Chatto £20 pp429

John Cooke — the barrister who acted as the solicitor general at the trial of Charles I — has long been recognised as one of the great bit-part actors in the drama of the English civil war. At its climax in 1649, when the defeated king was brought to trial, and when most London lawyers were running for cover, Cooke accepted the momentous role of preparing his monarch’s prosecution. It was a brave act, motivated, so far as we can tell, not by careerism, but by godly conviction. Charles, he was convinced, had committed treason in levying war against his people; and, with the fearlessness of the righteous, Cooke argued publicly before the court — and, less successfully, before the English people — that justice demanded that the king should die.

This “tyrannicide brief” brought him preferment under the various Cromwellian regimes (he became a judge in Ireland in the 1650s); and he used his newfound status to argue for a series of commendable causes: the reform of the law; the end of imprisonment for debt; the limitation of the death sentence to all but the most serious of crimes. Nothing, of course, came of this, as his proposals foundered on the rock-like conservatism of his profession. But Cooke remains a fascinating and attractive figure: principled, self-made, and with a breadth of human sympathy and a zeal for reform that contrasts nobly with the harsh complacencies of his age.

Come the Restoration in 1660, however, there was the moment of reckoning. While other Cromwellian placemen fled for the safety of exile, he stood his ground and faced trial and a hideous death (hanged, castrated, disembowelled and quartered) with apparent equanimity. His head was displayed on a pike near Westminster Hall, the scene (according to taste) of either his greatest triumph or his most monstrous regicidal crime.

To Geoffrey Robertson — himself an “internationally renowned human rights lawyer” (so his dust jacket assures us) — Cooke is a hero for our times: the inventor of the principle that “sovereign impunity” is no defence for rulers who levy war against their people. Indeed, Cooke’s “arguments resonate today in ways that historians have not appreciated”. For the king’s trial is the earliest precedent, Robertson asserts, “for the trials of modern heads of state . . . like Pinochet and Milosevic, who attempt (just like Charles I) to plead sovereign immunity when arraigned for killing their own people”.

This novel insight, so carelessly unnoticed by humble academic toilers in the field, necessarily colours Robertson’s view of the civil war. His is a binary world of despotic royalist reactionaries and forward-looking parliamentarian liberals, of goodies and baddies, in which the heroism of Cooke is neatly paired with the villainy of Charles I (a man who grew up in “a narcissistic cocoon” to become an out-and-out despot). To Robertson, the civil war is all Charles’s fault, because for a monarch to “kill subjects, loyal to him in all but their method of devotion”, is silly and “irrational”.

Perhaps so; but, unfortunately, the 17th century lacked Robertson’s superior wisdom. All over Europe at the time (and the 1640s were the final phase of the Thirty Years’ war), monarchs were fighting similar wars against subjects who differed in “their method of devotion” — or, to use plainer language, for reasons of religion. Such wars were possible, and the English civil war is no exception, because many good and honest men believed that the king was right; and all but the most blinkered of partisans can discern nobility and heroism, as well as bigotry and cruelty, on both sides of the conflict. It is that which made the civil war, genuinely, a national tragedy. Neither side had a monopoly of either virtue or vice.

Patronising towards the civil war’s combatants, Robertson is equally condescending towards latter-day historians who have failed to appreciate the splendour of Cooke’s tyrant-slaying role. In fact, current writers on the period are well familiar with Cooke’s contribution; it is just that Robertson seems not to have read them. And while he preens himself on finding minor errors in works now decades old, he repeatedly fails to spot the howlers in his own text, confusing dates (the New Model Army was created in 1645, not 1644), muddling titles (it was the Marquess of Ormond, not the “Earl”), misspelling famous names (the painter is “van Dyck”, not “Van Dyke”), inventing offices (there was no “Lord Chancellor” in 1649), misquoting even the simplest French (“pour encourage (sic) les autres”), and garbling the names of books in Greek.

Poor John Cooke: after the hangman finished his grisly work, he must have thought that there was no greater worldly indignity that could befall him. Little was he to know that his first full-length biography would be so pompous, accident-prone and parti-pris a work as this.

DECISION DAY

On the last day of his trial in Whitehall, left, after he had been sentenced to death, Charles I was refused permission to speak, and was immediately dragged away to prison. As he was being hustled out of the chamber by the guards, soldiers in the hall who had witnessed the trial began to chant “Justice! Justice!” and “Execution!”, and several supposedly blew tobacco smoke over him. Charles, in response, is reported to have said, “Poor soldiers, for sixpence they would say as much for their commanders.”

John Adamson’s history of the English civil war is published in 2006. The Tyrannicide Brief is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £20 on 0870 165 8585

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websites:
www.open2.net/civilwar
Excellent Open University site

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