ARREST OF MR. ARTHUR LYNCH, M. P. (Hansard, 12 June 1902)

§ MR. SWIFT MACNEILL (Donegal, S.)
I desire, as a matter of privilege, to firing before you, Sir, a matter affecting the detention of an hon. Member from his Parliamentary duties in a ease which has recently occurred in which a Member of the House was charged with high treason.

§ MR. SPEAKER
Order, order! I wish to say at once that that is a matter which cannot be brought forward as a matter of privilege. It is now before the Criminal Courts.

§ MR. SWIFT MACNEILL
Certainly, Sir. But I say there has been a breach of privilege committed in that no communication has been made to the House of the arrest of one of its Members for high treason. That fact should have been communicated to this House in the ordinary and proper way.

§ MR. SPEAKER
This is a point of practice and not of privilege.

§ MR. SWIFT MACNEILL
Yes, Sir, and if you will allow me I will raise it as a matter of practice. I bring it forward because what has occurred on this occasion may be used as a precedent at a time when it might be very dangerous in its application. I do not raise the question on behalf of the hon. Member for Galway, with whom I have had no communication, but as a matter affecting the privileges of the House generally. It is laid down by Sir Erskine May that, in all eases where Members are arrested on criminal charges, the House must be informed of the cause for which they are detained from their service in Parliament. It is also laid down that in the ease of commitments for high treason or any military offence communication has to be made by Royal message. A few lines further down the reason for that is shown— In the case of naval Courts-martial the communication is to be made by the Lord High Admiral or the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty by whom the warrant is issued. These are cases of arrest for high treason— It is the ordinary practice of the Home Secretary who signs a warrant to communicate to the House as a Minister of the Crown. Then, again, Sir Erskine May says— Another form of communication to either House of Parliament is in the nature of a verbal Message delivered by command by a Minister of the Grown to the House of which he is a Member. Sir Erskine May further says— This communication is made whenever a Member of either House is arrested for any crime at the suit of the Crown, as the privileges of the House require that the House should be informed of the cause for which their Member is imprisoned and retained from his services in Parliament. High treason is pre-eminently a crime at the suit of the Crown. I have only been able to discover two precedents. In the ease of Lord George Gordon, in 1780, Lord North, who was then Prime Minister, 479 went to the bar of the House and communicated a verbal Message that, at the King's command, Lord George Gordon had been arrested and charged with high treason. In the case of Mr. Smith O'Brien, in 1848, an exactly analogous practice was adopted. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the moment the news came to his ears, wrote a letter to the Speaker, on August 5th, 1848, from the office of the Viceroy, stating that it was his painful duty to inform him that Mr. Smith O'Brien had been imprisoned. As the representative of the Crown, the Lord Lieutenant's was practically a verbal Message. Let me tell you what occurred yesterday. The Home Secretary, who must, in the course of his duties, have signed the warrant—

§ MR. SPEAKER
I must remind the hon. Member that I have already read a letter from Sir A. de Rutzen in which he states that the hon. Member for Galway was arrested upon a warrant signed by himself.

§ MR. MACNEILL
I did not hear that. But the Home Secretary said— The prisoner will be brought up this afternoon, and all about it will become public property. That is not the way to treat the House of Commons as the grand inquest of the nation. [A NATIONALIST MEMBER: It was only an Irish Member.] He should have given us the information by a verbal message from the Crown. The First Lord of the Treasury, when I asked him not discourteously, said that was a question which should not be addressed to him. May I now, with the greatest courtesy, but with the greatest directness, challenge that?

§ MR. SPEAKER
The hon. Member must remember he is addressing me now on some point of practice.

