Westminster Hall where they had led the trial of the King. Thirty-one of the fifty-nine Commissioners who had signed the death warrant were living at the Restoration. Pardons were offered to those who came over to the monarchy. Those who did not were tried but in the regular courts and by procedures more orthodox than those in which they had participated. In the end, nine of the regicides suffered the punishment then provided by English law for traitors: hanging, drawing and quartering. Cook, the leading prosecutor, was executed. His enthusiastic adviser, Dr Dorislaus, had been murdered in the Hague in 1649 by English royalist soldiers. With the restoration of the monarchy, few in England would associate themselves with the republican cause. Cook, however, died convinced that he had acted justly. Before his death he wrote to his wife: "We are not traitors, nor murderers, nor fanatics, but true Christians and good commonwealth men, fixed and constant to the principles ... which the parliament and army declared and engaged for; and to that noble principle of preferring the universality, before a particularity, that we sought the public good and would have enfranchised the people, and secured the welfare of the whole groaning creation, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom" 43 . ...
