Product Description

Charles I waged civil wars that cost one in ten Englishmen their lives. But in 1649 Parliament was hard put to find a lawyer with the skill and daring to prosecute a King who claimed to be above the law: in the end the man they briefed was the radical lawyer John Cooke. His Puritan conscience, political vision, and love of civil liberties gave him the courage to bring the King’s trial to its dramatic conclusion: the English Republic. He would pay dearly for it: Charles I was beheaded, but eleven years later Cooke himself was arrested, tried, and brutally executed at the hands of Charles II.

Geoffrey Robertson, an internationally renowned human rights lawyer, provides a vivid new reading of the tumultuous Civil War years, exposing long-hidden truths: that the King was guilty as charged, that his execution was necessary to establish the sovereignty of Parliament, that the regicide trials were rigged and their victims should be seen as national heroes.

John Cooke sacrificed his own life to make tyranny a crime. His trial of Charles I, the first trial of a head of state for waging war on his own people, became a forerunner of the trials of Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Milosevic, and Saddam Hussein. This is a superb work of history that casts a revelatory light on some of the most important issues of our time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #794857 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-05
• Released on: 2006-09-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 448 pages

From The New Yorker
In 1649, after Oliver Cromwell and his army had taken King Charles I prisoner, they had to decide what to do with him. The easiest option, according to a contemporary, was assassination, "for which there were hands ready enough to be employed." Instead, a lawyer named John Cooke was given the brief to prosecute him. (Other lawyers left town to dodge the job.) At the time, there was no language for what Charles was charged with: as king, he was the law, so prosecuting him seemed a logical absurdity. Robertson, a lawyer involved in the prosecutions of Augusto Pinochet and Saddam Hussein, credits Cooke with helping to make those proceedings possible; he "made tyranny a crime." But Cooke himself was executed after the monarchy was restored. His heart and genitals were fed to stray dogs, and his head, at King Charles II's direction, was displayed at the entrance to Westminster Hall.
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Review
Praise from the United Kingdom for
The Tyrannicide Brief

“Those terrible, blood-soaked years are vividly conjured up by Geoffrey Robertson. This is a fine book: well researched, well written, well indexed and well illustrated. The fact there is no bibliography is evidence that Robertson has broken new ground. Not only has he written the first biography of John Cooke, one of the pivotal figures of the mid-seventeenth century, but he has illuminated the legal process by which a powerful monarch was held to account by the law of the land.”
–Sunday Herald

“In telling his story, Geoffrey Robertson has redeemed from obscurity an unsung hero of true greatness, a selfless champion of the poor and a law reformer of rare distinction. More important, he has shed invigorating light on the course of the English Civil War.”
–The Spectator

“Geoffrey Robertson provides us with some fascinating insights into this significant case. What makes the book especially illuminating are the parallels with modern practice . . . [A] work of great compassion and, at a time when it seems to be fashionable for politicians to denigrate lawyers, an essential read for anyone who believes in the fearless independence of the law.”
–The Times

“[Robertson’s] forensic intelligence can penetrate where professional historians have not yet reached.”
–Literary Review

“A work of literary advocacy as elegant, impassioned and original as any the author can ever have laid before a court.”
–The Observer



From the Hardcover edition.

Review
Praise from the United Kingdom for
The Tyrannicide Brief

“Those terrible, blood-soaked years are vividly conjured up by Geoffrey Robertson. This is a fine book: well researched, well written, well indexed and well illustrated. The fact there is no bibliography is evidence that Robertson has broken new ground. Not only has he written the first biography of John Cooke, one of the pivotal figures of the mid-seventeenth century, but he has illuminated the legal process by which a powerful monarch was held to account by the law of the land.”
–Sunday Herald

“In telling his story, Geoffrey Robertson has redeemed from obscurity an unsung hero of true greatness, a selfless champion of the poor and a law reformer of rare distinction. More important, he has shed invigorating light on the course of the English Civil War.”
–The Spectator

“Geoffrey Robertson provides us with some fascinating insights into this significant case. What makes the book especially illuminating are the parallels with modern practice . . . [A] work of great compassion and, at a time when it seems to be fashionable for politicians to denigrate lawyers, an essential read for anyone who believes in the fearless independence of the law.”
–The Times

“[Robertson’s] forensic intelligence can penetrate where professional historians have not yet reached.”
–Literary Review

“A work of literary advocacy as elegant, impassioned and original as any the author can ever have laid before a court.”
–The Observer

Customer Reviews

WADHAM AND GOMORRAH
Around the turn of the 17th century, Wadham College was founded at Oxford for the gifted sons of poor but respectable parents. Its high-profile alumni from this period included Admiral Blake who achieved spectacular victories during Cromwell's reign. It also welcomed, at the age of 14, John Cooke, later the prosecuting counsel who secured the conviction of King Charles I.

