Cooke’s urgent message was that ‘the sword has no capacity to settle religion’. The appalling prospect of war between Parliament and its own army was becoming very real and his Independent ‘thinks it strange that those who can least justify them – Christians – should have most wars’, a paradox put down to ‘this one depraved principle, to suffer no opinion but your own. How can truth appear, but through argumentation?’ It was a barrister’s point of view, perhaps, but it echoes Milton and predates the ‘free marketplace of ideas’ of John Stuart Mill. Look at the settlements in New England, Cooke expostulates: there, Independency has worked to the public benefit. He urges Presbyterians to be moderate, not rigid: it was the rigidity of the bishops, after all, that proved their downfall.
‘The Independent has always been a faithful well-wisher of King and Parliament,’ said Cooke in 1647, the last year in which this statement could be made with a straight face. Independents were still a minority in the Commons, although MPs of the stamp of young Henry Vane, Oliver St John and Arthur Haselrig had led the ‘war party’ which ran political rings around Holles and Prynne and their cohorts. The ‘recruiter’ elections towards the end of the war strengthened the Independents – they brought to Parliament Cromwell’s son-in-law, Henry Ireton (another lawyer), Charles Fleetwood, Robert Blake (Cooke’s Wadham contemporary), Thomas Harrison, Edmund Ludlow, Thomas Rainborough (soon to earn fame at the Putney debates) and Fairfax himself. Henry Marten was readmitted to their ranks after his suspension for urging a republic. By the summer of 1647 he was still, in this respect, in a minority of one.
That attitudes towards a republic changed so radically over the next eighteen months was primarily due to the conduct of the King, who had been relocated with full retinue, in his old palace at Hampton Court, under relaxed surveillance after giving a solemn promise not to escape. Throughout the civil war and obsessively after it, Charles determined to restore his divinely bestowed privileges by force of arms. He cared little about the killing of his countrymen: their deaths were the tribute paid by his subjects towards the restoration of his former powers. He had no compunction about begging armed assistance from Ireland and France or committing the ultimate crime (in the eyes of his English subjects) of soliciting the Pope’s support by promising to repeal anti-Catholic laws. (The Vatican in expectation did send a papal nuncio to Ireland, who stirred up plenty of trouble in the royalist interest and made secret treaties for ‘home rule’ under a Catholic lord lieutenant.) His tactic was to play for time and to play the factions off against each other until his supporters were ready to start a second war that would return him to power. The problem for Charles was that none of this secret scheming remained secret for long. His letters were often intercepted on the high seas or found in captured baggage trains or besieged castles.
The most crucial development in 1647 was the politicisation of the New Model Army, as a result of shabby treatment by the Parliament and the consequent receptiveness by its ranks to Leveller ideas. Denzil Holles led the rigid Presbyterian majority in the House of Commons: they showed no gratitude to the veterans, proposing to cut the pay they were owed before they disbanded. In March, Fairfax forwarded a petition from officers and soldiers asking only for fair treatment in terms of pay and conditions: the MPs’ response, at a late night sitting, was to deplore their temerity and warn the war heroes that if they persisted they would be treated as ‘enemies of the state and disturbers of the public peace’. This ‘Declaration of Dislike’ was a graceless and provocative act, as John Cooke was among the first to point out:
That such gallant men, who have kept some of the chief contrivers’ heads on their shoulders, for a humble petition presented to their noble General (which all soldiers by the law of armies may do) should be voted enemies and disturbers for that which since has been acknowledged to be but just, was the most monstrous ingratitude that ever was heard of under the sun since the first moment of its creation . . . But whom God will destroy for their great provocations, he first makes demented . . .11
Cooke had read his Shakespeare – Holles was mad as Lear. Cooke dubbed him the ‘chief incendiary’ because he had persuaded the Commons, against Cromwell’s opposition, to order the public hangman to burn copies of a Leveller petition. Cooke reported that ‘many honest people are much troubled at the burning of this petition which was lately presented to the honourable House; what greater mischief can befall a people in time of Parliament, than that those who have ventured their lives for the Petition of Right, should be denied the liberty of petition?’ Although much latitude must be allowed to governments acting for the public good, Cooke warned that some commonwealth men were becoming ‘private wealthsmen’ and ‘turning the edge of the axe of power against the people who put it into their hands’. It must have been in this period that Cooke was briefed to advise the army as an advocate-general at courts martial: his writing begins to show a familiarity with its operations.
