Jihadis are terrorists. Don’t charge them with treason
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Version 0 of 1. In a timely nod to the season of gunpowder, treason and plot, foreign secretary Philip Hammond has proposed reviving the dormant 1351 Treason Act for British jihadis who swear allegiance to Islamic State (Isis). Backing him on Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show, Tory MP Philip Hollobone said that the crime of treason requires special treatment because it is “worse than murder”, more or less word for word the tagline on my Tudor crime novel, Treachery. There’s no statement yet on whether Hammond wants to reinstate a scaffold at Tyburn for the purposes of hanging, drawing and quartering traitors, though high treason stillofficially carried the death penalty until 1998. Despite the swashbuckling resonance of “high treason”, Hammond has a clear precedent in applying it to religious extremists perceived to pose a threat to national security. It was the Tudors who really got creative with the definition of treason. Henry VIII used it as groundsto execute wives he accused of infidelity and their lovers, and also introduced religious nonconformity into the issue by condemning monks who refused to accept his supremacy to a traitor’s death. In the 1580s, Elizabeth I’s government faced a growing problem of underground religious cells – disenfranchised young men, often converted or radicalised at university, travelling overseas to religious training schools before returning to England on what they thought of as martyrdom missions (they called England “death’s waiting-room”). These young men were Catholic priests whose intentions were, for the most part, benign: to offer Catholic rites to those denied the freedom to practise their religion openly, while converting a few more souls along the way. While a tiny minority gambled with the idea of assassinating the Queen, the greater fear among her councillors was that religious loyalty, in this case to Rome, would always outweigh loyalty to queen and country. In the event of an invasion by the European Catholic powers, English Catholics’ allegiance would be to a higher power rather than to England. Perhaps this same fear lies behind Hammond’s desire to cry treason; too many citizens whose first loyalty is to a religious cause that supersedes national identity is a terrifying prospect for any government. But Elizabeth did not want to be seen persecuting people for their religion for fear of losing popularity and winning further sympathy for their cause; the increasingly punitive legislation passed against missionary priests made it clear that they were not being punished for their beliefs, but for turning people away from their loyalty to the Queen. They were not executed as heretics by burning, but by hanging, drawing and quartering, the penalty for the political offence of treason. Nobody was fooled. The missionary priests who were disembowelled became martyrs and, far from deterring would-be missionaries, their deaths only inspired more. In the same way, tempting as it is to find some enhanced way of expressing how abhorrent we find the actions of a British man killing fellow Britons in the name of an imagined religious state, to grant these actions a special status, above and of greater significance than mere terrorism or murder, is to accord the terrorists a grandeur that serves their own view of their “mission”. Hammond should save treason for bonfire night, and treat the jihadis as the murderers they are. Stephanie Merritt’s latest book, writing as SJ Parris, is Treachery, published by HarperCollins |