The tyrannicide brief (original 2005; edition 2005)

A well researched well written book. John Cooke is a man that has barely rated a mention in any history book I have read, this book fixes that oversight. Highly recommended to any one with an interest in republican England. ( )

Excellent review of the life of a great man, and a well written account of a time when England struggled, however, feebly towards a just society. Robertson skilfully and engagingly writes a biography of John Cooke, the lawyer who successfully prosecuted Charles 1st for tyranny and war crimes. Long live the Republic! ( )

I reviewed this book for the Portland Phoenix. ( )

This is a book that succeeds very well in giving us a lawyer's-eye-view of both the trial of Charles I and the "regicide trials" after the Restoration. This is something that most books on the period tend to skirt around rather: with his expert knowledge and his forensic way of presenting a case, Robertson makes the intricacies of 17th century court procedure very clear. Moreover, he does a pretty good job of demonstrating to the reader what an interesting figure John Cooke must have been.

Anyone who was previously unfamiliar with the details of "hanging, drawing and quartering" will be happy to know that Robertson explains this gruesome punishment in detail at least four times in the course of the book: the rest of us might wish to skip those passages...

Where it doesn't quite achieve its goal is in its attempt to convince us that Cooke and the prosecution of Charles I laid the foundations for the modern concept of "crimes against humanity". Robertson does show that arguments, e.g. of head-of-state immunity and refusal to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the court, that were discussed in 1649 were also relevant to (say) the prosecutions of Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, but he doesn't really explain how we got from 1649 to 1945. Whilst the lawyers preparing the Nuremberg trials must have been glad to find precedents in the trial of Charles I, that doesn't mean that the one was a prerequisite for the other.

I thought Robertson rather oversold Cooke, as well. He's clearly very interesting in many ways: his unsuccessful schemes for law reform, for example, and his equally unsuccessful attempt to defend himself in the regicide trial with the classic (but then new) argument that a barrister has a duty to accept any client, no matter how distasteful. However, his role as prosecutor in the 1649 trial clearly wasn't as pivotal as Robertson would have liked it to be: since Charles's refusal to enter a plea had to be considered, according to the practice of the time, as a confession, there was no case for the prosecutor to prove, and the trial was a bit of a damp squib, completely eclipsed by Charles's virtuoso performance as "royal martyr" at his execution. ( )

A compelling case for the barrister who prosecuted Charles I, by one of the most compelling of the world's great barristers. John Cooke has languished in history as one of the key players of a deed thought better forgotten. Robertson, on the other hand, portrays Cooke as a man of powerful ethics and advanced legal understanding who had risen from poor circumstances. Cooke's vision of legal practice has largely come about - but centuries after he proposed the improvements. As an outsider, his attempts to overturn the closed shop of insider privilege was always doomed in his own life time. A great book. Read August 2011. ( )