The Tyrannicide Brief

by Geoffrey Robertson

  Travel from London to Dublin in 1649 could take up to a fortnight: a week by horse or carriage to Chester (the terminal for sea-passage to and from Dublin) or to Milford Haven (for Wexford and Cork) then a few more days (weather permitting) for the sea-crossing. It was not until August that Cromwell departed, having persuaded John Cooke to follow and play a part in post-war reconstruction and settlement, as a judge who would initially hold court in conquered areas and in due course deal with the perpetrators of the 1641 massacres. The Irish sea is not a placid prospect at the best of times: Hugh Peters reported that the general was ‘as seasick as ever I saw a man in my life’.2 At College Green,3 still green around the gills from his rough sea-crossing, Cromwell spoke of his mission to propagate the gospel and deal with the ‘barbarous and blood-thirsty Irish’ who had perpetrated the 1641 massacres. In a less turbulent state a few days later, he issued a solemn declaration promising that none of his soldiers would ‘do any wrong or violence’ to any persons of any kind ‘unless they be actually in arms or office with the enemy’. A few days later, marching north, he emphasised this promise Henry V style by executing two of his soldiers who had stolen some hens from a local farmer. On 3 September – always a portentous day for Oliver Cromwell – he reached a town called Drogheda.

  Neither side had any illusion about the significance of this engagement. Ormonde’s plan was to tie Cromwell down at Drogheda in a long-drawn-out siege, so that during the onset of the winter those two stalwart Irish defenders, ‘Colonel Hunger and Major Sickness’, would decimate the tender-stomached English invaders. Cromwell, for his part, methodically surrounded the town walls and sent its governor, the experienced royalist commander Sir Arthur Aston, an ultimatum to surrender ‘to the end (that) effusion of blood may be prevented’. Answer came there none and Aston knew exactly what his defiance meant under the law of war, namely the right of the besieging army, once it breached the castle walls, to kill without mercy all its armed defenders.

  That, in short, is exactly what happened a few days later. The English cannons cracked the town walls and Cromwell, with astonishing personal bravery, led his troops, like Henry V, once more into the breach. There is no reason to dispute his own, invariably candid, account of his orders to his men: ‘being in the heat of the action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town, and I think that night they put to the sword about 2,000 men.’ Civilians were not killed, but the next day officers who surrendered were executed together with one in ten of their surrendered soldiers. However fashionable it may be to accuse Cromwell of a ‘war crime’ in Drogheda, he stuck precisely to the rules of war as they were well understood by Aston and by Ormonde, who gambled their men’s lives on a strategy of ‘no surrender’ that failed.4 What was shocking about Cromwell’s conduct at Drogheda was that he had fought according to these rules, and not according to the more humane understandings of them he displayed during the civil war – a war between English gentlemen.5 Thus Whitelocke and Ludlow justified his harshness on the basis that it accorded with the law of war and was intended as a deterrent. Cromwell in his report to Parliament could not help giving his terror tactic the absolving character of retribution:

  I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood, and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future – which are the satisfactory grounds for such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.6

  Cromwell persuaded himself easily enough, and doubtless many English people: his letter to the speaker was widely published. But he was not fighting the individuals responsible for the 1641 massacre, and these reprisals did nothing to stop the subsequent ‘effusion of blood’ – quite the contrary. The following month at Wexford hundreds of citizens were killed in overloaded boats as they tried to escape and at Clonmel a few months later the royalists took their revenge, trapping and exterminating some 2,000 of Cromwell’s soldiers – his worst (indeed, his only) defeat. Cromwell acted reasonably at Drogheda in ordering ‘no quarter’ for armed enemies in the heat and turmoil of the battle, but his behaviour at dawn the next day, in a conquered and utterly devastated town, was a different matter. Cromwellian apologists praise him for sparing nine lives out of ten on the basis that commanders during the Thirty Years War would have killed all prisoners taken after a defiant siege, but this is to miss the point: Cromwell was not a continental commander, and his objective had been achieved without need for cruel executions.

