John Bradshaw

Trial of the King In 1649, he was made president of the parliamentary commission to try the king. Other lawyers of greater prominence had refused the position.

Bradshaw was a controversial choice as Lord President, and opinions of his efficiency as a judge varied. Bulstrode Whitelocke believed that he was "learned in his profession," but Thomas Fuller dismissed him as a man "of execrable memory, of whom nothing good is remembered."

It is said that he dined at Odstone Hall in Leicestershire, then his property, after signing the warrant for the king's execution in 1649.

Commonwealth and Protectorate

On 12 March 1649, Bradshaw was elected President of the Council of State, which was to act as the executive of the country's government in place of the king and the Privy Council.

From 1 August 1649, Bradshaw also held the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. As Lord President he conducted trials of leading Royalists and condemned to death by beheading the Duke of Hamilton, Lord Capell, the Earl of Holland and Eusebius Andrews, for which he was well rewarded.

After wars in Scotland and Ireland, the Long Parliament had still not dissolved itself or called for re-elections. On 30 April 1653, Oliver Cromwell declared Parliament and the Council dissolved and soon assumed rule as Lord Protector calling elections for a new parliament himself. After that date Bradshaw served as commissioner of the duchy, jointly with Thomas Fell, until mounting differences with Cromwell culminated in his resignation in 1654.

Bradshaw, an ardent Republican, became an opponent of the Protectorate. In 1654, he was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Stafford and Cheshire, but because he refused to sign the recognition pledge put on Members to declare their recognition of the new army-backed government, he took no seat for either constituency. In 1655, the Major-General in charge of Cheshire, Tobias Bridge, persuaded leading gentry not to enter Bradshaw as the county's parliamentary candidate at elections to the next parliament.

After Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, his son Richard succeeded him as Lord Protector and reinstated Bradshaw as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Bradshaw was elected MP for Cheshire in the Third Protectorate Parliament in 1659.

Legacy

While some political philosophers have defended Bradshaw, most legal authorities have taken the view expressed in 1999 by Michael Kirby (then a Justice of the High Court of Australia) that the High Court of Justice for the trial of Charles I, of which Bradshaw was president, was illegal. However, in his 2005 book The Tyrannicide Brief (a biography of John Cook, the prosecutor at the trial), Geoffrey Robertson Q.C. put forward the argument that while the court was illegal due to the political settlement reached at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the trial anticipated the developments in humanitarian law in the second half of the 20th century, and that the leading participants in the trial are to be admired rather than condemned.

Bradshaw in popular culture Bradshaw was played by Stratford Johns in the 1970 historical drama film Cromwell. Bradshaw appears in several short stories set in the alternative history 1632 Series. In that series, King Charles discovers his future fate by reading books brought to the past in the time-displaced town of Grantville and orders the arrest and execution of almost everyone who would later have been involved in his trial and execution. In one story, John Milton is told by his father that Bradshaw has been executed, but several other stories say that Bradshaw escaped from England and journeyed to Grantville, becoming one of the town's junior district attorneys, and becoming part of a government-in-exile that plots to overthrow Charles and his tyrannical ministers.