The Tyrannicide Brief by Geoffrey Robertson

Author:Geoffrey Robertson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History
ISBN: 9780099459194
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2005-01-01T10:00:00+00:00

Cooke publicly defied his would-be murderers: ‘It is for a Cain to be afraid that every man that meets him will slay him.’17 He did not care whether he was killed by cavaliers or by consumption. ‘I leave that to my heavenly father. If it be his will that I shall fall by the hand of violence, let him do what he pleases.’ This was not empty defiance: Cooke was (and remained) utterly trusting to providence in respect of his own safety. But by now there were others to consider: not only Isaac his aged father, but his wife – Frances – whom he had married in 1646 once his practice had begun to flourish. The one place where they would be safe would be in the bosom of Cromwell's army, which was preparing to sail forth to subdue the unruly Irish. Soon, Cromwell would make him an offer.

For the present, in the hectic months after the execution, the Solicitor-General was immersed in trial work. Cooke was not a tub-thumping orator: his talent lay in creative application of the common law, and the trials of the courtiers gave this talent full rein in front of Lord President Bradshawe and the familiar faces (although not so many) of the commissioners who judged the King. He had four mighty lords to dispatch, all of whom can now be observed (unlike Cooke) gazing down upon visitors to the National Portrait Gallery. They ranged from Lord Goring, the most cruel and lawless of the royalist commanders, to the Earl of Holland, whose oscillation between the King and the Parliament was, he admitted frankly, contingent upon which side would give him the most money, because he believed poverty to be the greatest sin. The Duke of Hamilton, leader of the Scots invasion, was the main defendant, and then came Lord Capel, who like Holland and a fifth courtier, Sir John Owen, had reneged on earlier promises made to gain pardons and had led the royalists into the second civil war. Steele, the Attorney-General who had by now made a complete recovery, asked Cooke to take the lead in prosecuting Goring, Holland and Capel, and to assist him in the more difficult case of the Duke of Hamilton.

Cooke made short but interesting work of Goring, charging him in effect as a war criminal. Goring pleaded ‘not guilty’, so Cooke produced witnesses to testify that the defendant had ordered the torture of prisoners at Colchester, had burnt down hundreds of civilian homes and authorised the use of bullets boiled in poison. Goring admitted giving some of these orders, but he denied treason: he fought, he said, for peace – Cooke pointed out that his actions spoke louder than his words, and his actions infringed the laws of war accepted by both sides. Goring and the other peers tried to argue that their status carried various immunities from prosecution and that Magna Carta meant they could only be tried, quite literally, by ‘peers’. Cooke, who was dogged by

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