In truth, the state services imposed upon the Attorney General at this time were extremely laborious. The severity of the laws recently introduced against Roman Catholics had occasioned a succession of plots by foreign adventurers against the person of the Queen, more or less dangerous, the investigation of which was necessarily committed to the Attorney General. The treasons of Lopez, the Queen’s physician, of Patrick Cullen, and of Williams and Yorke, all occurred about this period; and the business of constant examination at the Tower, in addition to his Star Chamber duties and his undiminished practice in the common-law courts, must have imposed a weight of labour and responsibility upon Coke, which no mind of ordinary activity and energy could have sustained. Whole volumes of examinations in these cases of treason, taken by himself and written with his own hand, are still preserved at the State Paper Office, and sufficiently attest his zeal and assiduity in the service.
In February, 1593, Coke, being at that time Solicitor General, was elected a member of parliament for his native county of Norfolk. In his own memorandum of this circumstance he says, that the election was “unanimous, free, and spontaneous, without any canvassing or solicitation on his part.” At the meeting of parliament he was chosen Speaker of the House of Commons.
In the year 1582, Coke married the daughter and heiress of John Paston, Esq., of Huntingfield, in Suffolk, through whom he became connected with several families of great opulence and importance, and with whom he received a fortune of 30,000l.—a very large dowry in those days. By this lady he had ten children. She died in June 1598; and in his private register of this event in the Notes, which have been often before referred to, he calls her “dilectissima et præclarissima uxor,” and concludes his brief notice of her decease thus:—“Bene et beaté vixit, et tanquam vera ancilla Domini obdormivit in Domino, et nunc vivit et regnat in cœlo.” In the month of November in the same year, Coke contracted a second marriage with the widow of Sir William Hatton, daughter of Thomas Lord Burleigh, and grand-daughter of the Lord High Treasurer, which, though it was an advantageous alliance in point of connection and brought him a considerable accession of property, was by no means a source of domestic happiness. The marriage itself involved all the parties concerned in considerable embarrassment: for having taken place without license or banns, Coke and his lady, together with the clergyman, Lord Burleigh, and all who were present at the ceremony, were cited to appear in the Archbishop’s Court; and it was only in consequence of their making full submission, and pleading their ignorance of the law, (a singular excuse in Coke’s mouth,) that they escaped the sentence and penalties of excommunication.
Sir Edward Coke held the office of Attorney General until the death of Queen Elizabeth, and with the exception of the Earl of Essex, who always disliked him, enjoyed the fullest confidence of her ministers, and in particular of Sir Robert Cecil. He had always been favourable to the title of James I., and upon the death of Elizabeth, is said to have co-operated cordially with Cecil and the other members of the late Queen’s council in making the necessary arrangements for the peaceable accession of the king of Scotland to the crown. James, upon his arrival in London, continued him in his office of Attorney General, and conferred upon his eldest son the honour of knighthood.
Coke’s sound judgment and extensive legal knowledge, united with his fervent attachment to Protestantism, rendered him an invaluable officer of the crown in the various proceedings against the Roman Catholics at the close of Elizabeth’s reign, and the beginning of that of James I. In the examinations respecting the several assassination-treasons, which have been already mentioned, as well as that of Squire in 1598, of the Raleigh conspiracy in 1603, of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, and of numerous other treasonable and seditious movements imputed to the Catholics during the period that he filled the office of Attorney General, he engaged with a zeal and ardour far beyond mere professional excitement: and the temper displayed in his speeches and general conduct on the several trials is much more that of a religious partisan than of a legal advocate. It is common with Catholic writers to attribute to him the utmost barbarity in the use of the rack and the general treatment of prisoners under examination. That he, who in his writings inveighs most strenuously against the use of torture, was nevertheless in his official character the constant instrument of the Privy Council for applying this odious process, is beyond all question: but it must be remembered that what he wrote on this subject was written long after the period of which we are now speaking, and in the dawn of a better order of things; and also that the use of the rack for discovering State secrets was common throughout Europe in his time, and had been the daily practice of the Privy Council in England for centuries before he was born. There is no satisfactory proof that he was coarse and cruel in his conduct towards prisoners under examination; and on the contrary, Father Cornelius, the Jesuit, who had been examined by him respecting the Popish Plots in Queen Elizabeth’s time, told Garnet that he had found him “omnium hominum humanissimus;” and Garnet himself, in his intercepted correspondence, admits, as he also did on his trial, that he was constantly treated by him with the utmost courtesy and kindness.
As the advocate of the crown on trials for State offences, he displayed a degree of intemperance and asperity shocking to the feelings of readers, who are familiar only with the more civilized character of criminal proceedings at the present day. His vulgar vituperation of Raleigh, and his more measured sarcasm towards Essex, were extremely offensive even to his contemporaries, and were remembered against him with malicious eagerness on his own reverse of fortune. “In your pleadings,” says Bacon to him on the eve of his discharge from the office of Lord Chief Justice, “you were wont to insult over misery, and to inveigh bitterly at the persons; which bred you many enemies, whose poison yet swelleth, and the effects now appear.”
