In the end, they chose the radical lawyer John Cooke (1608–60) whose Puritan conscience, political vision and love of civil liberties made him stand out. Cooke might have been just an average lawyer but he was an impressive reformer. Robertson said that in the 1640s, Cooke had been the first to assert that poverty was a cause of crime. Cooke was already arguing for: a national health service; a national legal service; end most capital punishment; probation for those who stole out of hunger; and an end to the use of Latin in court.
Geoffrey Roberston's book
Note the execution of King Charles I on the front cover
What the Puritans achieved in the 1640s was the abolition of Star Chamber. They created the principle of no taxation without representation, and were keen on the separation of church and state. They fought in the civil wars that the king started. The king was also guilty, as Cooke later showed, of supervising torture of prisoners of war, and of encouraging plunder by the royalist forces.
In 1649, after Oliver Cromwell's army took Charles I prisoner, the new regime had to decide what to do with the king. They could have killed Charles, but a fair trial was seen as more ethical. Cooke was asked to prosecute him, esp after other suitable lawyers hid away from their Inns of Court.
In Parliament's brief to Cooke, the judge had to end the immunity of the head of state. But the divinely appointed king WAS the law, so prosecuting him seemed impossible. Thus Cooke had to invent the crime of Tyranny (aka War Crimes today). He put Charles on trial in Jan 1649, charging him with abolishing peoples’ civil liberties and with mass murdering citizens. In Westminster Hall, as this improbable trial was starting, the king was brought in and Cooke delivered the charges.
John Cooke
The decision to execute the king was the judges to make, but perhaps they didn’t predict that the executed royal would become a martyr. King Charles I was taken to the scaffold and beheaded later in Jan 1649, and for the next ten years he was remembered kindly. Executing him only inflamed the civil war further.
Cromwell appointed Cooke as a reforming Chief Justice in Ireland where of course he made very progressive rulings. Naturally the wealthy land-owning lords hated Cooke.
In 1653, at the head of an army, Oliver Cromwell marched into Parliament and dismissed the members.
King Charles II returned from France in 1660 and the monarchy restored. Cooke was the very first to be arrested, suffering a rigged trial at the Old Bailey when Charles II avenged his father. The ex-judge was taken to Charing Cross and made a very fine gallows speech: 'We are not traitors; we would have secured the liberty of the people and the whole groaning creation if the country had not preferred servitude to freedom.' He was hung, drawn and quartered.
Cooke and other regicides were executed. Cooke’s heart and genitals were fed to street dogs, and his head was shown at Westminster Hall. Samuel Pepys travelled to see some of Cooke's colleagues executed, but found that the executions had been suspended. Apparently Charles II’s advisors saw the crowd turning nasty. They would have to detain republicans without trial, despite the fact that habeas corpus laws were in place. So it was decided to put all the republicans on off-shore islands (eg Jersey) where habeas corpus wouldn't reach. Does this remind us of Guantanamo Bay?
Conclusion The key years 1640-60 was an era when extraordinary progress was made in human rights. The sovereignty of parliament, independence of the judges, separation of church and state all go back to this short, important era.
The Hon Michael Kirby believed that the King Charles' trial was by legal standards a discreditable affair. This seemed indisputable, until Robertson dug out a very old edition of the State Trials. Robertson was surprised to find that Charles’ trial was far from discreditable - on the contrary it appeared for its time as an oasis of justice and fairness."
Robertson said Cooke's trial was actually the discreditable affair. The defendants had been locked up for months in plague-filled prisons, and were brought to the Old Bailey in leg-irons to be viciously taunted by pro-Charles II judges. The Cooke events, Robertson proposed, showed that a person was more likely to get a fair trial in a republican court, than in a monarchical court. And provided a model for modern trials of criminal national leaders.
The devil sits with 11 men: 9 regicides and 2 chaplains who supported Charles I's execution
Wikiwand
Robertson showed that some important 1640s men have been whitewashed out of history by British historians, both conservative and liberal, for political reasons. These extraordinary men, who had taken on King Charles I, were later executed at the Old Bailey in 1660. Thus Robertson concluded that the king’s execution was necessary to establish Parliament's sovereignty and that the regicide trial victims should be seen as national heroes. I can agree with his first conclusion but his second conclusion sounds like a barrister, not like an historian
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1 comment:
In 1587, law, history and fact had been twisted to argue that a Scottish monarch owed the English monarch a duty of obedience. It had allowed Mary to be found guilty of treason against her Tudor cousin, Elizabeth I.
Now law, history and fact were being twisted again to argue that a king could commit treason against his people. It smacked of victors’ justice. The Scots had sent official delegations to plead for his life. So had the French. The Dutch had done so too: Mary, Princess of Orange, was Charles’s eldest daughter. But their pleas had been to no avail.
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