TRIAL

OF

CAPTAIN EDWARD DALE,

OF THE

Dorthumberland Regiment of Militia,

BY A

GENERAL COURT MARTIAL,

HELD AT

NORMAN CROSS,

IN THE COUNTY OF HUNTINGDON,

In the Month of May, 1810;

WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS,

BY CAPTAIN DALE.

NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE:

PRINTED AND SOLD BY D. AKENHEAD AND SONS;

SOLD ALSO BY T. EGERTON, MILITARY LIBRARY, WHITEHALL, AND LONGMAN, HURST, REES, ORME, AND BROWNE, LONDON,

TO THE PUBLIC.

SOME reason will be expected to be assigned for the publication of this Trial, after the lapse of so considerable a period of time, since his Majesty's approval of the sentence of the court was made known to the army; and I shall, therefore, in this address, state the cause which has now induced me to submit it to the public.

The prosecution which I have suffered, and which was attended with circumstances of peculiar hardship, was so clearly proved to have been the result of a base and miserable intrigue, without even the shadow of a pretext that the public service could be benefited by its success, that I was advised by several of my friends to publish the trial immediately after the promulgation of the sentence. The very flattering encomium however which by that sentence was bestowed, and I hope justly bestowed, upon my conduct, and the still more flattering terms in which his majesty was pleased to express his approbation of the sentence, so effectually cleared my character from the aspersions that had been maliciously cast upon it as to leave me nothing on that score to wish for.

The parties who had attempted my ruin, very soon met with the punishment which they merited, by being disgracefully deprived of their military rank, so that had I been actuated by revenge even that passion might have been fully gratified without a further exposure of their conduct; besides, I was unwilling to wound the feelings of those connected with them, by laying any thing more before the public than I conceived to be absolutely necessary for my own justification. For these reasons, and no other, I had resisted the solicitations of my friends, and given up all thoughts of committing my trial to the press. An occurrence has however incidentally arisen out of the proceedings of the court martial which has compelled me to alter my determination. The conduct of Mr William Morrison, one of the witnesses called against me, both previously to the trial, and while giving his evidence, was so evidently the result of a premeditated scheme to ruin me, that I was compelled in my defence not only to make such observations upon that conduct as I knew it merited, but to call witnesses to prove what that conduct had been. I performed this painful duty conscientiously, yet fearlessly, and dreadful indeed would be the situation of a prisoner if he were subject to be deterred, by the dread of future consequences, from

making such observations upon the evidence of the witnesses, as that evidence should seem to him to require. The witnesses are under the protection of the court as well as the prisoner, and if a witness be unfairly attacked the court unquestionably will protect him.

In the present case, the Prosecutor's reply was evidently written to support Mr Morrison's evidence, and the sentence of the court, sanctioned, as it afterwards was, by the approbation of His Majesty, forms perhaps the best commentary upon that reply. Mr Morrison however was determined not to remain quiet, and therefore on the 25th June last (two days after the sentence of the court had been read at the head of the regiment) he wrote me a letter, complaining that I had in my defence made observations upon his conduct which were not warranted by the fact. This letter led to a correspondence between us, which was conducted on his part so evidently with a design (by means of the most grossly insulting language) to prevent the possibility of any explanation coming from me, and thus to afford himself an opportunity uncontradicted of circulating the most unfounded charges against me, that I felt myself compelled to lay the whole before Lord Lovaine, the colonel of the regiment, and to inform Mr Morrison that I had done so. His lordship, who was well acquainted with Mr Morrison's conduct, deemed it necessary to order me to bring him to a court martial for writing the letters in question, and he was, by the sentence of that court, dismissed from the Northumberland Regiment.

Since Mr Morrison "left the regiment," he has had the audacity to circulate an anonymous publication, addressed to "The Army in General, and the Officers of Militia in particu lar," containing copies, (with some trifling alterations) of the correspondence which produced his dismissal, accompanied by a number of remarks purporting to be explanatory of the correspondence, and containing (as do his letters themselves) a series of the most gross misrepresentations.

The baseness of this act was only equalled by its consummate folly. Mr Morrison's letters contained little more than his own statements of his complaints; statements which he well knew, when he was making them, were wholly unfounded, and he must have known too, (as will soon be seen) that I could prove them to be so, by publishing the minutes of the court martial. The only expectation therefore that he could form of escaping the castigation, which he so well merited, must have been founded upon the hope that I would treat him and his publication with silent contempt. I shall soon have occasion to explain why I have not done so. A considerable part of Mr Morrison's letters has been occupied, not in any defence of his own conduct, (for he has never yet dared to state what that conduct was) but in an