Treason

• 1. Introduction

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  Treason is the crime of betraying the very authority to which you owe your loyalty. The word itself traces back to the Latin tradere, meaning "to deliver or hand over," and its original form, traditors, described bishops and Christians who handed sacred scriptures or fellow believers to Roman authorities during the Diocletianic Persecution between AD 303 and 305. From that act of surrender, a concept of the gravest political crime was born.

  For centuries, treason was the charge leveled at enemies of the crown. Queens were executed under it. Soldiers were hanged for it. Revolutionaries were both condemned by it and celebrated for defying it. And yet legal scholar Frederic William Maitland captured the essential problem in a single sentence: "Treason is a crime which has a vague circumference and more than one centre."

  Who actually owes loyalty to whom? What counts as betrayal? And what happens when the people in power use the charge as a weapon against dissent? Those questions have been tested in courtrooms from 18th-century Virginia to 21st-century Moscow, and they remain unresolved today.

• 2. The English Foundation

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  The Treason Act 1351 is the law that Joseph Story called "the pole star of English jurisprudence," and it is still in effect. Written in Norman French, it established the original statutory definition of treason in England, covering acts such as plotting the king's death, violating his closest female relatives, and levying war against him.

  Before that act, the rights of the Crown had been gradually separating from those of other nobles since the 12th century. Beginning with Edward I, the monarchy began asserting that rebellions counted as treasonous by nature. By the Elizabethan age, courts had moved even further, embracing what was called constructive treason as a tool of political control. Edward Coke ruled in R v Owen that mere speech about the monarch could constitute treason if it "disabled his title," a sharp departure from his earlier view that "bare words may make a heretick, but not a traytor without an overt act."

  The penalties for treason in English law were designed to terrify. Men faced being hanged, drawn and quartered. Women were burnt at the stake. Beheading could be substituted by royal command, generally reserved for royalty and the nobility. These penalties were abolished in 1790, 1814, and 1973 respectively. The Treason Act 1695 added a further procedural safeguard that would reach across the Atlantic: it required two witnesses to the same offence to secure a conviction, a rule later incorporated word for word into the United States Constitution.

• 3. Loyalty and Its Limits

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  During the American Revolution, a slave named Billy was sentenced to death for treason against Virginia after joining the British. Thomas Jefferson, then Governor of Virginia, pardoned him. The argument that saved Billy's life was that a person who is not a citizen and receives none of the benefits of citizenship owes no loyalty to the state, and therefore cannot commit treason against it. In earlier similar cases, enslaved people had been found guilty and executed; Billy's case broke that pattern.

  A different version of the same argument arose more than a century and a half later when William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw, broadcast Nazi propaganda from Germany to Britain during the Second World War. Joyce's court-appointed defence team argued that as an American citizen who had become a naturalised German, he owed no loyalty to the British Crown. The prosecution countered that Joyce had incorrectly stated his nationality to obtain a British passport and had voted in Britain, and therefore did owe allegiance to the king. The court agreed, and Joyce was convicted of treason and hanged. He was the last person put to death for treason in Britain, in 1946.

  Until the late 19th century, Britain held to the doctrine of perpetual allegiance: British subjects remained subjects even after emigrating and taking citizenship elsewhere. This doctrine became explosive after the 1867 Fenian Rising, when Irish-Americans who had traveled to Ireland to participate in the uprising were charged with treason by British authorities. The resulting outrage prompted the United States Congress to pass the Expatriation Act of 1868, which granted Americans the right to freely renounce their citizenship. Britain eventually followed with its own legislation and later signed a treaty recognising that British subjects who had become American citizens were no longer British nationals, and no longer liable for treason.

• 4. When Monarchs Become the Traitors

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  The English Revolution of the 17th century and the French Revolution of the 18th century introduced a concept that inverted the traditional logic of treason entirely. Under the older framework, treason ran upward: a subject betrayed his sovereign. But these revolutions held that sovereignty resided in the nation or the people, and that the monarch himself could be the traitor if he failed in his duty to them.

  Charles I of England and Louis XVI of France were each tried and found guilty of exactly this charge, and both were executed. The logic was symmetrical but the politics were unstable. When Charles II was restored to the English throne, he regarded the men who had condemned his father as traitors in the traditional sense, making the same act readable as heroism or high treason depending on who held power.

