reincarnation of the Greek Furies. They slept when Orestes visited Delphi, but rose in a rage when he demanded that Pallas Athene excuse him of matricide. They pursued and tormented him. When the Greeks finally acquitted him they consented only by being granted an honored place in Athenian drama and jurisprudence. They were duly called the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones. Today they are called the press.
Modern trial by ordeal seems to work. It is savage but justice is mostly done. The Furies usually drive the guilty from office, the innocent rarely so. Besides, in a nation with no currently operative redress against political corruption or incompetence, what is the alternative? Would the rascals really prefer torture?
