My Lords, every answer that most of them have been required to make they are sensible they cannot make without danger of criminating themselves, being all involved in the crimes of the prisoner.
Burke highlights the fear witnesses have of self-incrimination due to their involvement in the crimes.
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More from Edmund Burke
But an absurd theory on one side of a question forms no justification for alleging a false fact or promulgating mischievous maxims on the other.
If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world.
They threw a politic, well-wrought veil over every circumstance tending to weaken the rights which in the meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate, or which might furnish a precedent for any future departure from what they…
They look upon the legal hereditary succession of their crown as among their rights, not as among their wrongs,--as a benefit, not as a grievance,--as a security for their liberty, not as a badge of servitude.
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