Get Even More Visitors To Your Blog, Upgrade To A Business Listing >>

The Tyrannicide Brief – A book review

I wonder how many people know the name of the man who sent Charles I to the scaffold in 1649? The answer is not Oliver Cromwell.

I didn’t know before I read this Book and that’s a scandal.

John Cooke is the man’s name. Born in humble surroundings in rural Leicestershire, John Cooke became a lawyer and was the man into whose hands history’s most fateful brief was delivered by parliamentary messenger on Wednesday 10th January 1649.

John Cooke was given the brief because almost all the other lawyers had run away or suddenly become ill.

Cooke accepted it because he believed that an advocate must, once a fee has been paid, accept any case that is capable of argument. This principle – now called the ‘cab-rank rule’ – is the basis for a barrister’s right to practise.

I’m sure everyone knows the outcome of the trial. It set a precedent because it was the first modern legal argument against tyranny – based on a universal right to punish a tyrant who denies democracy and civil and religious liberty to his people or who bears command responsibility for a ‘crime against humanity’.

What sets Cooke aside for me is the ideas he had in the 1640s: he argued for the abolition of the death penalty other than for murder and treason; the end of imprisonment for debt; the abolition of Latin and Norman French in the courts. He was the first to claim that poverty was a major cause of crime, so offenders should be put on probation, and was the first to suggest that the state should provide a national health service and a system of legal aid for the poor.

Cooke was a man of courage who took the Tyrannicide brief knowing full well that if there was a restoration of the monarchy, the royalists would come for him. In 1660, he didn’t run away when they did.



This post first appeared on Julian Worker UK, please read the originial post: here

Share the post

The Tyrannicide Brief – A book review

×

Subscribe to Julian Worker Uk

Get updates delivered right to your inbox!

Thank you for your subscription

×