Geoffrey Robertson has a long and distinguished record as a barrister in the field of human rights, and in this book he turns constitutional historian to raise awareness of the significance of Cooke for English legal history. It is startling to realise that the only written constitution England has ever had was a republican one, for the duration of Cromwell's Protectorate 1649-1660. Its roots were shallow, and its fate was sealed with the death of Cromwell himself during a ferocious storm in 1658, widely touted as an omen. Nevertheless the law and polity of England under the Stuart kings were a sickening morass. James I, founder of the dynasty, had indoctrinated his son Charles from boyhood with the doctrine of Divine Right, under which the monarch was allegedly above the law. This convenient theology was understood by Charles literally and unquestioningly. He did not even pretend to think that his agreements were binding on himself, he was unencumbered by scruples in the matter of raising taxation, he was indifferent to the death of one in every ten of his male subjects in the civil wars that he incited, and when pressed on such matters at his trial he asserted sublimely that he embodied the security of his people, whatever this concept may have conveyed to him.

At the same time the legal profession was deeply corrupt. Enforcement of the criminal law was ineffective, but political and religious speech-crimes were punished savagely, as was debt. A career in the law was a path to self-enrichment (autres temps, autres moeurs) and the privileged classes viewed humble birth and lack of patronage as not far short of a crime either. The Magna Charta and the statute of habeas corpus however were always there in the background, and a characteristically English fiction attributed royal offences against these to the King's ministers, the King being of course out of legal reach, or so Charles argued. Against such a background Robertson paints in a man of modest demeanour but high talent and total incorruptibility for whom religion went hand-in-hand with rationality and fairness; a man also, to his ultimate undoing, who could not and would not hold his tongue.

Robertson writes as an advocate. He is not trying to rescue Cooke's reputation, Cooke having very little reputation in the first place. Certainly, if Cooke had significant character-defects we don't read about them here and he emerges as a bit of a saint. However the basic objective seems to be to argue for Cooke's unrecognised importance in the precedents he set. English common law is all based on case-law and precedent. I'm not myself clear to what extent Cooke's judgments 'stuck' for posterity, but at the least he is presented as having a mind-set ahead of his time. A liberal lawyer of our era has recognised a kindred spirit in a less enlightened age. Indeed some of Cooke's views verge on welfare socialism with legal aid for the poor and something like a health service. Unsurprisingly, this did not make him popular with everyone. Giving judgments in favour of tenants in Ireland didn't endear him to the rapacious landlords whose ideas of their own rights in this matter were the mirror-image of the King's. Belief in religious tolerance upset those who had recruited the Creator of Heaven and Earth to their own vested interest or at least to their own ideas of how He ought to see the matter. The Protectorate was certainly an improvement on the Stuarts in the matter of basic fairness, but Cooke was always a bit of a loner, and to stigmatise him as 'radical' (on top of his obscure origins) was condemnation enough for the self-complacent and partisan.

Cooke's rigid belief in due legal process led him to accept as his duty the prosecution of the King when barristers of greater eminence wisely took cover. Robertson recounts the trial as a professional and connoisseur, and trials make good drama. Charles was well advised, and it is beyond a legal layman to judge of the legitimacy of the arguments by which Cooke prevailed. Trials under the Stuarts, with their packed, suborned and bullied juries and their rigging of the law, are a clear affront to ordinary human notions of equity, but it's hard to see that the King's trial was any model of modern rectitude or process either, and Robertson seems to me to sail perilously close to arguing 'That's just the way it had to be'. His prejudices are basically mine too, but that is not really the issue. The doctrine that national leaders are above the law was later re-enshrined in the Treaty of Westphalia, and it took new legal ingenuity to get around that when it came to the post-WWII trials. Indeed at the trial of the Japanese leaders the Indian judge dissented from all the guilty verdicts as being victors' justice.

Part of Robertson's own self-brief is to measure Charles's trial against those of modern monsters. How the trial of Saddam Hussein may conclude is anyone's guess, but convention in 1649 dictated that if the prisoner refused to enter a plea that was equated with admission of guilt, and this cramped Cooke's style. Robertson rightly commends my late dear friend Richard May for directing a plea of not-guilty to be recorded when Milosevic took the same line of refusing to recognise the court, but faults him for allowing an indictment so long that the trial promised to go on indefinitely, this being an error that the King's judges had avoided. Pinochet may be too old and gaga to stand trial, but at least the concept of immunity for a head of state seems to have been rejected in his case too.

It makes an excellent read for a layman. The print is rather small but my eyesight is excellent through no merit of mine. Proof-reading in general is good, although 'elemental' has crept in for 'elementary' at one point, as well as the solecisms (now wearily familiar) of 'beseeched' for 'besought' and 'wreaked' for 'wrought'. Oxford has a Christ Church but no 'Christchurch College', Ormonde alternates with Ormond, and was the lover of Mary Queen of Scots Riccio or Rizzio? The book is patently fair, and the partisanship, though obvious, is rational. How it will all play out for the next putative King Charles I can't tell, but I suggest this book for his reading list.

What subject can give sentence on his king? . . .
And who sits here that is not Richard's subject?

Shakespeare, Richard II, Act IV, Scene 1.

