By which it appears that he, the said Charles Stuart, has been and is the occasioner, author and continuer of the said unnatural, cruel and bloody wars and therefore guilty of all the treasons, murders, rapines, burnings, spoils, desolations, damages and mischiefs to the nation acted and committed in the said wars, or occasioned thereby.
The charges against Milosevic at The Hague conveyed the same idea – the responsibility of the commander for all the natural and probable consequences of his commands. Cooke alleged not only high treason, but ‘other High Crimes’, which he spelled out in the final paragraph: Charles Stuart he impeached as ‘a tyrant, traitor, murderer and public and implacable enemy to the Commonwealth of England’. In a nutshell, what the Solicitor-General had created was a new offence, one that could condemn most of the crowned heads of Europe at the time, and many of the dictators and undemocratic rulers who would come to power in the nations of the world in the following centuries. He had made tyranny a crime.
On Saturday 20 January – only 10 days after accepting the brief – Cooke signed the charge, the document that was to seal the King’s fate and his own. That afternoon, a procession of sixty-eight judges in black cloaks or gowns solemnly entered the Great Hall at Westminster, for the public opening of the trial. Accompanied by 120 soldiers with long pikes, they presented a powerful tableau to thousands of citizens who crammed into the public galleries. Preceded by a clerk carrying the sword of state, Judge Bradshawe made his way to centre-stage where his crimson velvet chair had been placed, behind a desk on which a crimson cushion bore the parliamentary mace. The judges sat behind him, on benches hung with scarlet: the chair in which Charles would sit was directly in front of them. The prosecutor – John Cooke – stood immediately to the right of the King’s chair. The proceedings began with the deep-voiced ushers shouting the traditional ‘Oyez’ still heard at the opening of every English criminal court:
Oyez, oyez, oyez. All manner of persons who have any business in this Court, draw near and give your attendance.
The assembly waited to see a sight that had no parallel: the bringing of a king to a place of public justice. There were some – the soldiers in particular – whose thoughts were of retribution against the man they held responsible for the blood of fallen comrades, but most of the crowd would have had in mind the set of traditional beliefs about the monarch’s ‘divine majesty’. When Charles did enter, it was with a certain dignity. The sergeant-at-arms, mace held aloft, escorted him towards his centre-stage seat. He was not in chains, nor under obvious restraint: the halberdiers who followed him might have been his own retinue. This was no ordinary prisoner, as his behaviour immediately showed: resting upon his familiar silver-tipped cane, he looked with unblinking sternness at the judges, displaying his contempt for the court by refusing to remove his hat. He was, for these few moments, still a king in command.
‘Charles Stuart, King of England . . .’ Judge Bradshawe’s words were respectful, his tone measured and polite: ‘the Commons of England have constituted this High Court of Justice before which you are now brought, and you are to hear your charge, after which the Court will proceed.’
This was John Cooke’s cue. He brandished the parchment upon which the charge had been written – the charge that he had signed as Solicitor-General for the Commonwealth. ‘My Lord President,’ he began – at which point he felt a sharp tap on his shoulder. The King had hit the prosecutor with his cane, a walking staff with an ornate silver tip. ‘Hold,’ Charles commanded, and rose to speak, poking the low-bred lawyer again with his cane to emphasise his command to give way.
If Cooke had yielded, the entire enterprise would have faltered. But the barrister ignored the King, and continued to address the court: ‘My Lord President,’ he went on, ‘according to an order of this High Court directed to me for that purpose . . .’ At this point, he suffered a third blow from the cane, a palpable hit, hard enough to dislodge its silver tip, which rolled down the counsel’s gown and clattered on to the floor between the two men. Their eyes met, and the King nodded for Cooke to bend and pick it up. But the barrister did not blink, much less stoop. Ignoring the little man beside him at the bar rail he continued, coldly and precisely:
‘I do, in the name and on the behalf of the people of England, exhibit and bring into this Court a charge of high treason and other high crimes whereof I do accuse Charles Stuart, King of England, here present.’
