Tyrannicide brief. Geoffrey Robertson. 2005.

Charles I waged civil wars that cost one in ten Englishmen their lives. But in 1649 parliament was hard put to find a lawyer with the skill and daring to prosecute a King who was above the law: in the end the man they briefed was the radical barrister, John Cooke.

Cooke was a plebeian, son of a poor Leicestershire farmer. His puritan conscience, political vision and love of civil liberty gave him the courage to bring the King’s trial to its dramatic conclusion: the English republic. Cromwell appointed him as a reforming Chief Justice in Ireland, but in 1660 he was dragged back to the Old Bailey for a rigged trial and brutally executed.

Geoffrey Robertson QC reinvigorates the Republican debate with this gripping account of how that ‘good old cause’ produced Parliamentary sovereignty, equal justice and the rule of law, exposing at last Britain’s secret history of republican achievement.