On October 11, 2006, Britain's House of Lords (a panel of Judges known as the "Law Lords" who serve as the British equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court) issued a ruling in the case of Jameel v. Wall St. Journal Europe. The Lords' decision radically altered Britain's libel laws and has been hailed as a remarkable victory for freedom of the press in Britain. The attorney who argued successfully on behalf of the newspaper was Geoffrey Robertson, Q.C. Mr. Robertson is also a noted human rights attorney who has been involved in cases involving Chile's General Pinochet, Malawi's Hastings Banda and other high profile cases involving crimes against humanity. Robertson has turned this expertise to good use in a well-written and timely book, "The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold". The Tyrannicide Brief examines the life of John Cooke, the attorney who created the legal theory that destroyed forever the right of kings to act with impunity from justice. Until 1649 the answer to Richard II's question was "no, there is no subject who can pass sentence upon a king." John Cooke changed that answer from no to yes and this is his story.

The story of John Cooke is little remembered and less understood. Cooke was a man of humble origins. Born in 1608, his father was a small Puritan farmer in Leicester who managed to gain a scholarship admission to Oxford at age 14 to study law. Robertson's account of Cooke's life and his practice of law is a fascinating one. Cooke was very radical for his day (as befitted his Puritan background). He railed against rampant corruption and cronyism in the legal profession and the justice system. He created the first lawyer's code of ethics (although not accepted during his lifetime and for centuries to follow) whose basic principles now form the bedrock of legal codes of ethics in both Britain and the United States. He sought reform of a criminal justice system in which the rich could `buy' justice and in which the poor were routinely tossed into debtor's prison simply at the swearing out of a complaint. He was the first attorney (to my knowledge) to suggest that attorneys owed the public an obligation to work for free on behalf of the poor and indigent. Needless to say Cooke's theories of ethics did not sit well with his colleagues at the bar. The rump parliament that sat during the period of Cromwell's rule was dominated by lawyers (indicating how little things have changed in Britain and the U.S. in the last 350 years) quashed virtually all of Cooke's attempts to reform the profession and the criminal and civil justice system.

Cooke was also a strong supporter of Cromwell and the Puritan revolt against the Charles I. Charles I led a series of bloody civil wars against the Parliamentary forces that challenged Charles I's right to absolute rule. These civil wars caused the death of approximately 10% of Britain's adult males. It was a bloody time. Eventually. Cromwell and his supporters determined that the only way to end the civil wars was to put Charles I to trial. When it came time to select a prosecutor Cooke was the only one who didn't duck for cover. He accepted the brief. Cooke based his brief on the grounds that tyranny was not a right of rulers but a crime against the ruled.

After providing the reader with some sense of John Cooke and his times, Robertson turns to the trial itself. In the hands of Robertson the trial of Charles I in 1649 is conveyed in a narrative that is as compelling as it is informative. As might be expected from an experienced advocate Robertson makes a strong case for the fairness of the trial. I might quibble with the term fairness as it is commonly understood in today's justice system but I cannot argue with the point that Charles I's trial was fairer than those common at the time.

Next, Robertson recounts Cooke's life during the period of Cromwell's rule until the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. When Charles II was proclaimed king of England on May 2, 1660 the new king set about arresting and trying those `radical elements' that deposed, tried, and executed his father. Cooke was amongst those arrested and his trial and execution forms the centerpiece of the last part of Tyrannicide Brief. While the fairness of Charles I's trial is debatable the unfairness of Cooke's trial is certainly not. If Cooke's theory of the case set a precedent for future generations of human rights cases, Cooke's own trial set a precedent for the type of show trial favored by Stalin in the 1930s. Cooke was tried, sentenced, and executed in a particularly grisly fashion.

Robertson closes the book with a brief but compelling epilogue in which he discusses the contemporary relevance of the trials of Charles I and Cooke. It is at once well written and thought provoking.

Robertson's Tyrannicide Brief performs two valuable services. First, it sheds light on a lesser-known or misunderstood aspect of `history'. Second, it provides the reader with information that enables him/her to examine contemporary events (for example the Nuremberg trials, the trial of Milosevic or Saddam Hussein) with a greater understanding of the legal and political forces involved in those events. The fact that these two services are presented in a style that is literate, entertaining and informative for both academics and the general reader (such as this reviewer) makes the book an invaluable addition to the public record. Highly recommended. L. Fleisig

Lex vs. Rex
John Cooke, who held progressive views of the law that were well ahead of his time and who was a key actor in the trial of King Edward I, is rightly rescued from the dusty corners of English history by the very knowledgeable Mr. Robertson. The heretofore forgotten Cooke emerges a fitting hero to all who believe in the rule of law.

I score this book high for both those interested in the general development of the law, those interested in the trial of Edward I, and those looking for background in support of holding to account present-day political tyrants.

I do not have the knowledge to dispute the author's hostile view of some of the religious factions (such as Scottish Presbyterians) of that long ago day, but wholeheartedly agree with his condemnation---and John Cooke's---of the idea of a hereditary monarch (or tyrant of any stripe) ruling without restraint of earthly legislators and independent courts.