The Tyrannicide Brief

"This is about a radical lawyer who took a case nobody wanted. John Cook prosecuted King Charles I on the basis that a ruler cannot kill his own people and then claim executive privilege. He won and in 1649 the death warrant was signed and the King was beheaded outside St James’s Palace. The room where the King spent his last night is still there – just on Pall Mall. Cook established, as Robertson argues it, that rulers are not above their own people. Of course, it ends badly for Cook. Charles II was restored and Cook was hunted down, hung, drawn and quartered. An unbelievably horrible way to go and sad because he hadn’t wanted Charles I to be executed. But there are seeds of this case in current international law and in the arrests of people like Pinochet and Saddam Hussein."