Do you know who the first Anglican saint was? Here’s a hint: it wasn’t Henry VIII. The title of this article says it all, but don’t feel embarrassed if you are unaware of King Charles the Martyr. Since the founding of the Episcopal Church (USA), Anglicanism’s first and longest-loved saint has been curiously absent from our province’s liturgical calendar — and this despite repeated and growing calls for his reinstatement.

Sadly, the American case is not unique. Anglicans today pay scandalously little attention to the saint whose cult fueled the Anglican imagination for centuries. Yet King Charles the Martyr witnesses to important facets of the Anglican heritage, especially the Anglican Counter-Reformation and the importance of martyrs, miracles, and relics. If it is true, as many now claim, that Anglicans are out of touch with their history and tradition, then the life and legacy of King Charles the Martyr are important for our reintegration.

Royalist Piety
When Charles I was beheaded on January 30, 1649, the large crowd that witnessed his execution rushed the scaffold. But they weren’t fueled by rage or hatred; their concerns were quite different, with roots reaching back to the medieval period. The onlookers wanted access to the king’s miraculous blood.

This undoubtedly sounds strange to us, but in the mid-17th century it was wholly normal. Beginning with King Edward the Confessor in the 11th century, English kings were known as miracle workers. This was popularly known as “the royal touch,” a gift bestowed by God through the anointing that English monarchs received in their consecration. And, as the influential French medievalist Marc Bloch noted decades ago, the royal touch remains the longest lasting and most widely attested miracle in human history.

The ritual itself was quite simple. The monarch made the sign of the cross over the sick, touched the infected part(s), and prayed for healing. Initially used to cure scrofula, a widespread disease consisting of painful bodily inflammation, the royal touch was later used more widely. Kings consecrated and distributed coins called “angels”; they also blessed “cramp rings,” which were used to heal those racked by bodily pain. By the 15th century, much of this was synced with the English liturgical calendar, and Good Friday was the most popular day for performing royal miracles.

The English Reformation did not diminish the importance of the royal touch, but amplified it, along with other medieval traditions. One of the fault lines that defined the Middle Ages was the constant tension between the papacy and European monarchies. The papacy claimed to possess “plenitude of power” in both the spiritual and the political realms, but the validity of this assertion was undermined by the continued presence of wonder-working kings and queens.

Thus, in the 16th century, Roman Catholicism became the major opponent of this popular and ancient pattern of royalist piety; the Church of England, however, was one of its defenders and preservers. From the Anglican perspective, the monarch—not the pope—was the defender of the English church, and the royal touch was a God-given, miraculous vindication of this conviction.

The Anglican Counter-Reformation
Why, then, was King Charles I beheaded? The answer is found not in controversies between Anglicans and Roman Catholics, but in those between Anglicans and Puritans. Most importantly, the reign of Charles I saw the full flowering of the Anglican Counter-Reformation, a movement that began under Elizabeth I (1558-1603), and steadily gained momentum under James I (1603-25), Charles’s father.

On the one hand, the Anglican Counter-Reformation was a literary renaissance. Poetry saw a breathtaking revival in the early- tomid-17th century—John Donne and George Herbert are, perhaps, its best known representatives. No less importantly, during these same years Anglicans began composing devotional prose.

Rooted in the liturgies of The Book of Common Prayer, this literature was nurtured by the vividly emotional language of the Psalms. Lancelot Andrewes’s Private Prayers remains the apex of such writing. Anglican literature of the early 17th century was defined by unflinching, personal introspection, and the intervening centuries have not eroded its inspirational power.

On the other hand, the Anglican Counter-Reformation was a liturgical movement. Its ideals can be summed up in the phrase “the beauty of holiness.” Today, every Anglican parish bears the marks of the Anglican Counter-Reformation. One such legacy is altar rails, a unique feature of distinctly Anglican architecture.

During the reign of Edward VI (1547-53), altars were destroyed and replaced with movable tables, thereby symbolizing the Eucharist as a communal meal, rather than a sacrifice. The Anglican Counter-Reformation sought to unite the imagery of “the Holy Table” with the example of the early Church, which used altars. Together with altar rails, altars became visible reminders that the parish was a sacred space and should be reverenced as such. This dignified, outward liturgical expression perfectly mirrored the introspective drive of the movement’s devotional literature.