  These were times in which Englishmen of every political allegiance regarded Catholics as potential terrorists. The discovery of Guy Fawkes and the papist plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament on 5 November 1605 lived on in folk memory and was one celebration the Puritans did not ban. Irish Catholics were regarded as quite literally ‘beyond the Pale’ – they were collectively and indelibly responsible for the killings of 1641. For Cooke and his generation, Ireland was a permanent threat to security: the only long-term solution was to turn it into ‘West England’. Post-war reconstruction would be achieved by planting Protestants like dragons’ teeth throughout the land, and by transmigration – moving Catholic rebels to Connaught, the least fertile of Ireland’s four provinces. But first, the rule of law had to be re-established, by punishing the crimes of 1641 and then operating a system of expeditious and effective justice for all.

  To this end, John Cooke and his wife Frances arrived at Wexford shortly after it fell to Cromwell and on 1 January 1650 set sail for Cork in an old naval ship, the Hector. The ship made reasonable progress and by 4 January was half-way – Cooke could see the lights of Duncannon, the fort protecting Waterford Harbour – when the wind rose alarmingly. Early on Sunday morning the tempest struck and the sailors spent the day in desperate attempts to keep the ship off the rocks. In the evening, a vast wave split the foremast and the seas which washed over the stricken vessel left 5 feet of water in the hold. John and Frances huddled together in the main cabin with the other passengers, praying and lamenting as the boat shuddered in the darkness and its sailors shouted for all aboard to prepare for death.7

  Cooke had no doubt about what was in store: ‘My spirit fainted and my heart sank within me, the sorrows of death caught hold of me.’ He grieved most for Frances, his ‘poor dear heart’ who was clutching him, ‘my dearest friend upon earth’, as the ship careened. But John was even more worried ‘to think what my wife’s friends would say in England, that I should bring her to Ireland to drown her’. He felt remorse for his servants too, but much of his grief was concerned with the political consequence of his own death: ‘It almost split my heart to think what the malignants would say in England when they heard we were drowned.’ They would claim it as God’s vengeance upon him for murdering the King and for the first time there dawned upon him the awful thought that they might be right. Dorislaus had been assassinated and now he would be lost at sea: ‘Such extraordinary violent deaths import the nature of some heavy judgment – as if the Lord had been displeased with us.’

  He could not understand why he should be punished for coming to Ireland to do the Lord’s service – ‘What will thy enemies say’, he upbraided his God, ‘when the carcasses of thy people are given to be food for the fishes? It was for thy sake that we committed ourselves to the sea.’ He tried to comfort his wife with the thought that God would not let them drown, for He had further work for them to do. This seemed most unlikely: as the waves crashed over the cabin, Frances tried to prepare him for death: ‘We shall be made one with the father and the son, we shall be crowned with an incorruptible crown of glory’ (she clung to the hope with which Bishop Juxon had comforted Charles on the scaffold). As others swayed and screamed in the turbulence, John and Frances solemnly took their leave of each other: when they kissed he felt the tears running down her cheeks and promised, ‘These tears shall be wiped from our eyes in heaven.’

  It may have been a kind of ecstasy that enveloped John Cooke as he concentrated
his mind upon the joys of heaven, or it might simply have been dog-tiredness combined with the rolling of the ocean, but he felt an irrepressible drowsiness. He pinched himself to keep awake (‘What! Be drowned in my sleep!’) but could not fight off slumber. ‘And in my sleep I dreamed’, he subsequently recalled, ‘of being in a large room with other mariners all beseeching that their ships would not perish that night in this storm.’ A reassuringly Puritan young man, in ‘sad-coloured clothes’ and with snow white hair curled at the end beneath his broad-brimmed hat, explained that he was a servant of Jesus Christ – and he pointed to a glorious light shining from behind a curtain at the end of the room. ‘What would you have?’ the voice of Jesus asked, from behind the curtain. ‘The lives of all in the ship,’ replied Cooke. ‘And what ship is that?’ ‘The Hector,’ replied the dreamer. ‘A bad name for those who profess belief in me,’ said Jesus, his irony evincing a classical education. ‘Unless you speak the word,’ said Cooke, ‘the sea will swallow us up.’ ‘But why are you not willing to die?’ asked the Son of God, sternly. ‘Because then I can’t glorify you in the world,’ replied the lawyer, used to thinking on his feet, even when asleep. But then he made the courtroom beginner’s mistake of becoming emboldened by his own cleverness. He complained to the judge – of all mankind – that ‘the Lord should surprise us, getting us into a ship at his call for his service, and then drown us’.

