Trial of Pedro de Zulueta, jun., on a Charge of Slave Trading, under 5 Geo. IV, cap. 113, in 1843, at the Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey, London

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The case, which will be laid before you in the following pages, must be admitted to be one of an unprecedented character. A merchant, to all practical purposes a British merchant, the junior member of a firm of unquestioned respectability, in which his father and brother are active partners with himself, which has been established for upwards of seventy years in Spain, and of twenty in the City of London, during which period they have maintained, both as merchants and as individuals in private life, the character which will be found in the following pages to have been given them upon oath by several of the most eminent of their fellow-merchants—this individual finds himself suddenly arrested, in the manner hereafter described, within the precincts of his own private office, which is situated in the most conspicuous spot in the City of London, whilst in the pursuit of his ordinary business, upon a bench-warrant, as it is said (but which was never shown to, or has been since seen by him), a true bill having been found against him by the Grand Jury of the County of Middlesex. The charge will be found in the two indictments inserted in pages 211 and 214, the former for felony, under the Act of 5 Geo. IV, cap. 113, entitled “An Act to amend and consolidate the Laws relating to the Abolition of the Slave Trade;” the latter for conspiracy, to do that which the former indictment describes as done, viz. “manning,” &c. &c., “and shipping certain goods on board a certain vessel, called the Augusta, for the purpose of dealing in slaves;” and the penalty, amounting, in fact, to a person in the rank and station of the accused and of his family, to a forfeiture of life, and those objects which are dearer than life itself. He is carried in custody to the police-station on Garlick Hill, where shortly afterwards, a London attorney, whose name he had never before heard, appears and prefers a charge of slave dealing. The prisoner is immediately conveyed to the Central Criminal Court, then sitting at the Old Bailey; there the two indictments are read to him pro formâ, for they leave him in utter ignorance of who the prosecutor is, or upon what depositions the Grand Jury had found the bill, although his defence, to be effectual, must be directed against them: they remain to this moment an undisclosed mystery, and no one is answerable for the accuracy of those statements, whilst who the prosecutor was, was only disclosed by the counsel for the prosecution at the trial, before the examination of the witnesses began. The prisoner’s application to the Central Criminal Court to be admitted to bail was strenuously opposed by the prosecuting attorney in person, when the Court, yielding to the representation of the probable result of the refusal upon the members of an honourable family thus violently taken by surprise and distracted, granted the application on terms indeed which the Court itself deemed excessive, but which were the only terms to which the attorney’s consent could be obtained. It was found impossible, on account of the lateness of the hour, to meet with one of the two individuals who had been approved of by the attorney; and under these circumstances the Court consented to receive one security alone for 2,000l., and the prisoner’s own recognizance for 6,000l. Thus it happened, that he who had left his home, his wife, and his children in the morning, with as assured a conscience as any of you can do, returned about ten o’clock in the evening a prisoner, with the possibility of a sentence of transportation hanging over his head, as ignorant of his accuser, or of the facts deposed to against him, as if he had fallen into the hands of the Inquisition.