Under Cooke’s wounding words, the King seemed to shrink, into a small cranky prisoner with dirty hair. In that character, slowly and painfully, under the astonished gaze of his people, the King stooped to pick up the silver tip from the floor at Cooke’s feet. There were gasps: Cooke paused for the significance of the moment to sink in before handing the indictment to the court clerk, Andrew Broughton, for its formal reading.
The symbolism of this incident was plain to all. The King, the divine majesty, had bowed, powerless before the majesty of human law. In an age when everyone was on the look-out for signs and portents, this was taken as the direst of signals. The King told his friends that he believed it a bad omen, and the news-sheets reported how Charles had been forced to stoop to retrieve the silver tip: ‘This it is conceived will be very ominous.’ Few had really thought this unprecedented public spectacle would be taken seriously, but Cooke’s resolve at its outset transformed expectations. It now had the appearance of a real trial in which the monarch would have no special favours. ‘Be ye ever so high, the law is above you’ had been an empty aphorism for those who had tried to bring the Stuart kings to the bar or the battlefield: this defining historical moment gave it meaning. It was the moment for which John Cooke would never be forgiven.
Part I
Revolution
1
A Man of the Middling Sort
THE FIRST RECORDED existence of John Cooke is in the register of All Saints church in the village of Husbands Bosworth, just south of Leicester. Here he was baptised on 18 September 1608, an indication that his birth had taken place a few days before. He came from poor but healthy farming stock: his father, Isaac Cooke, was twenty-five, and would live until the age of seventy-four. Isaac was one of twelve children of Abraham Cooke, who would die in 1620 at a similar age. If John could come through his early years, in this period when a third of all infants died before reaching five, he could be expected to live through all the seven ages of man predicted by Shakespeare, at this time writing his final plays for the London theatre. His family were God-fearing farmers, with allotments that dotted the countryside for twenty miles to the town of Burbage. Husbands Bosworth was named for all its husbandmen – tenant farmers whose smallholdings sustained their families but little else – and that would have been his parents’ expectation for baby John. What mattered most to Isaac and Elizabeth was that he would live an abstemious and pious life, his ability to do so being regarded as an outward sign that he was one of the ‘elect’ predestined for paradise when the Son of God returned to claim the earth.
This mattered so much to these Puritan parents that for the baptism of their first-born they had travelled from their own farm, just outside Burbage, where the rector was a well-connected Anglican who obeyed the bishop, to Elizabeth’s austere family church.1 Its minister was willing to dispense with ‘impure’ rituals, like motioning the sign of the cross over the head of the baptised infant. That such a tiny gesture could become a major bone of contention between the bishops of the Church of England, who were sticklers for rituals and symbols, and those Puritan worshippers who wished to ‘purify’ the Church of all such distractions, was typical of the internecine squabbling that had rent the Anglican religion. Puritans like the Cookes were thick on the ground in the Midlands and the eastern counties and many local ministers were sympathetic to their preference for deritualised worship, which was anathema to King James and his bishops.
James I had been invited from Scotland (where he ruled as James VI) to take the English throne on Elizabeth I’s death in 1603. The optimism among Pur
itans in England that a man from the austere Calvinist Kirk would look sympathetically on their similar form of worship had soon been dashed: James was obsessed with his God-given right to rule as an absolute prince, through a hierarchy supported by archbishops and bishops, alongside his councillors and favourite courtiers. From the outset of his reign he urged the Anglican authorities to discipline ministers who refused to follow approved rituals or who spoke on politics from the pulpit. James I was very far from being ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’: he was highly educated and very canny, and he knew exactly where the Puritans’ hostility to hierarchy in their church would lead: ‘no Bishop, no King’.