  As he uttered this disrespectful remark, the light began to dim. Regretting instantly his doubting of divine purpose, Cooke threw himself down and begged for pity – unavailingly, until the young Puritan whispered that his complaint had been falsely premised – the tempest had been raised by Satan, not by God. Armed with this new information, Cooke begged Christ to hear him one last time: God may well allow Satan to play havoc on the ‘children of disobedience’ for their sins, but were not the children of obedience free from Satan’s control? The light flared. ‘Be not afraid. Your lives shall be saved.’ Cooke asked for the goods in the ship to be saved as well and Christ consented, farewelling the lawyer with what might pass for divine wisdom (or mind-numbing banality): ‘Go no more to sea in winter.’

  Frantic elbowing from Frances awoke John – she wanted him conscious as they drowned. ‘Peace, dear heart, and be quiet. We shall all be safe – Jesus Christ has promised our lives.’ Captain Stokes was not impressed: the storm was getting worse and all hope had gone. ‘I know God is very merciful and can do much,’ he said, to humour his famous passenger. ‘But this ship has five foot of water in the hold, which the pump cannot reach because it is blocked, and it is over twenty years old – it will shortly break asunder.’ Cooke remained ‘brimful of comfort’ as the waves washed through the broken cabin windows and the ship seemed to founder. The sailors cried: ‘Now we are gone.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ he shouted, ‘we are as safe as if we were on dry land.’ Frances, ever practical, suggested to Captain Stokes that the ship be lightened by throwing their heavy trunks overboard. Her husband would not allow it: he had made a deal with Christ and it included their baggage. Frances marvelled at his confidence, but Cooke’s fears ‘were so far above my hopes, as the rain descended and the floods came and the wind blew upon my soul, when we were like to have been split in pieces upon the rocks in the sea called “the three stags” I said I would cast my mind and body into the arms of my sweet saviour’.

  To the amazement of the mariners, the Hector weathered the night and when she was blown towards the rocks a miraculous change of wind veered her out to sea again. Eventually, the ship staggered into harbour at Kinsale,8 and both Frances and John set down the story of the dream and their deliverance. ‘Mrs Cooke’s Meditations’ were described as ‘an humble thanksgiving to her Heavenly Father for granting her a new life, having considered herself dead, and her grave made in the bottom of the sea’. John wrote an account of his dream, typically adding a didactic essay on other possible instances of ‘divine light’ provided through dreams. He was too much of a rationalist to claim he had really encountered Christ: he admitted that ‘Usually dreams follow men’s actual inclination’ and that having meditated on the pity of Jesus throughout the Sunday as the storm grew worse, it was likely that any dream would feature a compassionate Christ. He offered it to the public none the less as a possible instance of divine communication, in which his spirit may have been translated to some metaphysical plane where Christ, attended by Puritans, was open to rational, even legal, argument. His booklet, entitled A true relation of Mr Justice Cooke’s passage by sea from Wexford to Kinsale and of the great storm and imminent danger that he and the others were in, with the wonderful appearance of the power and goodness of God in their deliverance, according as it was revealed to him in a dream, went through several editions. It was circulated as devotional reading for the New Model soldiers in Ireland, and became the talk of many Puritan congregations back in London. The Lord had witnessed on behalf of the man responsible for taking the King’s life, and if this was augury, it boded well for the republic.

