The Tyrannicide Brief

by Geoffrey Robertson

  The young barrister completed his pupillage with Brickenden in 1634. He lacked the inherited wealth to take, like his contemporaries, a grand tour to the Protestant centres of Europe, and the prospects for law practice in New England were not, at this point, enticing. He had no money and no status: to make his way at the English bar required both. His solution was to move to Ireland and seek employment. Dublin was only a week’s travel time from home and religious diversity was tolerated, as it had to be, in a country where most were Catholic. In 1634, he was admitted to the Dublin bar as a member of King’s Inn and he was soon offered a job by Thomas Wentworth, the ‘Lord Deputy’ – the King’s regent and the effective ruler of Ireland. The young lawyer seems to have cut a dashing figure – an enemy later recalled him ‘strutting in his plush and velvet, cringing for acquaintance and screwing into the favour of the Earl of Strafford, who at length took notice of his fair deportment and saw something in him that might deserve his countenance’.7

  Thomas Wentworth had arrived to rule as the King’s deputy in Ireland in the summer of 1633: his administration continued for six years. ‘Black Tom’ was a remarkable leader and administrator, if utterly unscrupulous in amassing power and wealth. He had trained at the Inns of Court and became an MP: back in 1628, Cooke had admired his leadership of the Parliamentary clamour for a Bill of Rights. Then, opportunistically, Wentworth had accepted a senior position in the King’s government, where he worked with Archbishop Laud to attack the rising Puritan power in the kingdom. He was a man from the lower aristocracy, which partly accounts for his obsession with improving his position according to the way the political wind was blowing. His colleagues called him ‘the grand apostate’, but his defection gave him the opportunity to exercise his administrative genius as a member of the Privy Council. In 1633, Charles seemed unassailable in every part of his kingdom except Ireland, so it was to that unruly domain that Charles appointed his most talented civil servant.

  Ireland was a melting pot with ingredients that refused to melt. It was a separate kingdom, but regarded as an English colony – unlike Scotland, which was a separate kingdom with a Presbyterian Church and an independent Parliament. Most of its two million people were poor, uneducated and Catholic: the ‘Old Irish’ native people, Celtic in origin and Gaelic in language, were organised on a tribal basis with their own noble chiefs and their ancient ‘brechon law’ that defied comprehension by English common lawyers. The great estates, however, belonged to ‘Old English’ (or ‘Norman Irish’), the original planter-class families who had unjustly acquired vast swathes of the best land in the country long before the Reformation: they too were predominantly papist. But the post-Reformation colonial expansion, followed by the Puritan exodus from England, brought waves of migrants to form a third class of ‘New English’ settlers, planted Protestants determined to grab as much land as possible and exploit it for maximum profit whilst despising the primitive ‘wild Irish’ and their idolatrous religion. When Wentworth arrived, reliable central government was confined to ‘the Pale’ – an area comprising Dublin and its surrounds, full of Old and New English. It was his genius to extend his administration ‘beyond the Pale’ and to provide a modicum of law and order throughout the land. But in 1641, two years after his departure, the whole structure broke down in barbarous civil strife. His regime had eventually disaffected all these factions, by milking them in the interests of the King of England – and of the future Earl of Strafford.

