King Charles I
Heading off

Books & artsSep 14th 2006 edition

GRANTED, the competition isn't strong. But England has never had a cleverer line of monarchs than the 17th-century Stuarts. Nor one more foolish, as apt to harm themselves as the nation they misruled: four civil wars provoked and lost; two crowns lost and one crowned head. Still they did the nation—and, as time showed, the monarchy—one real favour. If most later sovereigns have used their heads more wisely, it was not least because Charles I lost his.

The hero of this lively biography, which was published in Britain a year ago and is just out in America, is the lawyer who, in his field, did most to execute the king: John Cooke, who prepared the case for trial in 1649, and was savagely punished for it after the monarchy was restored in 1660. Cooke's name is barely a footnote in histories of the time. With men like Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein in mind, Geoffrey Robertson, an international lawyer, is eager to write it six feet high.

The trial never really became one: Charles, accused of high treason and much else, refused to plead, denying the court's authority. He had a point. The court was set up, without the king's consent or the Lords', by the House of Commons alone; a house from which many members had been forcibly ejected in “Pride's purge”. But Mr Robertson will have none of this. As the de facto power-that-was, he argues, even this truncated Commons was entitled to create the court.

So Cooke himself argued, vainly, at his own trial in 1660. Anyway, he added, he had only done his duty as a lawyer: he had been given a case and he had to argue it as best he could. Factually, this was thin: a lawyer maybe, but one wholly in sympathy with his case. His plea anyway fell on plugged ears. Yet history has backed him: the “cab-rank” principle that a barrister must take any brief he is offered is today commonplace, if not always a fact. And no one disputes that, having taken it, he must argue for his client as best he can.

History also backs Cooke on the substantive issue. Had Charles deigned to plead, he would have argued, as Cooke's prosecutors did in 1660, that “the king can do no wrong”. If wrong were done, even at his command, his ministers could be punished, but not the monarch, accountable only to God. To modern ears this is absurd. To the 17th century its truth was self-evident. Not to Cooke and the Commons: the divine right of kings, which Charles had imbibed at his father's knee, was myth. The king was not above the law. The “rump” Commons indeed went much further still: “the people under God are the organ of all just power”, and the Commons, representing them, the supreme authority, entitled to make law whether king or Lords consented or not.

In practical terms, Charles was indeed guilty. At least the second civil war was of his sole and unscrupulous making. He had conspired to bring in Scottish, Irish and even French soldiery to aid him. Lawfully or not, Cooke and the court of 1649 gave him what he deserved. From then on, Cooke, seemingly successful, was in practice a loser. He went to Ireland, and did his personal best to ensure that justice be both just and speedy. But the reforms of legal sloth and chaos that he tried to institute there and hoped to see take root in England too were frustrated. Then came the Restoration.

Having said he did not seek revenge, Charles II named 49 “regicides” as due for it. All who could be found were set before a kangaroo court, “tried” for a few hours, and duly found guilty by a jury that seldom bothered even to retire. Some escaped death. Cooke was one of ten sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, a revolting medieval procedure that his executioner dragged out as long as possible. And until 1859 the Church of England delivered sycophantic prayers in memory of Charles I, “the Martyr”.

This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under the headline "Heading off"

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