Fairfax held a council with his senior officers at Saffron Walden in May, which decided to summon a ‘general rendezvous’ of the whole army, in defiance of Parliament. Cooke’s description of their meeting explains what drove these Christian soldiers onwards: they fasted, then led by Fairfax
lay grovelling upon their knees and pouring forth fervent prayers . . . when they rose to eat, their countenance was no longer sad. The Lord had, by the powerful influence of his good spirit, given a sweet return for their prayers. The horse and foot met with such general rejoicing and such a unanimous resolution to live and die together, for the just rights of King and people, that it is most admirable to consider that money, which is the lode-stone that draws the iron hearts of most soldiers, is no more reckoned by them than dirt in comparison to just liberties. I am confident that they which kick their heels against this army will in the end break their necks.12
The massed ranks of the New Model Army cheered Fairfax and made a solemn engagement that they would not suffer themselves to be disbanded until their just grievances were met. As if to live up to Cooke’s expectations, they issued a declaration by which they vowed:
that we were not a mere mercenary army, hired to serve any arbitrary power of state, but called forth and conjured by the several declarations of Parliament to the defence of our own and the people’s just rights and liberties.
Out of this assembly came the blueprint for a General Council comprising the most senior officers and an elected representative of each regiment: this General Council would determine the political direction of the army, and in due course of the state. Its first business was to settle the ‘Heads of Proposals’ that Ireton personally put to the King: the very fact that they were more emollient than Parliament’s ‘Newcastle Propositions’ was misinterpreted by Charles as a sign of weakness. He temporised, as usual, duchessing the army leaders whilst waiting for his two great enemies to fall out. This they proceeded to do – the army wanted to impeach Holles and ten other ‘incendiary’ Presbyterian MPs who had been instrumental in the ‘Declaration of Dislike’; they in turn rallied the London mob which staged a violent peace demonstration against the ‘war party’ of independent MPs, who thereupon left the city (taking the mace with them) to seek the protection of Fairfax. The army marched apprehensively into London in August, but all seemed well: there was a fine show of trumpeting and drumming and the public turned out proudly for the parade. Their huzzahs augured well for John Cooke’s latest work, published that month: A Union of Hearts between the King’s most Excellent Majesty, the Right Honourable Lords and Commons in Parliament, His Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax and the army under his command; the assembly and every honest man that desires a sound and durable peace, accompanied with speedy justice and piety. King and Parliament, army and people: four estates that needed reminding, in what little space was left on the cover, that ‘The falling out of lovers is the renewing of love’. The problem was that the King had never been in love with his Parliament or its army or with his people and the consequence was not yet apparent to C
ooke (or to anyone else). His new work attempted to find a basis for rapprochement with the King, but his argument came very close to justifying a republic, where rulers could be put on trial for murder or for maladministration.
‘I know very few who have gained anything by publishing, besides their own contentment’, Cooke began, with reference to ‘hard censures’ earned from fellow lawyers for the Vindication. None the less, he volunteered some basic propositions:
that all men are born free;
that nature gives talents unequally – some are gifted to command and others to obey, since ‘wise men should govern the ignorant’;
that all just authority comes from God, who filters it through the people by making their consent necessary for monarchical (or any other) government. God dislikes ‘tyrants’ – viz, kings with unlimited power. People should free themselves from tyranny if and when they can;
that no government is approved by God unless it is just and rational. It cannot be rational to obey one man in all things ‘for wise men are but men’;
that tyrants may act oppressively by maladministration as well as by conquest. The English people, long before the Norman Conquest, voluntarily submitted to monarchy, by consenting to a contract which bound the monarch to call parliaments to make new laws. To these laws the King was not obliged to consent, but if his continued refusal would endanger the people, Parliament was entitled to bring the law into operation notwithstanding.
Cooke accepted that there were opinions by judges to the contrary, but
By whom were they made judges? By the King. How came they by their places? The echo [rumour] is: they bought them . . . all judicial places were bought and sold, as horses in Smithfield; one thousand pounds for a chief justice’s place – and for how long to continue? During the King’s pleasure. Was it safe for such judges to argue for the liberty of the subject against the King’s prerogative . . .?13
Why, Cooke asks, should any more value be put on opinions by these corrupt judges than on decisions by the bishops – were they not both the King’s creatures? Take the legal maxim that the King can do no wrong: ‘Therefore if he kill or rape it is neither murder nor felony. I say it is against reason and therefore against law: for if the King may kill one man he may kill a hundred and what courtier dare give any faithful advice, when the King may without control kill him or strangle him and not be guilty of blood?’14 Sovereign immunity offended ‘right reason’ – the internal logic of the law which the King’s judges wilfully ignored in the ship-money case and the Five Knights’ case: ‘how many gallant worthies have they suffered to die in prison when they might have been set at liberty by habeas corpus?’15
For all his talk of a renewal of love and a union of hearts, what really emerges is Cooke’s bitterness towards the ‘rigid Presbyterians’, representatives of the war profiteers, who wanted to impose their own narrow religious orthodoxy. His about-face, from the effusive comradeship he offered just six months before, demonstrated how the ‘Declaration of Dislike’ had soured relationships: to Puritans, the army appeared the last safeguard of religious liberty. Cooke, imagining himself speech-writer to Jesus, prepared an urgent address to the army:
Your work is not yet done. You must stand up for the liberties of your brethren. You must stand upon the gap for me, who alone trod the wine press of my father’s wrath for you. Why have I empowered you, but to purchase liberty for my people?