  Wentworth had an English Puritan’s contempt for the Old Irish, but he insisted that ‘the meaner sort’ be tried fairly. He removed tainted judges who accepted bribes, and punished one judge who wrongfully convicted a defendant in order to obtain his land after his execution.8 For these tasks he relied on ‘can-do’ lawyers like John Cooke. He revitalised but controlled the weak Irish Parliament, which at his direction voted taxes to the King – unlike the malcontents at Westminster. He cleaned up the collection of customs and other revenues, to the disadvantage of some powerful lords (whose noses were even more out of joint when they realised that Wentworth had put his in what used to be their trough). He tried, more creditably, to reform the land tenure system, although his impatience led him to take discreditable steps – in Galway, for example, he punished a jury that refused to find for the King in a land claim against an ‘Old English’ lord. In this instance, the King’s claim had been justified and the jury had been perverse – it had been stacked by the sheriff with relatives of the nobleman.9 But Wentworth’s irascible behaviour, in punishing not only the sheriff and the jury, but counsel and even the county, was cited by his enemies as an example of his autocratic style.10 In his regular correspondence with Archbishop Laud, his friend and fellow Privy Counsellor, Wentworth referred to his policy as ‘thorough’. This word he used in the sense of driving through, or riding roughshod over, interests that lay in the path of fiscal religious or administrative unity, however long settled or indigenous those interests might be. English writers, irrespective of their political sympathies, have generally saluted Strafford as a great administrator, whilst Irish historians condemn him as despotic and venal. Both perspectives are correct.

  Cooke served in Wentworth’s entourage between 1634 and 1636 and the Deputy found the fledgling lawyer worthy of advancement. Cooke was employed to draft the reform legislation that Wentworth was pushing through the pliable local Parliament: these laws he had printed in 1635 ‘in a small but stately volume bearing cherubs and cornucopia on its title page, followed by the royal arms and the arms of Wentworth’.11 He was involved in a project to reduce legal fees and to punish lawyers and officials who overcharged, and the idealistic young Puritan may have suggested a scheme whereby all who got themselves drunk in Dublin of an evening had to pay for it the next morning – literally, by a fine of one groat. This he thought would raise many hundreds of pounds, but of course it proved impossible to enforce, although its failure did not deter Cooke, years later, from advocating a similar cure for alcoholism in England.12 Cooke would later apologise to Strafford for leaving his service after only two years, notwithstanding the career opportunity it provided. The King’s Deputy was noted for looking after his employees, and Cooke could have expected a profitable supply of government briefs had he stayed to practise, with further lucrative work from the grand ‘New English’ plantation owners.

  So why did this talented lawyer abandon a budding career in Ireland? Many years later, a royalist mudslinger would falsely allege that he had pocketed the money for printing the statutes and had absconded to Italy until after Strafford’s execution in 1641.13 The truth is very different. As Cooke explained to Strafford, he was at this time ‘wanting to myself’14 – an indication of spiritual crisis. Strutting in plush and velvet had not overborne the Puritan upbringing of this poor farmer’s son, but easy association with Catholics had aroused deep unsureties about the true path to salvation. He was twenty-eight, with sufficient earnings now to travel to the alternative centres of religious learning – to Rome and Geneva. So John Cooke left the King’s Irish service, to search for the best way to save his soul.

  It was usual for the sons of notable Puritan families to go on a ‘grand tour’ of the continent after their study at the Inns – a kind of gap year in which they might learn something of the civil (i.e. Roman) law practised there, pass with distaste or disputation through Catholic regions and sojourn piously in Calvinist Geneva. Cooke’s trip was belated but extensive: he travelled through France and Spain (he was unimpressed by Spanish inn-keepers, who required guests to shop for their own food and wine).15 In Madrid, where he inspected the city’s new prison, he was told the sort of joke that has been current for centuries. A horse refused to leap aboard a ferry across the river, until a passenger whispered in its ear, whereupon it leapt quickly onto the boat. The ferryman asked the passenger how he had made the horse move so rapidly. The man answered: ‘I told him to leap into the boat as fast as the soul of a lawyer goes to hell.’16

  Cooke’s tour was not
for pleasure or cultural observation. His Protestant faith needed strengthening, by exposure to the alternatives. He was in Basle in 1637, asking a leading Calvinist, ‘Where was your Protestant church before Luther?’ – only to receive the answer that he was too young to meddle with such a hard question.17 But meddle he did, by registering to study at the University of Padua, the most liberal institution in Catholic Europe because it came under the relaxed authority of Venice.18 In this period (1637–8) his presence is recorded on two occasions at the English College in Rome, run by Jesuits as a fly-trap for visiting Protestant gentlemen: all were invited to partake of its hospitality (the wine was fabled) in the hope that conversation with a cardinal might lead to conversion. Cooke dined there, as did the young Milton, in the spring of 1638.19 Government spies reported back to London, and many years later a royalist libeller would falsely claim that Cooke had joined the Jesuits when in Rome.20