  Queens Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard had been executed for treason against Henry VIII on charges of adultery, though most historians consider the evidence against Anne Boleyn and her alleged lovers to be dubious. The 18th-century trial of Johann Friedrich Struensee in Denmark illustrates how elastic the concept had become: the court ruled that a man having sexual relations with a queen was guilty not only of ordinary adultery but of treason against her husband, the king.

• 5. Michel Ney and the Problem of Allegiance

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  Marshal Michel Ney swore allegiance to the restored King Louis XVIII of France after Napoleon's first fall from power. When Napoleon escaped from Elba, Ney rejoined him and commanded the French forces at the Battle of Waterloo. After Napoleon's final defeat and exile in the summer of 1815, Ney was arrested and tried before the Chamber of Peers.

  His lawyer, Andre Dupin, mounted a defence of startling ingenuity. He argued that Ney's hometown of Sarrelouis had been annexed by Prussia under the Treaty of Paris of 1815, making Ney legally a Prussian citizen, no longer owing loyalty to the French king, and therefore not subject to a French treason charge. It might have worked. Ney himself destroyed the argument by interrupting his own defence to announce: "Je suis Francais et je resterai Francais!" (I am French and I will remain French!). Having refused the one defence that might have saved him, Ney was found guilty and executed.

  The episode crystallises a tension that runs through the entire history of the charge. Treason depends entirely on the existence of a bond of loyalty. Deny the bond, and the crime dissolves. Affirm it, as Ney did with a kind of doomed pride, and the sentence follows as a matter of logic.

• 6. Treason as Political Weapon

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  Historian Ron Chernow documented that Alexander Hamilton and George Washington regarded much of the criticism directed at their administration as disloyal and even treasonous in nature. When the undeclared Quasi-War with France broke out in 1797-98, Hamilton increasingly mistook dissent for treason, according to Chernow. The Jeffersonian opposition behaved the same way. After 1801, with a peaceful transfer of power between parties, the political rhetoric of treason against opponents gradually diminished.

  Thomas Jefferson himself was not immune to the impulse: in 1791 he declared that any Virginia official who cooperated with the federal Bank of the United States proposed by Hamilton was guilty of "treason" against Virginia and should be executed. The bank opened; no one was prosecuted.

  In some contexts, the term traitor has been worn as a badge rather than a brand. Abolitionists who rejected the authority of the federal government on the question of slavery proudly called one another traitors. William Lloyd Garrison called himself a traitor for decades. The Dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the-back myth, shows the opposite extreme: an accusation of mass treason leveled at a large group of people can serve as a unifying political message, regardless of any actual treasonable act. These uses of the word operate as political epithets rather than legal terms, and that gap between the legal definition and the rhetorical weapon is as wide today as it has ever been.

• 7. Modern Laws Across the World

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  Russia's treason law, updated in April 2023, covers espionage, disclosure of state secrets, and any assistance to a foreign state in hostile activities against the Russian Federation, carrying a penalty of 12 years to life in prison. In early 2024, Russian American ballet dancer Ksenia Karelina was arrested in Yekaterinburg and charged with treason for sending $51.80 to Razom, a New York City-based nonprofit providing humanitarian assistance to Ukraine. She initially faced life imprisonment, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to 12 years. Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian opposition politician, was convicted in April 2023 on charges of treason and spreading disinformation about the Russian military, and sentenced to 25 years. That sentence was described as comparable in length only to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s.

  In New Zealand, treason was the last capital crime on the books: the death penalty for it was not revoked until 1989, a full 28 years after it was abolished for murder. Brazil provides that treason during wartime is the only crime for which a person can be sentenced to death. The only military person in Brazilian history convicted of treason was Carlos Lamarca, an army captain who deserted to lead a communist-aligned guerrilla movement against the military government.

  In Ireland, no person has ever been charged under the Treason Act 1939. Members of the Provisional IRA who levied what might legally be described as war against the British government during the Troubles were instead prosecuted for murder, violent crimes, or terrorist offences. The gap between what treason laws say in theory and what prosecutors choose to charge in practice remains one of the defining features of the crime across almost every jurisdiction.