[5]Sir John Holt, one of the great chief justices in the history of British law, handed down numerous important rulings on the subject of libel. See Fredrick Seaton Siebert, _Freedom of the Press in England, 1476-1776_ (Urbana, Ill., 1952), _passim_.
[6]John Tutchin, publisher of the _Observator_, made broad charges of treason and corruption against the government, and was tried in a court presided over by Chief Justice Holt (1704). See Siebert, _op. cit._, p. 275.
[7]William Fuller was one of the notorious impostors who abounded in England at the time of the Popish Plot. His grossly fictitious account of a sinister scheme to restore the Stuarts was exposed by the House of Commons (1692), and he was promptly arrested, prosecuted, and convicted. Macaulay has a good description of the Fuller incident, _op. cit._, pp. 280-289.
[8]These ecclesiastics, led by William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, refused to promulgate from their pulpits the Declaration of Indulgence by which James II would have granted freedom of worship to his subjects. The Seven Bishops argued that he was attempting to exercise a dispensing power that the crown did not possess. They were prosecuted before Parliament, but acquitted (1688). See Clark, _op. cit._, pp. 120-121.
[9]Francis Nicholson, a stormy petrel among colonial administrators, was Governor of Virginia at the time of this episode (1704). His intended victim was John Monroe, a clergyman of the Church of England. The information against Monroe is in the _Executive Journals of the Council of Virginia_ (Richmond, 1927), II, 451-452.
[10]Laurence Echard, Tory divine and historian, wrote the bitterly anti-Williamite _History of the Revolution of 1688_. See Eugene Lawrence, _Lives of the British Historians_ (New York, 1855), I, 312-315.
[11]Paul de Rapin de Thoyras, although a Frenchman, became the foremost authority on English history. His _Histoire d'Angleterre_ appeared in 1723, and long remained the standard work on the subject, influencing a whole generation of British historians including Hume. See Lawrence, _op. cit._, I, 226-229.
[12]Marcus Brutus, one of the assassins of Julius Caesar, is most familiar to the English-speaking world as Shakespeare's "noblest Roman of them all." Hamilton's anecdote is based on the laudatory picture of the man drawn in Plutarch's _Lives_.