The development of rich ceremonial in many English parishes outraged Puritans. They believed such ceremonies were blasphemous. Furthermore, as if adding insult to injury, Charles I maintained his father’s prohibition on public speculation about the doctrine of double predestination, a prohibition aimed directly at Puritan theology. These religious tensions, which were joined to political grievances of questionable integrity, ignited the English Civil War in 1642. It quickly became clear that this was a zero-sum affair; monarchy and episcopacy, traditional institutions of authority that many believed were divinely ordained, were under attack. Their enemies wanted nothing less than their complete obliteration.

Eikon Basilike
The king’s capture in 1646 aroused sympathy and support for him. So too did his continued administration of the royal touch, which galvanized pious Anglicans, and also converted some of his opponents – including his own jailers — to the royalist-Anglican cause. Nonetheless, the king was executed on January 30, 1649. In his own words, he lived and died “according to the profession of the Church of England.” This was a clear affirmation, on the king’s part, of the necessity of episcopacy and monarchy, and the validity of the Anglican Counter-Reformation.

Two developments sustained Anglican identity in the dark decade that followed. First was the cult of the king’s relics. The royal touch continued to function through items such as handkerchiefs, which were dipped in the martyred king’s blood. These miraculous events were well known and widely reported, by word of mouth and in print. The location of such relics — usually private homes—became important sites of pilgrimage for Anglicans who refused to accept that the end had already come.

The second important development was the appearance of the king’s autobiographical Eikon Basilike, or The Royal Image. A collection of 28 meditations, each of which concluded with a prayer, Charles I used his book to defend himself, pray for his people, and meditate upon death. Like other writings of the Anglican Counter-Reformation, Eikon Basilike frequently drew upon the Psalms. Its first edition, printed on the day of the king’s death, was hugely popular; 39 editions were printed in 1649 alone. But the book was quickly proscribed, and became the target of a scathing, government-sponsored polemic written by John Milton. Nonetheless, Eikon Basilike was a force to be reckoned with, and its influence proved unmatchable.

Restoration
On May 29, 1660, Charles II returned to England after more than a decade of exile. With his return, the English monarchy and the Church of England were restored amidst a surging tide of popular support. One of the new king’s first acts was the commemoration of his father as King Charles the Martyr, the first Anglican saint. A number of other saints’ days were brought back into the Anglican calendar, several of which were dedicated to royal saints such as King Edward the Confessor. The date of the Restoration, which was also Charles II’s own birthday, became an Anglican feast day.

These developments were given their final form in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which included liturgies for King Charles the Martyr and the Restoration. According to the commemorative liturgy for the royal saint, he was murdered by “wicked men.” Such liturgical sentiment reveals that the Anglican Counter-Reformation emerged victorious in the Restoration, and that honoring martyrs, believing in miracles, and reverencing relics are part of being Anglican. King Charles the Martyr’s last words included the simple statement, “Remember.” Why don’t we?

Benjamin Guyer is a graduate student in British History at the University of Kansas.

[This article was originally published by The Living Church.]
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I wrote similarly to the Living Church, but I want to repeat.

Notwithstanding that I abhor the death penalty, I cannot find it in me to esteem Charles I, let alone regard him as a saint.  He was by my historical remembrance a betrayer of England and the great gains of the English Church in being Reformed.  He was an enemy of nascent democracy and a bastion of overbearing privilege.  The Roman Catholic Church of that era was not what it is today (and I still could not be one for doctrinal reasons as I am much more or Reformed Anglican than Catholic in my doctrines.)  The RC church was an imperial power and English history of this early modern era was one of political conflict as well as religious, characterized by an commingling of both that does not fit today’s western separation of Church and State.

I shall ever remember, indeed execrate, Charles I as an enemy of democratic principles and a would be destroyer of the great advances in the Church in England to enshrine protestant, Reformation principles.  No king may place himself above the people in the way that he did.  As for the superstitions surrounding his blood - may they be an embarrassment for ever.

You might as well try to canonize Guy Fawkes!  Sorry Benjamin - I grew up there.