James warned his son to ‘hate no man more than a proud Puritan’.2 He did not persecute them, but encouraged the Church to discriminate against them and to sack their ministers. The King’s edicts, on matters of Sunday observance in particular, were often at variance with the strict moral code of these godly communities, and the profligacy and debauchery of his court further outraged them. As John Cooke grew up, there was much prurient gossip amongst the faithful about a monarch who claimed divine authority yet who maintained a luxurious and licentious court, financed by selling titles and monopolies, and who boasted that his favourite pastimes were ‘hunting witches, prophets, Puritans, dead cats and hares’. After all, James had a grotesque parentage: his mother was Mary, Queen of Scots. He was in her swollen belly when it was clutched at by her lover, David Riccio, as he was being dragged to his death at Holyrood House by a team of assassins led by James’s father, Henry Stuart. Mary had later arranged for Henry to be strangled and had eventually been executed for plotting to kill her cousin and sister-queen Elizabeth I. If there was anything in the theory of hereditary right by which James acceded to the throne, it did not bode well for the Stuarts.
The farming community where the Cookes lived was small – there were only seventy families at Burbage (then named Burbach) and a handful in their hamlet of Sketchley. The town’s name – a construct from ‘burr’ (a kind of thistle) and ‘bach’ (a rivulet) – indicates the kind of countryside in which he played as a boy, although play was not encouraged by Puritans: they had been outraged when James issued a ‘Book of Sports’, permitting certain recreations after church on Sundays. As a young man, Cooke was well aware that the brand of religion on which he was raised was not in government favour. At school, where he excelled, he belonged to a group of Puritan children ostracised in the playground just as their parents were often excluded from worship in the church. There was one faith that suffered worse discrimination: the stateliest house in the area, Bosworth Hall, was owned by a Catholic family related to Sir Thomas More, and their secret celebration of Mass was the cause of occasional raids authorised by the local Justices of the Peace. Especially after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, Catholics were regarded as potential terrorists, but the strength of their faith intrigued the boy, and would later tempt him to explore it before settling on his own. He spent long hours learning the Bible (the King James edition was printed in 1611, and widely distributed) and was brought up to believe that powerful men who had failed God’s election were abandoned to sin – a belief readily corroborated by reports of corrupt behaviour at court.
James, more homoerotically fixated as he became older, elevated his young male favourites (first Robert Carr, then George Villiers) to titles and positions of power entirely beyond their abilities. Scandalous rumours were rife throughout Cooke’s youth, confirmed by trials in 1616 which gripped the nation. The Countess of Essex, married to Robert Carr whom the King had made Earl of Somerset, arranged for Sir Thomas Overbury to be murdered, by having arsenic put in his food and then, when that failed, by administration of an enema filled with poison. Various of the poisoners were convicted and hanged, but not the earl or the courtiers who had procured the murder, who were pardoned because of their status. Puritans got the message: although their birth might be low on the social scale, in death God would raise them far above kings and courtiers. Another message – that there was no justice to be had in the King’s courts, at least in cases concerning the King and his favourites – would soon concern a new generation of lawyers for whom the common law of England, rooted in Magna Carta, brooked no such exceptions.
Another telling event of Cooke’s youth was the execution in 1618 of Sir Walter Ralegh, that great Renaissance Englishman – historian, explorer, poet, philosopher, intellectual and adventurer. He had been convicted in 1603 on trumped-up charges of plotting with Spanish interests to overthrow the newly crowned King James. His treason trial had been notable for the invective of the prosecutor, the ambitious Attorney-General Edward Coke:
COKE: You are the most vile and execrable traitor that ever lived.
RALEGH: You speak indiscreetly, uncivilly and barbarously.
COKE: I want words sufficient to express your viperous treasons.
RALEGH: I think you want words indeed, for you have spoken one thing half a dozen times.
COKE: You are an odious fellow; your name is hateful to all the realm of England . . . I will make it appear to the world that there never lived a viler viper on the face of the earth than you.
