It is not likely that the couple of years spent by Lady Purbeck with her father can have been very pleasant ones. He was bad-tempered, ill-mannered, cantankerous and narrow-minded, and he must also have been a dull companion; for beyond legal literature he had read but little. Lord Campbell says: "He shunned the society of" his contemporaries, "Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, as of vagrants who ought to be set in the stocks, or whipped from tithing to tithing."
Nor can Lady Purbeck have found him a very tractable patient. He had no faith in either physicians or physic. Mead wrote[86]to Sir Martin Stuteville: "Sir Edward Coke being now very infirm in body, a friend of his sent him two or three doctors to regulate his health, whom he told that he had never taken physic since he was born, and would not now begin; and that he had now upon him a disease which all the drugs of Asia, the gold of Africa, nor all the doctors of Europe could cure—old age. He therefore both thanked them and his friend that sent them, and dismissed them nobly with a reward of twenty pieces to each man." Doubtless a troublesome invalid for a daughter to manage.
At last it became apparent that the end was rapidly approaching, and then Lady Purbeck was subjected to a most embarrassing annoyance. Two days before her father's death she was summoned from his bedside to receive Sir Francis Windebank, the Secretary of State, who had arrived at the house, accompanied by several attendants, bringing in his hand an order from the King and Council to search Sir Edward Coke's mansion for seditious papers and, if any were found, to arrest him.
Sir Francis, on hearing the critical condition of Sir Edward, assured Lady Purbeck that he would give her father no personal annoyance; but he insisted on searching all the rooms in the house except that in which Coke was lying; and he carried away every manuscript that he could find, including even Sir Edward's will—a depredation which subsequently caused his family great inconvenience. It is believed that Coke was kept in ignorance of this raid upon his house, probably by the care and vigilance of Lady Purbeck. Thus his last hours were undisturbed, and on the 3rd of September, 1634, in the 83rd year of his age, died one of the most disagreeable men of his times, but the most incorruptible judge in a period of exceptional judicial corruption.
FOOTNOTES:
[79] The History of the Troubles and Tryal of the most Reverend Father in God, and Blessed Martyr, William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. Wrote by Himself, during his Imprisonment in the Tower: London, R. Chiswell, 1695, p. 146.
[80] Finetti Philoxenis, London, 1636, p. 239.
[81] P. 10.
[82]Historical Collections, p. 607 (ed. 1659).
[83] Rushworth's Collections, p. 616.