Cooke, Henry (1788–1868), presbyterian leader and minister, was born 11 February 1788 at the Grillagh, near Maghera, Co. Londonderry, fourth and youngest child of John Macook, tenant farmer, and his second wife Jane (née Howe). Educated in local hedge schools and Glasgow University (1802–7), Cooke was ordained in Duneane, Co. Antrim, 10 November 1808. This ministry inauspiciously ended in resignation (13 November 1810), but he was installed in nearby Donegore (29 January 1811), where his preaching gifts developed. In 1818 he moved to Killyleagh, Co. Down, where he emerged (1821) as a bitter opponent of theological radicalism, particularly the Arianism or anti-trinitarianism spreading in the synod of Ulster. For more than a century the synod had been divided by tensions between Old Lights (conservatives who held tenaciously to traditional Calvinism as enshrined in the Westminster confession of faith) and New Lights (liberals in theology, opposed to obligatory subscripton of the confession by ordinands as a test of orthodoxy). By the 1820s some of the non-subscribers had become Arians; but for Cooke, to abandon the doctrine of Christ's deity was to undermine the foundations of Christianity. In a relentless campaign he persuaded the synod to reaffirm its trinitarianism and establish a committee to test the orthodoxy of future ordinands. A small group of Arians and non-subscribers drew up a remonstrance protesting against these decisions of synod, and when it was rejected seventeen ministers and their congregations withdrew from the synod of Ulster in 1829 to form the remonstrant synod, which later joined other non-subscribing presbyterian bodies in what later became the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland.
The withdrawal of the remonstrants left Cooke on a pinnacle of prestige and influence in the synod of Ulster. From the pulpit of the large new church built for him in May St., Belfast, and increasingly on political platforms, he preached a popular blend of evangelical protestantism and political conservatism. During the conflict in the synod, Cooke had become associated with, and drew strength from, political conservatism and Orangeism (although he was never an Orangeman), and after his victory over Arianism he became openly identified with conservatism in politics and opposition to the reforming whig administration of the 1830s. Many presbyterians who had supported his theology opposed his politics, particularly on the tenant right question and his support for the established church. Sharp criticism followed his publication of ‘banns of marriage between presbytery and prelacy’ at a political meeting at Hillsborough (1834) to evoke protestant solidarity against resurgent catholicism. Even his deathbed appeal to protestant electors to vote tory and save the Church of Ireland from disestablishment went largely unheeded by presbyterian voters. Perhaps his only political stance with which most presbyterians identified was against the campaign of Daniel O'Connell (qv) to repeal the union. When O'Connell, on a visit to Belfast in 1841 to advocate repeal, refused to meet Cooke in public debate, Cooke was hailed as ‘the cook who dish'd Dan’, and he became a unionist hero.
Presbyterians honoured him as their Athanasius who defeated Arianism, leading to the union (1840) of the synod of Ulster and the secession synod, the consequent formation of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, and a creative period of presbyterian outreach at home and abroad. The Rev. James Morgan (qv), in his address at Cooke's funeral, declared: ‘Our church extension in the great increase of congregations, our missions, home, foreign, continental, colonial; along with our daily and Sunday schools, our colleges and professors. All these were the issues of the one great measure of which Dr Cooke was the originator.’ Twice moderator of the general assembly, he was first president of the Presbyterian College, Belfast (opened 1853), and received honorary doctorates from Jefferson College, USA (1829), and Dublin University (1837). He died 13 December 1868; the Belfast News Letter described his civic funeral (18 December) as in all respects like a royal or imperial demonstration.
Cooke married (1813) Ellen Mann of Toome, Co. Antrim, who died six months before him; a son and three daughters survived them. The biography by his son-in-law J. L. Porter (qv), professor of biblical criticism in the Presbyterian College (1866–78) and president of QCB (1879–89), though uncritical, remains indispensable as Porter had access to Cooke's papers, which have subsequently disappeared. Several of Cooke's sermons and speeches were published and have survived; he contributed 8,000 notes to Brown's self-interpreting Bible (1844 ed.), a popular family bible.