This abuse of the defendant was what passed for cross-examination in treason trials, after which jurors who had been hand-picked by the King’s officials were expected to convict. This time, unusually, Coke’s venom backfired: Ralegh’s dignity earned him such popular support that James, cautious at the outset of his reign, felt it politic to suspend his death sentence. Sir Walter lived in modest comfort in the Tower of London, in rooms that can still be viewed, and was released in 1616 to mount an expedition in search of Spanish gold. It was unsuccessful, but it rekindled Spain’s hatred of the man who had sunk so many of its galleons and had razed Cadiz. His execution was demanded as a condition of fulfilling James’s pet project of marriage between his own heir (Charles) and the Spanish princess. James could hardly put Ralegh on public trial for attacking England’s traditional enemy: instead, he ordered his Chancellor, the brilliant but bent Francis Bacon, to arrange to have the 1603 death sentence put into effect. Ralegh went to his long-delayed execution with memorable dignity, after a scaffold speech which persuaded everyone of his innocence and which convinced two of the onlookers – the MPs John Eliot and John Pym – that the Stuarts could not be trusted to govern the country. James was depraved, unpopular and idle: now he had killed an English hero at the request of Spain. There remained a general belief that he had been appointed by God, but by the end of his reign it had occurred to many MPs to examine more closely the terms of that divine appointment.
James had only one male heir, the small (5 feet 4 inches) stammering and petulant Charles, born in 1600. He was made Prince of Wales in 1616, after the death of Henry, his more popular elder brother. While John Cooke spent his boyhood in the bosom of a loving family circle, Charles had to endure long periods of separation from his mother, at the insistence of an unloving father who had him indoctrinated with the divine right of the Stuarts to rule and to be obeyed. James had set down these precepts in a small volume, Basilikon Doron, a handbook for the divine right monarch. From it, Charles was made to believe that his God-given authority over his people was like that of a father over his children. James preached the benefits of what would now be described as a benign political and spiritual dictatorship, in which the King governed through an elite, chosen and discarded at his own discretion, comprising his ministers, his bishops and judges, who must never question the royal prerogative, for ‘that is to take away the mystical reverence that belongs to those that sit in the throne of God’.3 In this Stuart utopia, Parliament was irritating and irrelevant and alternative religions were positively dangerous. James had written another book to refute the claim – by Geneva Calvinists – that monarchy entailed a contract with the people, who might resist and remove a king if he breached it. On the contrary, the monarch is ‘the absolute master of the lives and possessions of his subjects; his acts are not open to inquiry or dispute, and no misdee
ds can ever justify resistance’.4 It was an argument that Shakespeare, in context ironically, put thus in Pericles:
Kings are earth’s gods; in vice their law’s their will,
And if Jove stray, who dares say, Jove doth ill?
One Englishman who dared to quarrel with the King over whether God gave him power to override the common law was Sir Edward Coke. He had been appointed Chief Justice after his Crown-pleasing (if not crowd-pleasing) prosecution of Ralegh. His legendary confrontation with James at a Privy Council meeting in 1608 arose when the King claimed that since he was divinely ordained and thus the supreme judge on earth, he could override the decisions of any of the other judges, all of whom he had appointed and could dismiss at will. Judges might (as Bacon had said) be ‘lions under the throne’, but they were under it, and tethered. The Chief Justice disagreed: God’s prodigy the King might be, but he was bound to obey the common law: ‘The law is the golden metewand and measure to try the causes of your majesty’s subjects, and it is by that law that your majesty is protected in safety and peace.’ At this, James flew into a rage, screaming that it was treason to say that he was under the law. The King lurched forward to punch Coke, but the Chief Justice prostrated himself and begged for mercy. It had been a courageous moment and Coke’s short-lived defiance reverberates today,5 but at the time had little support. James I’s subjects believed that the King’s authority was bestowed by God, a belief endorsed by all his other judges. Monarchical government was ordained by God and resistance to the King’s power was both mortal sin and treason.6
The Tyrannicide Brief Page 4