Ian -

I thank you for your note, and for the opportunity to clarify.  I think, in all honesty, that this is a historical matter moreso than a theological one - or, perhaps better, that this is a theological issue that can be resolved only with reference to history.

First, you write that Charles was “a betrayer of England and the great gains of the English Church in being Reformed.”  I confess that I don’t know what you mean by this.  I recognize that there was a Calvinist movement within England and that its radical wing is known today as Puritanism, but Calvinism was a rather variegated movement - so much so that even some Puritans (e.g., William Perkins) thought that reverencing relics was a necessary part of Christian orthodoxy.  In other words, there was no lone set of “Reformation principles” that everyone agreed to.  One need look no further than the implacable debates between the Lutheran and Swiss Protestant movements to recognize this.  The Church of England was a royal church from the time of Henry VIII onward.  The fact that crosses behind the altar were replaced with images of the royal arms is evidence of that aplenty.  Protestantism was (and still is today) a highly variegated movement, and in England it took root in much older and fairly elaborate royalist traditions.  That’s the way it was and the way it is, and no amount of upset is going to change this.  An attack on Charles’s cult is an attack on the entirety of the English Reformation which began, let us recall, with the declaration of royal supremacy!

Second, you write that Charles “was an enemy of nascent democracy and a bastion of overbearing privilege.”  I implore you to find any substantive evidence that people in mid-seventeenth century England were interested in democracy.  Surely, Oliver Cromwell was not interested in democracy!  I propose that your argument is based upon mixing up political issues of the early-mid seventeenth century with those of the eighteenth century (and primarily in the American colonies, at that).  Attacking the royal saint’s memory due to historical conflation is hardly a valid argument.  One might as well argue that Charles was an enemy of socialism, when the truth of the matter is that one is hard pressed to find the idea, let alone advocates of it, in the seventeenth century.

Third, you write that “No king may place himself above the people in the way that he did.”  On the one hand, if that is the case, then you are going to have to deal with King Henry VIII and King Edward VI.  Indeed, far moreso than Charles I, these two monarchs (the boy king, admittedly, under the “guidance” of Cranmer, Somerset, and others) did much to violate the good faith and well-being of the people in their land.  On the other hand, I would like to demythologize your appeal to “the people” and claim, instead, that “the people” is a deeply problematic concept, not least in the present discussion.  If Charles was really against “the people” then why were there so many royalists?  And if Charles was so hated, why was he so easily commemorated, and why did his fast day (only now do we think of it is as a feast day) last so long (nearly 200 years!)?  Again, I think that you argument conflates categories - and in this instance, yours is an American populism wielded against an English royalism.

Lastly, you refer to the miracles associated with the king’s relics “superstitions”.  Isn’t the more important question whether or not, in fact, the reports were true?  Even a secular historian like Mark Bloch writes, in his book The Royal Touch, that the these royal miracles are the most well attested miracles in history.  We have a voluminous amount of written and archeological evidence for them.  Charles II reportedly touched and healed more than 100,000 people in his own day.  You can’t buy - let alone fabricate - evidence like that!  Of course, if you are a Calvinist (in the traditional sense), then you entirely deny the existence of miracles after the time of the Apostles, and polemicize against every claim of divine intervention as “superstition”; if you are a Deist or an Atheist, you polemicize against all miracles (which only highlights the far higher tendency among Calvinists rather than Anglicans, especially in the eighteenth century, to convert to Deism).  But these are clearly not the Anglican way.  We are not Calvinists, Deists, or Atheists.  Part of what is at stake with forgetting King Charles the Martyr, I believe, is forgetting - or, perhaps, abandoning - belief that miracles, God’s dynamic interruption of our history, are a part of orthodox Christian existence.  Especially in the wake of the intellectually violent (and thinly polemical) “new atheism” the Church must preserve - which entails first and foremost knowing! - its own history and traditions.  Is not turning to the single most well-attested miracle in human history an excellent way of doing so?  Disbelief does not make evidence disappear; nor does disbelief make evidence irrelevant or “superstitious” or whatever.  Disbelief is simply disbelief and, when confronted by tremendous evidence to the contrary, disbelief is nothing but sheer foolishness (even if there are those who stubbornly maintain it).