The army commanders continued their negotiations with the King, because he was the only card that could trump the demand of Presbyterian MPs for a compulsory Covenant. But they reckoned without the hostility from their ranks at their dealing at all with the man against whom they had fought for four long and bloody years. Leveller propagandists persuaded the common soldiers that their leaders were bent on appeasing this ‘man of blood’. Cooke was Lilburne’s counsel, and the Levellers respected his radical intellect, although his writing was often dense and legalistic, relieved by bad puns. The Leveller leaders, by contrast, were outstanding polemicists and neat phrasemakers: The Agreement of the People, which they presented to the General Council of the army in October, was a simple and moving document, calling for a new and representative Parliament, elected biannually, for religious toleration and an end to discrimination on grounds of ‘tenure, estate, charter, degree, birth or place’. It bemoaned the ‘woeful experience’ of being ‘made to depend for the settlement for our peace and freedom upon him that intended our bondage and brought a cruel war upon us’.16
Cromwell and Ireton joined in public debate with their Leveller-inspired critics at a church in Putney over the first week in November 1647. Here, with prayers and passion, the case for liberty and for its limits was memorably stated. The key exchanges were between the cautious Henry Ireton, who feared that universal suffrage would lead to the destruction of private property, and Colonel Thomas Rainborough, who famously extemporised the case for democracy:
I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under . . . Every man born in England cannot, ought not, neither by the law of God nor the law of nature, to be exempted from the choice of those who are to make laws for him to live under, and for aught I know to lose his life under.
When Ireton insisted that universal suffrage would give the vote to persons with no stake at all in the kingdom, Rainborough responded with the question that Cooke had asked in Union of Hearts:
I would fain know what the soldier hath fought for all this while? Hath he fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him a perpetual slave?
The upshot of these debates was agreement that the vote should be accorded to all except beggars, servants and women (the poorest she in England would not be enfranchised). The King became the subject of discussion so heated that official note-taking was stopped. Harrison called him a ‘man of blood’ who should be prosecuted, and Cromwell agreed that he was a danger to national security, but he reminded them of how David could not punish Joab for murder because his brothers were powers in the land and the ‘sons of Zeruih were too hard for him’.17 This was Cromwell’s favourite biblical precedent for temporising, but the patience of the army – officers and soldiers alike – was running out. Why, if God had meant us to negotiate with the King, was he proving so stubborn? It was a good question and became even better after 11 November, when Charles broke his solemn undertaking not to escape from Hampton Court. He sneaked out through a secret passage and headed south, to the coast.
The King’s escape was an act of calculating confidence. Since his surrender he had never ceased to be ‘the King’. His enemies might have won the war but they still, and desperately, needed his agreement to the terms upon which he should be reinstated. They wanted him to turn into some kind of constitutional monarch, deprived of control of the army, forced to share policy with Parliament, and to make a religious settlement which would entrench Calvinism but (if the Independents had their way) with a degree of toleration. At Hampton Court, Charles had held court to factional leaders, receiving in turn Cromwell and Ireton, then Holles and other leaders of the Presbyterian majority, and then the Scottish commissioners with whom he really did want to deal. Their countrymen could not forgive the English for failing to deliver on Pym’s promise to accept the Solemn League and Covenant, and were furious at the blasphemous sects which were fermenting in London under the protection of the Independents. Before his flight, Charles had secured in principle their promise to invade England on his behalf: that he headed south rather than north to the border evinced his wish to avoid being in their custody again as well as in their debt. He wanted to place himself where he could rally his foreign and English supporters for a second civil war.
That was not what Charles told the good folk of Newport when, through the bungling of his courtiers, he ended up detained by Cromwell’s cousin in Carisbrooke Castl
e, instead of reaching Jersey or a fall-back base in France. He had come to the Isle of Wight, he announced, through fear of ‘a people called “levellers” . . . desiring to be somewhat secure till some happy accommodation may be made between me and my Parliament, I have put myself in this place, for I desire not a drop more of Christian blood should be spilt’.18 This was colossally hypocritical, even for Charles, who was about to spill another ocean of Christian blood to avoid any accommodation with his Parliament. Leveller voices in the army council had not demanded his execution, and Cromwell was famously insisting that the army must cling to constitutional authority: ‘If it be but a hare swimming over the Thames, I will take hold of it rather than let it go.’19
For this purpose, reckless radicals had to be jettisoned. At a dramatic army ‘rendezvous’ at Cork-Bush field, Fairfax eloquently rallied the troops while Cromwell tore up copies of the Leveller ‘Agreement of the People’ that some wore in their hats. Cork-Bush field effectively ended Leveller prospects of a solid power base in the New Model Army, although their ideas were to remain influential and Lilburne, their leader, was yet to have his finest hour.
The Tyrannicide Brief Page 14