§ MR. SWIFT MACNEILL
Very well, Mr. Speaker. You have heard me with great patience and great courtesy, and I have put the matter before you as well as I could. It is the invariable practice that the House of Commons should be communicated with, in a case of a charge of treason against one of its Members, by a Message from the Crown, and the reason is that treason is pre-eminently 480 a crime against the Crown. If that were not so, the relations between the King and the House might be very strained. It is a proper thing when a Minister of the Crown advises the arrest for high treason of a member of this House that that arrest should be told by him, taking on himself, as he is bound to do, the responsibility of the King and the delivery of the Royal Message. It has been done in every other case, and I do not think that if this were a British Member this would have happened. I say that not attributing any unfairness to hon. Gentlemen. We wish to protect to the utmost of our power the privileges of this House. I am not personally affected by the case of Mr. Lynch. I bring it forward as I would bring forward the case of any other hon. Gentleman who is a Member of this House. I leave the matter in your hands, Mr. Speaker, and I ask you respectfully to rule that it is in accordance with practice in cases of high treason that a Minister of the Crown should communicate the action of the Crown by a verbal Message, and that the practice is necessary for the preservation of the liberties of Members.

§ MR. SPEAKER
The hon. Member is quite right in saying that it is of the highest importance, when a Member of this House has been arrested, and, therefore, has been prevented from performing his duties in Parliament, that the earliest opportunity should be taken of informing this House of his arrest. That is a duty which is ordinarily performed by the magistrate before whom the person charged is brought. That has been done in this case. The hon. Member seeks to establish it as a rule of procedure of this House that in a case of high treason a Message must be delivered by a Minister of the Crown from the Crown of this House I am not surprised at his raising this point, because there are undoubtedly words in Sir Erskine May's book which would go a long way to support him in that view. When the hon. Member asked me a question on this matter yesterday, I had no notice of the question, and, as he himself says, in the last 120 years there have been only two charges of high treason 481 against Members of this House. Therefore it is a matter with which I may well be expected not to be very familiar. But I have had an opportunity of looking at the precedents, and I am bound to say that they do not seem to me to bear out what is stated in Sir Erskine May's book. The hon. Member has referred to these two—the only two—precedents. His proposition is that, whenever an hon. Member of this House is charged with high treason, it is the duty of the Minister to communicate to the House a verbal Message from the Crown at the Table. These two precedents were that of Lord George Gordon in 1780, and that of Mr. Smith O'Brien in 1848. In the case of Lord George Gordon there was a Message from the Grown delivered at the Table. But that was a case of a very peculiar kind. It was a case where, as the hon. Member, who we all know is well versed in history, is aware, there had been, some days before the Message was delivered, an assault upon this House. A large mob brought to the House by Lord George Gordon assaulted and intimidated Members on their way to the House, and the result was that the House was in considerable peril for some time. The House the next day passed resolutions condemning the conduct of the mob and asserting their right to be free from such interference. In those circumstances Lord George Gordon, having afterwards joined the mob in London, was arrested by the Crown on a charge of high treason. It seems to me that when the House itself had been attacked it was an extremely natural thing that His Majesty should send a formal communication of the fact of the arrest to the House. That is the only case in which, in regard to an arrest upon a simple charge of high treason, a Message was sent by the Crown at all. The hon. Member also quoted the case of Mr. Smith O'Brien as an authority in his favour, but he forgets that in the case of Mr. Smith O'Brien no such Message was delivered. He gets over that difficulty by saying that something analogous happened. There was nothing analogous at all. What happened was simply that a great Executive officer in Ireland, the Lord Lieutenant, not acting as Viceroy, but as an Executive Minister, wrote a letter to the Speaker informing him of 482 the arrest of the Member. It would have been perfectly regular, whether it was necessary or not, if the Home Secretary had written such a letter to me in this case. But it does not at all follow that a Loyal Message is necessary; nor is the case of a letter written by the Lord Lieutenant to the Speaker informing him of the arrest of a Member analogous to a Loyal Message. Therefore, of the two authorities cited, one of them—the case of Lord George Gordon—appears to me to be a very exceptional case, and the other one is no authority at all with regard to a Loyal Message. In these circumstances, I see no ground for the suggestion that the arrest of a Member of this House on a charge of high treason should be intimated to the House in any different way from the arrest of a Member charged with any other criminal offence.