You can certainly “execrate” Charles.  But in so doing, you are execrating a tremendous amount of the history of the church that you yourself are a minister of.  The same sentiments that commemorated Charles gave us the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.  If your being “more Reformed…than Catholic” in your doctrines is evidenced by your polemic here, then you are also more ahistoical than historical, and more fantastic than real, in your understanding of Anglican history, theology, and devotion.  That is your call and your decision, of course.  But why create and attempt to justify an ecclesial identity with such thin reference to and understanding of the past?  I cannot fathom spending my life that way.  I would like to think that at some point, the so-called “Reformed” and so-called “Catholic” among us might sit down and ask themselves, “how do I submit to the past?”  Part of that answer means reconciling ourselves with the intense royalism that so pervasively defined our earliest Anglican centuries.  Refusing to do so is, I believe, an intellectual and theological cop-out of the highest magnitude.  Rather than rejecting history and replacing it with historical conflations, we should ask ourselves how the values of our Anglican past can be fruitfully brought to bear upon the present.  Indeed, that is the task of Anglican theology today - a profoundly difficult exercise in historical understanding, and an equally difficult exercise for our moral and theological imagination.  That such an exercise takes a hit at atheism makes it all the more worthwhile, especially at the present.

Thanks for the long reply.
You may out it down to long held prejudice, family of origin and theological preference.  I grew up in England in an environment that would have been Roundhead at the time and whose sympathies lie there still.  I was formed in that part of the C of E that holds Calvin and Zwingli the real inspiration of the Anglican Reformation.  We still honor the Puritan Divines.  We were anti-Tractarian in the 19th Century and continued to hold that to be a Roman Catholic and English is to be beholden to two conflicting authorities, one of which was potentially traitorous.  Charles I has always represented the worst of monarchs.  I am a creature of my environment I am sure.  I cannot find it in me to honor this king, let alone regard him as a saint.  So there you are.  Please let me know when Oliver Cromwell will be so honored and I will come running.

I must confess that I have learned something about King Charles I that stretches my credulity more than a little. I find the whole system of making saints more than a little off-putting, be they by the Vatican method or, equally repulsive, by religious extremists of any brand, not least Protestants and evangelicals, who want to turn ordinary men (usually) into something bordering on extra-human. By all means less us praise famous men (and women) but let us avoid superstition. Salvation lies in Christ alone and I know of nothing substantive in Scripture or the tradition of the early church that suggests we need any other mediator but Christ.

Being of a reformed disposition like IanM, I obviously find it difficult to go along with any kind of “sainting”. We are having a field year in Australia as we approach our very first domestic Catholic saint, the founder of the teaching order of St Joseph (often affectionately referred to as the Joey’s) that did an enormous amount, and still does, to provide Catholic education in Australia. I am second to none in respect for Sister Mary McKillop but I don’t need a Vatican committee to tell me of her worth and contribution to Australian society.

Even less can I go along with totally unsubstantiated claims about the blood of King Charles I and his hankies, still less the superstitious nonsense about the “royal touch.” Any historian knows that the rules of historical evidence are not immediately revealed by simply referring to statements, even if contemporary.

I am astonished that St Charles I is argued as “fact” on an Anglican forum (and who observes his feast day anyway), and still less that a man who brought in foreign armies in a vain attempt to maintain his autocratic rule should be seen as a Christian martyr, still less a “saint.” Charles had his head whacked off by the political winners who asserted, and for it I for one thank God, parliamentary supremacy and the rule of law over the whims of a king. We owe, in the UK, Australia and the US, much of our present religious and political freedoms to the departure of Charles I.

We should acknowledge in our liturgy, for those Anglicans who still use anything resembling a Book of Common Prayer, the outstanding men and women who have served Christ. One of the things I like about the American liturgy is that it does just that, without elevating, for example, Martin Luther King into something that he would have rejected out of hand. But most of us, I suggest, are well aware of the political games played by institutions, not least the church, when it seeks to elevate people beyond their humanity in something approaching divinity.

Sadly, I suspect, it is impossible to bridge the intellectual and spiritual gap between a “Catholic” worldview that incorporates intermediaries and a “Protestant” or “Reformed” view that Christ, and Christ alone, is the Redeemer and Savior of the world.

