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London Review of Books

Farewell Sovereignty subscriber-only content

Stephen Sedley

  • The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold by Geoffrey Robertson

When I read for the English Bar in the 1960s, the legal history lecturer stopped when he reached 1649 and explained that he was now moving directly to 1660, because everything that had happened between the trial of the king and the restoration of the monarchy was a nullity. By this simple and efficient process John Cooke, the barrister who prosecuted Charles I, has been airbrushed from history, save by a handful of historians of the trial who have written him off as a hack. Geoffrey Robertson has set out to rescue him from the enormous disregard of posterity, and from the ignominy of his death in 1660 by hanging, drawing and quartering.

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Stephen Sedley is a lord justice of appeal for England and Wales and president of the British Institute for Human Rights. He gave the 2007 Mishcon lecture at University College London under the delphic title ‘Bringing Rights Home: Time to Start a Family?’