On January 20, 1649, 60 black-gowned judges sat before 120 soldiers and thousands of citizens in the Great Hall at Westminster for the public opening of the trial of King Charles I. However, no sooner had John Cooke, the young Puritan barrister from Gray’s Inn, begun to speak then he was interrupted by the king prodding him with his silver-tipped cane: “Hold.” But the barrister ignored the king’s repeated interruptions until the king hit Cooke hard enough to dislodge the silver tip, which rolled on to the floor. The two men looked at each other, and the king nodded for the barrister to pick it up. The barrister did not blink much less bend down, but continued: “I do, in the name and on behalf of the people of England, exhibit and bring into this Court a charge of high treason and other high crimes whereof I do accuse Charles Stuart, King of England, here present.”1 Under the astonished gaze and audible gasps of his people, the king stooped to pick up the silver tip from the floor; the royal majesty had bowed before the majesty of the law.2

In the twenty-first century, citizens have come to expect that their leaders will submit to the law. This was not an expectation in early seventeenth-century century England. It was commonly accepted that the monarch was directly appointed by God. Thus, he had a “divine prerogative” and demanded complete obedience. It is hard to overstate the persuasive power of this prerogative; some even believed the monarch’s touch was capable of curing skin diseases. Nonetheless, as the seventeenth century progressed, a power struggle developed between the crown and parliament. Royalists argued that an absolute monarchy provided the most efficient rule, while the legislators argued that the king was effective when willingly checked by a powerful parliament.3 Thus began a most interesting turn of events in British history.

King Charles I did not want to be “checked.” In fact, he did not want to work with parliament at all. In 1629 he commanded the dissolution of parliament and imprisoned those members who attacked his “prerogative.”4 Hostility toward Charles spread when, in the absence of a national emergency, he overtaxed his subjects. “What Charles regarded as legal actions, his people branded as tyranny.”5 When parliament managed to reconvene in 1640, its members knew they had to restrict the king’s powers. Two years later, a civil war erupted with Oliver Cromwell leading the parliament to victory over Charles I. The divine prerogative was coming to an embarrassing end.

Despite Cromwell’s decisive defeat of the cavaliers6 at Naseby in 1645 and the king’s imprisonment, Charles continued to foment revolt. When Cromwell’s New Model Army7 extinguished an attempted second civil war in 1648, Charles allied with the Scots and Irish, encouraging them to invade England. This proved the last straw for the weary soldiers and their supporters in parliament; a trial was called to deter future tyrants from maltreating their own people,8 and Barrister Cooke prepared his best case.

Cooke argued that the king of England was not a person but an office; every king was entrusted “with a limited power to govern by and according to the laws of the land.”9 Charles, however, had breached that trust by waging war against parliament and harming the people whose welfare he was obliged to preserve “out of a wicked design” to achieve “an unlimited and tyrannical power.”10 Cooke insisted that Charles deserved punishment for loss of human life in the wars since 1642 and for provoking a second and third civil war. Thus, Charles, as commander, “occasioner, author, and continuer of the said unnatural, cruel and bloody wars” was responsible for all probable consequences of his commands, particularly the spilling of “much innocent blood of the free people of this nation.”11 For this, the title of “king” should provide him no protection. Indeed, according to the prosecutor, execution was essential, both to ensure retribution and to deter future monarchs from seeking such absolute power. In essence, Cooke persuaded parliament to make tyranny a grave crime. Consequently, Charles was beheaded.

However popular, however powerful, no man is above the law.12 Charles I could not do whatever he pleased, and neither should those who rule today. The virtuous leader treasures not only authority, but also accountability. To have the former without the latter is to lead blindly, selfishly, and foolishly.
 
Footnotes:
 
1  Geoffrey Robertson, The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man who sent Charles I to the Scaffold (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), 154-155.
 
2  There are a number of highly readable accounts of the English Civil War in general and the trial of Charles I in particular, including Tristram Hunt’s The English Civil War: At First Hand; Simon Schama’s account in his A History of Britain: British Wars, 1603-1776, vol. 2; Veronica Wedgwood’s The Trial of Charles I, and for much of the detail on John Cooke see, Geoffrey Robertson, The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man who sent Charles I to the Scaffold (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), 151-187.
 
3  Gerald R. Cragg, Freedom and Authority: A Study of English Thought in the Early Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1975), 85.
 
4  Ibid.
 
5  Ibid., 86.
 
6  Name used to refer to the royalist supporters of King Charles I.
 
7  The New Model Army was unusual in that in consisted of professional soldiers led by generals as opposed to armies led by nobility without necessarily having any specialized training.
 
8  Tristram Hunt, The English Civil War: At First Hand (London: Phoenix Paperbacks, 2003), 175-198, Simon Schama, The British Wars 1603-1776, in A History of Britain, vol. 2 (New York: Talk Miramax Books, 2003), 161-169.
 
9  “The Charge against the King,” The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625-1660, ed. Samuel R. Gardiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 371.
 
10  Ibid., 372, 374.
 
11  Ibid., 373-374.
 
12  See also Kairos Journal article, “Lex Rex: The Magna Carta’s Influence on Western Civilization”.
 
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