Ian -

First, just to be clear, I said nothing about intercession or intercessors.  Although I do believe, per Scripture, that the saints intercede for us, I do not believe in the Roman practice of appointing of appointing a particular saint for a particular cause or need.  My article made no claim about Charles as a patron saint for anything, precisely because he was not seen as such (and indeed, Anglican sainthood has resisted the notion of patron saints, preferring instead to hold up saints as a) morally important, b) theologically important, and to a much lesser extent c) mythologically important).  If you find saints off-putting, I suppose that being Anglican would be a frustrating experience, as we have always reverenced saints, and even commemorated them from time to time.  Your concern about “elevat[ing] people beyond their humanity in [sic] something approaching divinity” is one that I imagine the vast majority of Anglicans share.  If you are attempting to attack something, I imagine you have either set up a straw man with this statement, or missed your target entirely.

Charles died proclaiming, among other things, episcopacy - something that Cromwell, et. al., were wholly opposed to.  I propose, however, that rather than seeing him as a “Christian” martyr (and is not Christianity an ever-changing, ever-broadening concept?), you should see him instead as exactly what I have claimed he was (and is) - an Anglican saint who died for distinctly Anglican values.  There is no need to reduce the Anglican tradition to some sort of ecumenically bland, lowest-common-denominator “Christianity”.  Charles was an Anglican saint.  If other Christians don’t like it, what is that to me?  I am an Anglican.  Charles died for a number of things that I believe in.

As for your - silly - claim that “We owe, in the UK, Australia and the US, much of our present religious and political freedoms to the departure of Charles I” I simply welcome evidence of that fact.  I propose that you have done what Ian Montgomery did - conflated the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  If you think otherwise, that is fine, but I want to see evidence.  I know of no one - not a single person - in the seventeenth century that was arguing for anything like “our present freedoms”.  Do you?

Are miracles superstitious?  That’s what I want to know.  You are welcome to lecture about “historical evidence” but the problem you face is not one or two accounts, but - quite literally - hundreds of thousands.  When you have that volume of testimony, and when it spans centuries, there is nothing historically reputable about treating the evidence with suspicion - indeed, quite the opposite.  The only refuge one ultimately has is the secularist attempt at ignoring the royal miracle and writing books as if it didn’t happen.  But the evidence comes back, again and again.

I really do disagree, especially with your first point here in the snippet below.  Christianity is not the lowest common denominator of anything, it is everything.  Anglican is a small subset, and far less important than what is essentially Christian.  You as an Anglican revere Charles I.  I do not, and so it seems does t’other Ian.  From my part of the C of E, I know of no one who would give your advocacy the time of day.  I am sorry - at best this seems the point of view of a small swath of Anglican folk and to my mind it is misguided.

There is no need to reduce the Anglican tradition to some sort of ecumenically bland, lowest-common-denominator “Christianity”.  Charles was an Anglican saint.  If other Christians don’t like it, what is that to me?  I am an Anglican.  Charles died for a number of things that I believe in.

My article and emphases only appear as misguided because the Anglican Communion, as it exists today, is out of touch with its past in the deepest and most pervasive of ways.

Restore the Restoration!!!

Benjamin,

Way to stir the pot!  I was recently given by one of my supervisors a first edition copy of Eikon Basilikon.  I will treasure it.  My own assessment of Charles I is along the lines of what (I think) Laud said of him to Stafford just before Stafford’s execution: ‘He neither was nor would be made great’.  I think Charles had the devotion of a saint and the political acumen of, well, a Stuart!  But in the end he was a creature of his time and he, like Laud, perhaps earned their good memories by the manner in which they confronted their deaths.

Restore the Restoration!!!

As for me - Restore the Reformation

I used to enjoy my conversations at theological college (Anglican) as to whether we were five or six point Calvinists.  Then throw in a Zwinglian with discussions about “nuda signa.”  Those were heady times.  Then we would go off to either St. Ebbs or St. Aldates. 