With the trials of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot in 1606, the career of Sir Edward Coke as an advocate closed. In the month of June in that year he received his appointment as Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. He retained this situation upwards of seven years; and, in the discharge of the common judicial duties at this period, his profound learning and unwearied industry procured him the highest reputation. At this time too, though he has sometimes been reproached for a haughty and unconciliating deportment on the bench, the bitterness of temper which he had displayed at the bar appears to have been suppressed or softened; and in several constitutional questions of the highest importance which occurred while he was Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and in which he resolutely opposed the views of the king, especially in the conflicts between the ecclesiastical jurisdictions and the courts of common law, and in his resistance to the encroachment of prerogative on the subject of royal proclamations, he displayed great integrity and independence. With a view to corrupt his uncompromising disposition, his crafty and ambitious rival, Sir Francis Bacon, who was then Solicitor General, suggested his promotion to the Chief Justiceship of the King’s Bench; and accordingly he received his patent for that office in October, 1613, and a few days afterwards took his seat at the board as a Privy Councillor. In the following year he was elected High Steward of the University of Cambridge.
The project of making the Chief Justice “turn obsequious” by his advancement, which was no doubt entertained by the court, and was expressly avowed by Bacon, altogether failed. In the case of Peacham, who was prosecuted for treason in the year 1615, for having in his possession a sermon supposed to contain sedition, written by him, but never preached or published, Lord Coke expressed an opinion, in direct opposition to the wishes of the court, that the offence was not treason. His deportment at the trial of Somerset and the murderers of Sir Thomas Overbury, in the same year, though praised by Bacon in conducting the case as Attorney General, gave much displeasure to the king; and his independent conduct in the case of Commendams, which occurred in 1616, finally determined the court to remove him from his office. The transaction was this. A serjeant-at-law, in the discharge of his duty as an advocate in the Court of Common Pleas, was supposed to have used matter in his argument which tended to abridge, or at least to question, the royal prerogative; upon this the king required the judges to proceed no further in the case without his warrant. The twelve judges conferred upon this message, and resolved that in a common dispute between party and party, it was their duty to proceed notwithstanding the king’s mandate. Upon this they were summoned to the council table, and personally reprimanded by the king; and all of them, excepting the Lord Chief Justice, acknowledged their error, and craved pardon for their offence upon their knees. Sir Edward Coke, on the contrary, boldly justified his opinion, contending that the king’s command for staying the proceedings was a delay of justice, and consequently against the law, and contrary to the judges’ oath. After much discussion, the Lords of the council proposed the following question to the judges:—“Whether in a case where the king believed his prerogative or interest concerned, and required the judges to attend him for advice, they ought not to stay proceedings till his Majesty had consulted them?” All the judges at once answered in the affirmative, except Coke, who only said “that, when the case happened, he would do his duty.”
The court now despaired of bending the stubborn integrity of the Chief Justice, and determined at all events to displace him. Accordingly, as a preliminary to his removal, he was summoned before the Council and charged with several frivolous accusations, some of them founded upon alleged malversations while he was Attorney General, to all of which he returned distinct answers. Soon afterwards, being again summoned to appear before the Council, he was reprimanded, sequestered from the Council-table during the King’s pleasure, enjoined not to ride the summer circuit as Judge of Assize, and ordered to employ his leisure in revising certain “extravagant and exorbitant opinions” set down, as was pretended, in his Book of Reports. He received his writ of discharge from the office of Chief Justice, in November, 1616; and was succeeded by Sir Henry Montague, who was expressly warned by the Lord Chancellor Egerton “to avoid the faults of his predecessor, who had been removed for his excessive popularity.” The discharge of a judge of unrivalled learning and incorruptible integrity for the exercise of the very qualities which rendered him an honour and an ornament to his station, forms a part of the long catalogue of weak and wicked actions which disgraced the reign of James I., and directed the course of events to that catastrophe by which the fate of the Stuart family was decided.
From causes, not very distinctly explained in the letters and histories of the day, but which are supposed to have been connected with an intrigue for the marriage of his daughter to Sir John Villiers, afterwards Viscount Purbeck, and brother to the celebrated Duke of Buckingham, Sir Edward Coke, though he never afterwards filled any judicial situation, was, at no long interval, restored to a certain degree of royal favour; and in September, 1617, he was reinstated as a member of the Privy Council. In the course of the next three years he was employed in several commissions of a public nature; and in the Parliament which assembled in 1620 he was returned as a Member for the Borough of Liskeard in Cornwall. In this Parliament he distinguished himself as one of the most able and zealous advocates of the liberal measures which were proposed; he declared himself a strenuous opponent of the pernicious monopolies by which at that period the freedom of trade was fettered, and took an animated part in that struggle between the prerogative pretensions of James and the freedom of debate, which ended in the celebrated resolution of the Commons, “That the liberties, franchises, privileges, and jurisdictions of Parliament are the ancient and undoubted birth-right and inheritance of the subjects of England.” The consequence was, that he was arrested on one of those vague and senseless charges which prevailed in those evil days, and committed to the Tower, in December, 1621, where he remained a close prisoner until the month of August in the ensuing year. On this occasion, he was a second time formally dismissed from the Council-table, and was never afterwards restored to favour at Court.