Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 12.djvu/76

 was drowned in attempting to go off to his ship in a heavy gale 25 Jan. 1794. The widow long survived her family, and died on 13 May 1835 at the age of ninety-three. She was buried by the side of her sons, Hugh and James, in the church of St. Andrew-the-Great, Cambridge. As, according to her recorded age, she was only fourteen years younger than her husband, and as Cook at the age of fourteen was either in the village shop or on board a North-Sea collier, the story that he was his future wife's godfather may be dismissed as an idle yarn. His portrait, by Nathaniel Dance, is in the Painted Hall at Greenwich, to which it was presented by the executors of Sir Joseph Banks.



COOK, JOHN (d. 1660), regicide, is stated in a royalist newspaper of 1649 (Mercurius Elencticus, No. 56) to have been employed in Ireland by Strafford, and this seems to be confirmed by a letter of Cook's to Strafford during the trial of the latter. Ludlow states that Cook had in his younger years seen the best part of Europe, spent some time at Rome, and lived several months at Geneva in the house of Diodati (Memoirs, p. 366). Occasional references to his travels in Cook's own pamphlets bear out this statement. Like Bradshaw and several other leading republicans, Cook was a member of Gray's Inn. In February 1646 he acted in conjunction with Bradshaw as one of the counsel representing Lilburn on the reversal of the Star-chamber sentence against the latter by the House of Lords (A True Relation of Lieutenant-colonel Lilburn's Sufferings). On 8 Jan. 1649 the high court of justice chose Cook one of the counsel to be employed against Charles I, and on 10 Jan. he was appointed solicitor for the Commonwealth, and ordered to prepare the charge. Owing to the absence, through illness, of Steele, the attorney-general, the conduct of the prosecution fell chiefly to his lot. On 20 Jan. Cook brought forward the charge. As he began to speak ‘the prisoner, having a staff in his hand, held it up, and softly laid it upon the said Mr. Cook's shoulder, bidding him hold; nevertheless, the lord president bidding him to go on, Mr. Cook did accordingly’ (, Journal of the High Court of Justice, p. 28). On 23 Jan., as the king continued contesting the jurisdiction of the court, and refusing to plead, Cook prayed the court either to oblige him to plead, or to pronounce sentence against him (p. 55). The charge drawn up against the king was printed under the title of ‘A Charge of High Treason and other high crimes exhibited to the High Court of Justice by John Cook, Esq., solicitor-general appointed by the said Court, for and on behalf of the people of England, against Charles Stuart, King of England.’ It is reprinted by Nalson (Trial of Charles I, p. 29). There was also published immediately after the trial, ‘King Charles his Case, or an appeal to all rational men concerning his trial in the High Court of Justice, being for the most part that which was intended to have been delivered at the bar if the king had pleaded to the charge.’ This tract (with an answer to it attributed to Butler, but more probably by Birkenhead) is reprinted