On a less partisan note - I do in fact now cherish some of the more catholic elements of the Anglican world.  I still draw the line at Charles.  Thanks you Mark for your remark that he was indeed a quintessential Stuart.  As such he is on the historical list of the “baddies” of English history.  He may have been pious, however piously wrong IMHO.

Ian,

I didn’t mean to imply anything sinister by my reference to Charles being a typical Stuart…just ineptitude.  And while I’ve never subscribed to the Anglo-Catholic cult of Charles, King and Martyr (which seems more prevalent in America than here in the UK) I could never look on Charles as a ‘baddie’.  Similarly, I can’t view the events of his reign and the years thereafter from merely a religious point of view.  The same march from Catholicism towards a reformed march, from aristocracy towards democracy was also a march towards a type of economic and cultural reordering equally anathema to Christianity: namely the Enlightenment.

Bless you Mark - Cromwell was a family hero.  I am biased.  Yet also firm in my rejection of Charles I, and the Stuarts that followed him.  These for religious as well as political reasons.

May I suggest that those who believe that Charles I was a saint, however defined, read Geoffrey Robertson’s, “The Tyrannicide Brief: the story of the man who sent Charles I to the scaffold.” Robertson, an Australian incidentally, is one of the most respected lawyers in the UK and his research is rarely challenged. It may also help clarify why removal of this autocrat, irrespective of his personal religious beliefs, was the foundation of our liberties, silly as that may seem to some.

Why is King Charles to be considered a martyr, rather than a casualty of the English Civil War? How is he different from the many others who died fighting against Cromwell? And how is he like the earlier martyrs (e.g. St Stephen) who died specifically for their refusal to deny Christ as Lord?

My knowledge of English history is very limited. Maybe that is why I don’t understand what makes Charles I a martyr.

I thought a couple of additional references might contribute to the discussion about King Charles I.

First, a review by Justice Michael Kirby, recently retired from the High Court of Australia, the equivalent of the US Supreme Court. This is to rely on someone infinitely more learned in the law than me. The review is a little dated as references to the Australian, David Hicks, held at Guantanomo indicate.