  It was in Paris that Cooke himself locates his temptation – from Dr Smith, an Englishman who kept the Cardinal’s library, ‘a subtle man and a great scholar who was very earnest with me to reconcile myself into the bosom of the Roman church’. Smith argued that the English Protestants would soon destroy themselves by persecuting each other – look at the way the bishops were persecuting the Puritans. ‘We allow a greater latitude in the Church of Rome, notwithstanding the inquisition.’ Cooke was able to resist Dr Smith’s blandishments, whilst accepting that there were attractions in disciplined Catholicism, which encouraged good works by inviting everyone to find salvation through them: after all, he mused, ‘If good works do not merit, who will do any good works?’21

  The young lawyer wavered, but did not succumb. His friend Edmund Ludlow later recalled that ‘Cooke in his younger days travelled through France and Italy; and being at Rome spoke freely on the behalf of the reformed Religion and so far discovered his zeal and abilities therein that no endeavours were wanting for drawing him to own the Popish interest. But he, as enlightened from above, was not the least shaken by their temptations.’22 Ludlow protests too much – obviously the young Puritan was wavering in his religious beliefs at this time. However, his faith was not lost: by August 1638 he had left Rome for the Calvinist city on a hill, where Ludlow continues: ‘Residing for some months in Geneva, at the house of Mr Diodati, he was observed to live a very strict and pious life, and to be a constant frequenter [observer] of public ordinances.’23 This does ring true: the poet Milton, who was Cooke’s exact contemporary, stayed in Geneva in 1638–9 and records that in a place ‘where so much license exists, I lived free and untouched by the slightest sin or reproach, reflecting constantly that although I might hide from the gaze of men, I could not elude the sight of God. In Geneva I converse daily with John Diodati, the learned professor of theology.’24

  Diodati was minister of the Italian church in Calvin’s city (where licence was not as available as Milton imagined) and he offered a comforting retreat for young English Puritans. Cooke stayed with Diodati long enough to observe what he later described as ‘the nature of democracy, where the power resides in the people, as all lawful power originally is . . . Geneva is a pure democracy [because] every inhabitant has a voice in the election of the Grand Council’.25 This system appealed to Calvinists (much taken with selection of the wise) and to democrats, and worked well in a fortified city: but could it be translated to a nation? It was a topic of discussion amongst the émigré Protestants who had settled in Geneva as refugees from the Thirty Years War and the English descendants of the Marian refugees. They reproached Cooke vehemently about Charles I, who they believed had betrayed La Rochelle and the Protestant cause in France. Cooke spoke out in defence of his monarch: Charles, he explained to Diodati, was wise, and friendly to their church. The theologian smiled: ‘Christ commands us to forgive our enemies, but not our friends’. To the embarrassment of his young English guest, Diodati would often say ‘the Protestants have Charles I’s body, but the papists have his heart’.26

  Both Cooke and Milton stayed with Diodati at this time and speak of Camillo Cerdogni, an Anglophile Neopolitan nobleman who insisted on recording autographs and messages from visiting Englishmen in his Album Amicorum. When adding his own signature in August 1638, Cooke was most struck by a message left by an Englishman who had stayed with Cerdogni back in 1612.27 It was a quote from Seneca: ‘Whoever is too much known to everyone, is unknown to himself.’28 It had been inscribed by his former patron, the young Thomas Wentworth, who had never suffered fools gladly – and back in England, those he had treated as fools were no longer prepared to suffer him.

