This is a series of three blogs about Parliament and Libel. The first, Privilege, Libel and the long road to Stockdale v. Hansard, Part I: from Strode’s Case to Article IX,dealt with the earliest encounters, in the seventeenth century, between parliamentarians and the court over the publication of material that the parliamentarians believed was protected by privilege, the most notorious and important of which was the case of Speaker Williams, prosecuted for the publication of Thomas Dangerfield’s Information of 1680 concerning the Popish Plot. The case ultimately led to the introduction of Article IX of the Bill of Rights, which is still the authority text for parliamentary privilege today. However, the guilty verdict against Williams was never rescinded.
The result of the failure to reverse the judgment in R. v. Williams meant that there remained plenty of ambiguity about whether or not Article IX made it possible to publish parliamentary…
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