BOOK REVIEW
THE TYRANNICIDE BRIEF
By Geoffrey Robertson
PAGES: 1-355; Chronology and Endnotes 356-401; Index 402-415
PRICE: (Paperback) Chatto and Windus £20
DATE OF PUBLICATION: October 2005
ISBN 07011 76025
    A history teacher recently explained to me why many school students cannot warm to Australian history. It was, he said, because of the lack of blood and gore. Nothing like a civil war, revolution and an execution or two to get young minds excited about history.
That is what Geoffrey Robertson has now offered: a book concerning the war that broke out in England between Charles I and the Parliamentary Army. The revolution that led an exasperated House of Commons to put the king on trial. And the trials that followed, of Charles in 1649 and of the king’s killers in 1660.
    Midway through the book, after Charles has been tried and condemned by the Parliamentary Commissioners, Robertson describes clinically the monarch’s death from a single blow of the axe that temporarily ended the English monarchy. At the end of the book, he tells, in gory detail, the story of the execution and death of John Cooke, the Gray’s Inn barrister who prosecuted the king. Hanging, drawing and quartering was a horrible process. Even by European standards, the English were most imaginative in the business of punishment. We are spared no detail.
    This book grew out of a commentary the author offered on a lecture this reviewer gave in London on the defects of the king’s trial. He was intrigued as to why Cooke was not celebrated as one of England’s most famous advocates. At first, Robertson was inclined to ascribe this to the truth that, in any great historical cause, victors tend to put their spin on history. But as he dug deeper, Robertson saw qualities in Cooke that deserved a biography. The result is readable and a tale definitely worth telling. It is relevant for Australians. It recounts the beginnings of limited government in English speaking countries. According to Robertson, the trial of King Charles was the forerunner to the modern efforts to make tyrannical rulers accountable to the people they have oppressed: from Goering, Milosovic and Pinochet to Saddam Hussein.
    When King Charles was captured in 1648 and brought back to London under guard, most of the judges and leading barristers fled to the countryside. They feared involvement in any prosecution of the wayward king. But not John Cooke. When a parliamentary messenger brought him the brief, he declared that he would wait for God’s instruction before accepting it. But take it he quickly did. He was to be junior to the Attorney-General, William Steele. But when Steele opted out, Cooke enthusiastically took over. Geoffrey Robertson portrays this as the first case of a barrister acting for clients, whatever his private beliefs or wishes. This is dubious. For Cooke this was a famous brief. The parliamentary forces were all powerful. The prospects of royal restoration were tiny. The risks were tolerably small. And God had told him to do the job.
    Robertson rejects criticisms of Charles’ trial. He points out that a trial was a concession to the already strong English tradition of due process. He demonstrates that, there were features of the trial that extended courtesies and rights to Charles greater than those extended to most prisoners facing charges of treason at that time.
    However, the trial of the king had some of the defects now raised against the military commissions in the United States that will try Guantanamo prisoner David Hicks. The prisoner was tried, in effect, for a crime retrospectively invented and imposed on him. The “court” that tried him was hand-picked. The military stood guard at every moment, symbolising where the real power lay. The tribunal was not a regular court of even one established by Parliament for, in Charles’ case, the House of Lords was ignored. The prisoner was denied an effective presumption of innocence. His contest as to the legitimacy of trying him was rejected with contempt. Certainly, by modern human rights standards, the trial of King Charles was a shabby affair. For all this, the royal trial sent a signal that changed British history forever. It signalled the acceptance of monarchy only on terms that respected the people’s basic rights. A Bill of Rights followed in 1688 which was a modern compact with authority. Its symbolism has been played out in history ever since: although in Australia, it still awaits the final chapter.
    During the Cromwellian republic, Cooke was a pamphleteer of great energy. He was also a forward looking lawyer He urged the abolition of the death penalty for all crimes except murder and treason. He wanted an end to imprisonment for debt. He advocated legal aid and counselled his fellow lawyers to accept briefs without fee in worthy cases. He urged legal limitations on lawyers’ charges. When Cromwell took his fierce troops to Ireland, the one kindly act he performed there was to appoint John Cooke as chief justice. It was from Ireland that Cooke was dragged back to the Old Bailey for the trial, described in this book, that led to his brutal execution.
    A reader will come away from Tyrannicide Brief with a greater understanding of the motivation of this puritan lawyer and his friends. Cooke was thrust forward and took the biggest brief of his life. He played his role on the stage of English history. He did what his brief, his religious convictions and divine instruction told him to do. It is wrong to suggest, as the author does, that Cooke was a faultless victim of the restored monarch’s frenzy of violence. By the standards of the time, Charles II contained the vengeance against the regicides. But John Cooke, whose prosecution had resulted in the death of a king, had to pay with his life. King and prosecutor knew that they were engaged in a mighty tussle. This was no ordinary brief. One can deplore the cruelty of Cooke’s execution and of all others. But in the mood of 1660 it was inevitable, and Cooke, ultimately knew and understood this.
    Cooke and Charles emerge from this book as brave men. They were fighting for their respective causes. In the result, it is Cooke’s cause, of limited executive power, that won the battle for the imagination of history. To this extent, Geoffrey Robertson has done a service by rescuing the prosecutor of 1649 from obscurity and doing so in this splendid, well illustrated and beautifully produced book. If Cooke is not entitled to all of the praise that is heaped upon him, his role in history is worth remembering. And it is told in this book with Geoffrey Robertson’s flair and advocate’s passion.

I also refer those interested to:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/dec/17/featuresreviews.guardianreview7

Karen -

Charles was an Anglican martyr and an Anglican saint.  He did not die due to a profession of Jesus as Lord, but due to belief in Anglican orthodoxy, which was wholly rejected by his Puritan enemies.

Ian -

Thanks for the review.  I know of Robertson’s book, but to be honest I prefer the works of professional historians.  To claim that Cooke somehow won “the imagination of history” is wholly false, not least because everything that happened 1660 onwards testifies to precisely the opposite.  The idea of Cromwell was important for Puritans in the American colonies in the 1770s, but to claim that 1649 was a sudden, watershed event in world history, altering the direction of history toward contemporary democracy, is simply untrue.  There was more than one hundred years between Cooke and the American and then French Revolutions - hardly evidence in favor of a sudden turning point!

My best to you both.

Benjamin