  It also augured well for their marriage. What the ‘his and hers’ accounts provide for modern readers is an affecting testimony to the love shared by John and Frances. The two had come to Ireland out of a missionary zeal to do God’s work, and thanksgiving for their unexpected salvation made them redouble their efforts. Thereafter, on the Munster circuit between Dublin, Waterford and Cork, Justice Cooke would praise the Lord and proffer that cheap and speedy justice he believed that all legal systems should supply. His dream had been an epiphany which convinced him that he was one of the elect whose work had the stamp of divine approval: henceforth he would fear no evil. His pistol he thought the only possession lost at sea, but in conformity with Christ’s promise that he should lose none of his belongings it was returned by a sailor upon landing – which he took as a sign that it would not be needed.

  Shortly after the storm, Cooke’s role in the ‘civilising’ mission became clear: Cromwell offered him the all-important post of chief justice of Munster, the largest and most settled of Ireland’s provinces. He was not the first choice, which had lit upon John Sadler, a distinguished Cambridge academic. In an effort to entice him to Dublin, Cromwell offered the munificent salary of £1,000, recognising that inadequate pay for Irish judges in the past had deterred recruitment and encouraged corruption. The invitation which went out in his name to Sadler, written on 29 December, so encapsulates Cooke’s language and hopes that it is likely he drafted it:

  We have a great opportunity to set up, until the Parliament shall determine otherwise, a way of doing justice amongst the poor people which for the uprightness and cheapness of it, may be an exceedingly great gain to them, who have been accustomed to as much injustice, tyranny and oppression from their landlords, the great men, and those that should have done them right, as, I believe, any people in that which we call Christendom. Sir, if justice were freely and impartially administered here, the foregoing darkness and corruption would make it look so much the more glorious and beautiful . . .9

  These prospects – and the pay that went with them – did not tempt Sadler. So instead the post went to Cooke himself at half the salary – £500 per annum – an indication of his willingness, in this ‘second life’ after the storm, to make personal sacrifices to do what he believed to be missionary work for God as well as for the commonwealth. He became chief justice of what had been a prerogative court of the president of Munster, who was now Henry Ireton: with his support Cooke began to work his miracle of summary justice. He decided over 600 cases in three months – a Guinness Book of Records average of seven decisions a day. Justice had suddenly – amazingly for most but alarmingly for a few – become fair and speedy and tenant-friendly. Cromwell was delighted and boasted to Ludlow that Chief Justice Cooke had ‘determined more causes in a week, than Westminster Hall in a year’ – and Westminster Hall housed all the civil courts of England.10 The Munster Court mainly handled small claims (albeit claims not small to the impoverished tenants who made them) and could not decide
title to land. None the less, Cooke’s achievement in revitalising the justice system was spectacular. It came at a price, of course: he was accused of arbitrariness by those ‘great men’ his rulings disfavoured, and his zeal to protect the poor against their landlords earned him the enmity of powerful Protestant nobles and rack-renters.

  In November 1651, Ireton died of fever whilst besieging Limerick. ‘His heavenly father would not suffer him to die by the hand of an enemy’, wrote Cooke, making the best of unfathomable providence. Ireton had been the prime mover in the King’s trial and the intellectual force behind the republic: he was Cromwell’s obvious (and only obvious) successor. Sir Charles Coote was not trusted to replace Ireton, least of all by Ireton himself, who had warned Cooke that the man would betray them if occasion arose to advantage himself. Charles Fleetwood, soon to become Cromwell’s new son-in-law by marrying Ireton’s widow, was eventually appointed Lord Deputy. Cooke worked well with him, as he tended to do with all veterans of the New Model Army. His pension arrangements were finalised in 1653 by act of parliament. In lieu of any pension, he received the freehold title to two houses in the town of Waterford, valued together at £208, some grazing land worth £245 at Kilbarry that also yielded wheat (twelve barrels of which went annually to the local hospital) and a farm at Barnahaly on which stood the crumbled remains of several castles.11 These were hardly great estates, but they made him for the first time a man of some property.