The Tyrannicide Brief

This is a life of John Cook, the bravest of barristers, whose bowels were publicly burned as punishment for sending the King to the scaffold. In 1649, no lawyer in the country would accept the brief of prosecuting Charles I. All packed their bags and disappeared to the country, except one, the forty-year old John Cook. The charge was treason - not, of course against himself, the monarch, but against his people - bringing evidence to show that Charles had begun wars which cost the lives of innumerable Englishmen and had sanctioned murder, rape and pillage. Cook was a farmer's son from Leicestershire, who had studied at Oxford and travelled widely in Europe. He was a political visionary, concerned for social justice and liberty of conscience, and especially with reforming the old, barbaric legal system. His fate was sad. He had little sympathy with Cromwell's strict protectorate - and at the restoration in 1660, with the other 'regicides' who signed the king's death warrant, he was arrested, tried, and brutally hung drawn and quartered. -Geoffrey Robertson is one of Britain's leading counsels, famous for his battles for civil liberties. In this gripping account of a sensational life, which uses Cook's own moving speeches and letters, Robertson relates the call for a republic to the debates of today. More significantly, he presents the indictment of Charles I as a precedent for trials of modern war criminals and leaders - Goering, Pinochet, Milosevic - who have oppressed their own people. John Cook was not a regicide but a tyrannicide - the first to argue that brutal action by a head of state justified 'regime change'. Centuries after these brutal events, he is still a potent example to us all.