"We are not traitors or murderers or fanatics,
but true Christians and good commonwealths men, fixed and constant in that
noble principle of preferring the universality before particularity.
John
Cooke. Regicide.
"We shall therein… by all means possible endeavour to
pursue and bring to their due punishment those bloody traitors who were either
actors or contrivers of that unparalleled and inhuman murder."
Charles ll
This is a very well written and soundly researched book.
Jordan and Walsh's book has been described as "a work of popular history".
It would also suit the more academically minded reader.
The fact that both authors are not historians in the formal
sense is all the more remarkable because this is a very serious attempt at a
complex subject and should be read by any student, academic or member of the
public interested in the story of the regicides.
The book works on many levels. On a lower level, this is a
personal story of a son's revenge for the killing of his father. One minor
criticism of the book is that the authors dwell a little too long on this. On a
much higher level, the vengeance expressed in the manhunt and ultimate murder
of over twenty regicides was the product of a deep-seated counter-revolution
against the very people who took part in the English revolution especially its
most far-sighted and courageous republican representatives.
The first few chapters of the book give an adequate
introduction to the events that led up to one of the greatest show trials in
English and for that matter World history. The book could have done with a bit
more research into the historiography of the events of the civil war and the
trial itself.
I share Geoffrey Robertson belief that "historians
rarely have a good word to say about the trial: 'Oh dear, oh dear – shocking,
shocking' was all that Richard Holmes, Cromwell's advocate in the BBC's 2002
Great Britons series, could manage (so it was little wonder that Oliver came
last in the voting). J.G. Muddiman, the editor of the notoriously slanted
version of the trial published in 1928 in the influential Famous British Trials
series, was a ranting royalist".[1]
This downplaying of the importance of the trial of Charles l
is also expressed by numerous revisionist historians. Perhaps the most
eloquent of these is Blair Worden who in his book The English Civil Wars,
believes that the war achieved nothing and that the parliamentarians: "whose
exploits were ... emphatically reversed" with the restoration of Charles
II in 1660, would have supported John Dryden, view in 1700: that
"Thy wars brought nothing about."
The most open hostility towards the trial is expressed by
Blair Worden in his book The English Civil Wars, believes that the war achieved
nothing and that the parliamentarians "whose exploits were ...
emphatically reversed" with the restoration of Charles II in 1660, would
have supported John Dryden, view in 1700: that "Thy wars brought
nothing about." According to Worden, nobody wanted a revolution; no one
wanted to kill the king and that the king died because of "the law of
unintended consequences".
Hopefully in their next book, Walsh and Jordan will pay more
attention to this historiography and less to drama. To their credit, the authors
have consulted Geoffrey Robertson book The Tyrannicide Brief. Robertson
dubbed the trial of the regicides as the "the first war crimes trial
in history" he also made a valid point in comparing it to Stalin's
show trial of old Bolsheviks. While not on the same scale both were counter-revolutions
against previous revolutions and both carried out a series of judicial state
murders.
This book is not a radical history of the English
revolution. The authors are if anything sympathetic to the Whig interpretation
of history and seem to be republicans. They believed that the civil war was a
progressive development and support Robertson contention that "The
proceeding against Charles I in 1649 secured the constitutional gains of the
Civil War – the supremacy of Parliament, the independence of judges, individual
freedom guaranteed by Magna Carta and the common law".
It must be said that large numbers of these regicides have
been woefully under-researched and their ideas and motivation have been largely
left to small footnotes in old history books. One such figure is the leading
regicide and republican lawyer John Cooke who has been finally recognised in a
recent biography by Geoffrey Robertson. Cooke it seems is more known for his
refusal to pick up the Kings silver top than for providing the theoretical,
constitutional and practical justification for killing the king.
As Cooke said,
"We fought for the public good and would have enfranchised the people and
secured the welfare of the whole groaning creation if the nation had not
delighted more in servitude than freedom."One thing is clear that many who
took part, including Cooke, did not believe that the trial and execution of the
king was a foregone conclusion. The majority of the leading figures of the revolution
"did not at first want to kill the King".
John Cooke, at the beginning, thought that "the
proceedings would end with some form of reconciliation". It was only the
threat of an intervention from the New Model Army that moved most of the
leading regicides to kill the king. It was after all the army that wanted
"to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for that blood
he had shed, and mischief he had done".
The regicides were leading intellectual figures of the
English revolution. The majority were republicans and were "men of
principle". John Cooke was concerned with the plight of the poor. He
wrote in several publications calling for action to be taken to secure a better
standard of living for the poor. In the book The Poor Man's Case. He
called for social equality and even called for a national health service, In
another far-sighted way he believed that poverty was a significant cause of
crime, he would later call for limits to the death sentence and abolition of
imprisonment for debt. He even urged fellow barristers to give away small parts
of their salary in order to carry out legal work for the poor.
Cooke for his trouble was hunted down like a common criminal
and was a given the traitor's death: hanged, drawn and quartered. Agents and
spies were sent all over the world to hunt down and murder if necessary, every
regicide. In 1664 Sir John Lisle, a barrister who helped organise the trial but
did not sign the warrant, was shot on his way to church in Lausanne,
Switzerland, shortly after Edmund Ludlow and five others fled there from nearby
Vevey.
The writer's Don Jordan and Michael Walsh at times turn
their book into a spy novel. They show how Charles spymaster Sir George Downing
of Downing Street fame, and described by Samuel Pepys as "that perfidious
rogue", plotted and planned to go himself to the Continent, kidnap and if
necessary murder then and there his former friends or bundle them back to
England to stand trial and certain execution.
It would appear from the book that the reign of Charles was
dominated by this manhunt. While sanctioning what amounted to judicial murder,
the regime was hardly a picture of stability. The longer the show trial went on,
the more nervous Charles and his ministers became and recognised the growing
danger of a rebellion. As Jordan and Walsh point out when the mistake was made
to give a public funeral to one of the regicides, over twenty thousand people
attended testifying the still considerable support held for republican ideas.
Another striking aspect of the book is how people who were
once leading members in the Cromwellian era shifted their allegiances like some
people change a shirt.
Charles Monck, who has always struck me as a person of
extreme opportunism, was "a turncoat of heroic proportions". He had
been commander in chief of the English army in Scotland and an ardent follower
of Cromwell. But after being promised the unheard-of sum of £100,000 a year for
the rest of his life changed sides and decided to do the kings dirty work.
One severe weakness of the book is that it fails to convey
how the regicides lost power and a monarchy established albeit with the help of
substantial sections of the bourgeoisie. The book is absent as to the political
and economic makeup of the Charles ll regime. The trial far from just being
about revenge was a counter-revolution by sections of the bourgeoisie who were
still closely connected to the Monarchy.
Given the skill of the two writers, the failure to explain
the demise of the republicans of the Cromwellian era is a major weakness. Even
if the authors of the book are not sympathetic to Marxist historiography the
least, they could have done examined for instance James Holstun's assertion
that "What turned the tide was the failure of bourgeois republican
revolutionaries to unify themselves militarily, and create an interest and
stake in the republic among the copyholders, soldiers, sailors and apprentices;
and the superior power of General Monck and the forces of Restoration in
shaping and controlling the army".
To conclude, despite the books many weaknesses I would still
recommend this serious attempt at explaining the "Kings Revenge". It
is a cracking read and deserves a wide readership and should be put on
university reading lists on the subject.
[1] Geoffrey Robertson, QC is
author of The Tyrannicide Brief: The Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold
(Vintage, 2005)
