ABSTRACT
On June 5, 1817, the very day that Committees of Secrecy were nominated in both Houses of Parliament to study Ministers’ new “Green Bags” of alarming documents, T. J. Wooler was put on trial for some writing in the Black Dwarf of April 2nd. The Black Dwarf had, after Cobbett’s flight, become the leading organ of the “Radical Reformers” and was destined to remain so until Cobbett’s return in 1819. Wooler, who had undertaken his own defence, made an intrepid reply to the charges, and, though a verdict of Guilty was at first recorded, it transpired almost immediately that three of the Jurors had dissented from the Verdict as returned by the Foreman. Wooler’s two trials had taken place on June 5th, and on June 9th there opened the bigger affair of the High Treason Trials which had been decided on for the four persons principally accused of plotting the notorious “insurrection” associated with Spa-Fields.