  Wentworth’s former colleagues in the fractious parliamentarian class of ’28 had prospered during the years of Charles’s personal rule. Most were directors of corporations formed to foster and benefit from Puritan settlement abroad, such as the Massachusetts Bay Company and the Providence Company in the Caribbean (in the latter case, they showed little scruple in benefiting from the exertions of slaves on the sugar plantations). Corporation meetings provided commercial cover for seditious discussions, and what these Puritan grandees refused to tolerate was the King’s threefold attack – on their parliament, on their place in the Church and on their well-gotten gains.

  In the Church, the influence of William Laud and his episcopalian faction waxed because it had the King’s blessing: Laud became the most powerful figure in the Privy Council. His purge of Puritan ministers continued and congregations were forced to accept his preferred rituals and his insistence, against their wishes, on fixing the place of the communion table.29 Such insults offended many believers, but what made them ripe for rebellion was their outrage at the Court of Star Chamber. This prerogative court comprised all members of the Privy Council (i.e. nominees and favourites of the King – in effect, his cabinet) and two subservient judges. As a court, it had power to arrest, to torture and to sentence to indefinite imprisonment (‘at his Majesty’s pleasure’) for political offences such as seditious libel. Its punishment of Puritan propagandists was ferocious, and took place in public, attended by Laud himself, who took a vicious satisfaction in observing the agonies to which he had sentenced his critics.

  In 1633 the barrister William Prynne had his ears cut off for a polemic against the theatre, on the theme Women Actresses Notorious Whores, shortly after the Queen had acted in a masque. In prison, he penned an attack on the bishops, so was arraigned again, in June 1637, along with the Puritan divine Dr Henry Burton, who had preached a sermon attacking Laud’s innovations as anti-Christian, and Dr John Bastwick, a Presbyterian who had penned a popular satire on the grossness and greed of the bishops. The Star Chamber, with Laud as a judge, condemned these three learned men to sit in the pillory at New Palace Yard and to have their ears (in Prynne’s case, the stumps of his ears) cut off, to be branded on the face with a hot iron, fined the massive sum of £5,000 and then thrown into prison for the rest of their lives. A vast crowd gathered around the pillory at New Palace Yard: to them the three preached and with them, prayed, inspiring their audience (and, through the pamphlets which described the scene, the whole country) with their courage in the face of the Star Chamber’s cruelty.

  This cruelty was attributed not to the King but to his counsellors – particularly to Laud and Wentworth. This was a convenient way of exculpating the monarch, in whose interests and with whose approval the punishment had been imposed. Wentworth’s advice from Ireland was that ‘to be shut up and kept in the dark all their lives is punishment mild enough for such savages . . . It is not prelacy they would end with . . . They begin to let forth the very life-blood of monarchy itself.’30 The result, of course, was to make them martyrs, and one hot-headed youth who had been at the front of the crowd around the pillory was inspired by their example to smuggle their seditious books back into the country. On his arrest, John Lilburne refused to answer his Star Chamber interrogators, claiming that as a freeborn Englishman he was entitled to a right against self-incrimination. The court found him in contempt and ordered him to be whipped,
all the way from Fleet Street to New Palace Yard. The sentence was carried out viciously, in the sight of a large crowd that gathered to cheer the youth they dubbed ‘Freeborn John’. It was a catch-cry that would be heard again – and again . . .

  In the same year, 1637, came another legal challenge, over the very serious issue of ship money. Charles had managed to survive financially in the first years of his personal reign by the sale of patents and monopolies and from the exaction of customs duties, exempt from the historic rule that taxes must be approved by Parliament. But the King’s expenses were heavy, even though the country was at peace, and another revenue-raising device was required. The King’s legal advisers found it in the ancient duty of every coastal county to provide and pay for a ship for the Royal Navy. By extending this duty to all counties, whether they bordered the sea or not, and by collecting the money through individual assessments, the King could raise sufficient funds not only to provision his navy, but (so it was feared) to extend the army and pay for the court. He might never need to recall Parliament – so long as his judges upheld the dubious argument that ship money was not a tax and the even more dubious argument that the King had the power to levy it whenever, in his unchallengeable judgment, there was peril on the sea.