Edward Coke, the only son of Robert Coke, of Mileham, in the county of Norfolk, and Winifred, daughter and one of the heirs of William Knightley, of Morgrave-Knightley, in the same county, was born at Mileham, February 1, 1551. He was descended, both by his father’s and his mother’s side, from ancient and opulent families. His father, who was a bencher of Lincoln’s Inn, died in the year 1561, when Edward Coke was ten years old. Before that event he had been sent to the Free Grammar School at Norwich, whence, in September, 1567, he removed to Cambridge, and was admitted as a fellow commoner at Trinity College. After having spent three years at the University he returned into Norfolk for a few months, and then went to London to commence his legal education. According to the practice of that time, he took the first step of his legal course by becoming a member of Clifford’s Inn, a house of Chancery, or inferior inn, dependent upon the Inner Temple, and was admitted into the latter society, April 24, 1572. He was called to the bar in Easter Term, 1578. During the continuance of his studies in the Inner Temple, he is said to have greatly distinguished himself in the exercises called mootings and readings, which constituted a necessary part of the education of an advocate in former times, and which were carried on with a degree of interest and excitement almost incredible to those who at the present day peruse the details of these grotesque and antiquated proceedings.

In the course of the year after his call to the bar, the society of the Inner Temple appointed him reader at Lyon’s Inn; and the learning displayed by him, in the conduct of the exercises at which he presided in this capacity, raised for him a high reputation as a lawyer, and opened the way to that extensive practice at the bar, which he acquired with a degree of rapidity almost without a parallel in the history of the profession. In the first term after he was called to the bar he conducted an argument of much nicety and importance, which is reported by the name of Lord Cromwell’s Case; “And this,” he says, in his own report of it (4 Rep. 146), “was the first cause that the author of this book moved in the King’s Bench.” Less than three years afterwards he was associated with Popham, the Solicitor General, in arguing before the Chancellor and the twelve judges the important case in which was laid down the celebrated doctrine in the law of real property, well known as the ‘Rule in Shelley’s Case.’ From that period until he became Solicitor General in 1592, his practice was enormous: it appears from the Reports of that time that there was scarcely a single motion or argument before the court of King’s Bench in which he was not engaged. Professional honours were the legitimate consequence of this large business in the courts; in 1586 he was chosen Recorder of Norwich, and four years afterwards was made a bencher of the Inner Temple. In January, 1592, on the resignation of Serjeant Fleetwood, he was elected Recorder of London; but, in the following June, on being appointed Solicitor General, he resigned that office. In the same summer he became Reader of the Inner Temple, and selected the Statute of Uses for the subject of his readings. He says that he had composed seven readings for this occasion, and had delivered five of them to a large audience, consisting of not less than 160 members of the society, when the appearance of the plague in the Middle Temple, which raged with great violence in the autumn of that year, compelled him to discontinue them, and to leave London abruptly for his house at Huntingfield in Suffolk. Such was the honour and respect in which he was held by the profession, that on this occasion he was accompanied on his journey, as far as Romford, by a procession composed of nine benchers and forty other members of the Inner Temple. In March, 1594, he was appointed Attorney General, and, as the office of Solicitor continued vacant until the close of the following year, the duties and labours of both offices during that interval devolved upon him.

At this period originated the animosity between Coke and Bacon, which prevailed with little intermission during the life of the latter. As soon as the office of Attorney General became vacant, in consequence of the removal of Sir Thomas Egerton, the Earl of Essex used his most strenuous efforts to induce the Queen to bestow that place upon Bacon, instead of promoting Sir Edward Coke from the inferior office of Solicitor General. The letters of Bacon, written to Essex and others, with relation to this intrigue, abound with sarcastic and contemptuous expressions respecting Coke, whose high reputation and great experience certainly marked him out as fitter for the office than his rival, whose practice at the bar was never extensive, and who was then scarcely known in the courts. After Coke had obtained the appointment of Attorney General, Bacon and his friends charged him first with intriguing to keep the emoluments of both offices in his own hands, and afterwards with recommending Serjeant Fleming for the vacant solicitorship and encouraging the antipathies and prejudices of the Queen against Bacon. There is, however, no evidence to show that these imputations were true; and if Coke really urged the appointment of Fleming, it might well be with the view of obtaining a more experienced and efficient coadjutor than Bacon.

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 coelo.” 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.

In the first Parliament of Charles I., called in April, 1625, Sir E. Coke was again returned as one of the knights of the shire for the county of Norfolk, as he says in his note, without any canvassing or solicitation on his part. At the commencement of this Parliament he adopted a moderate tone. He dissuaded the House from insisting upon grievances, and urged conciliatory measures; saying, that “as it was the very beginning of the new king’s reign, there could be no grievances as yet.” But this disposition to peace was overcome by the determined tendency of the crown to arbitrary measures; and the king being unable to obtain any other answer to his demand of a subsidy, than repeated remonstrances against grievances, abruptly dissolved the Parliament. He was compelled, however, by his pecuniary wants, to assemble a new one in the course of the same year, having previously appointed Sir Edward Coke and three other popular leaders sheriffs of counties, in order to prevent their serving as members. Coke was again returned as knight of the shire for Norfolk; and though he did not take his seat, and consequently took no part in the proceedings of that Parliament, it was considered that he was still de facto a member of the House, and for that reason no new writ was issued to supply his place. On occasion of the third Parliament summoned by Charles I. in March, 1628, Sir Edward Coke was returned for two counties, Buckingham and Suffolk. He elected to serve for the former. In this Parliament, though now in his 79th year, this extraordinary man asserted and defended the constitutional rights of the people of England with all the energy of youth, and the sagacity of age. By his advice, and with his active co-operation and assistance, which his extensive and varied experience rendered particularly valuable, the celebrated Petition of Right was framed; and by his perseverance and reasoning the Lords were, after many conferences, induced to concur in that measure, which was, at last, and after many ineffectual attempts at evasion, reluctantly assented to by the king. One of the last acts of his public life was his spirited denunciation of the Duke of Buckingham as the cause of all the misfortunes of the country. As a proof of the earnest feelings by which he was impressed, Rushworth records that, on this occasion, “Sir Edward Coke, overcome with passion, seeing the desolation likely to ensue, was forced to sit down when he began to speak, through the abundance of tears.” At the close of the Session of Parliament, in March, 1629, the growing infirmities of age induced him to withdraw from public life, and he passed the remainder of his days in retirement on his estate at Stoke Pogis, in Buckinghamshire. Still it appears that his vigorous and active mind was not without employment; and the last years of his life are said to have been occupied by the revision of the numerous unpublished works which he left behind him.

The last entry in his note-book, written with almost as firm a hand as he wrote at the age of 40, records the following incident, which may possibly have been the cause of his death:—

“Memorandum. Die Jovis, the iii^rd of May, 1632, riding in the morning in Stoke, between eight and nine of the clocke to take the ayre, my horse under me had a strange stumble backward, and fell upon me (being above 80 years old), where my head lighted nere to sharpe stubbes, and the heavy horse upon me. And yet, by the providence of Almighty God, though I was in the greatest danger, yet I had not the least hurt,—nay, no hurt at all. For Almighty God saith by his prophet David, ‘The angel of the Lord tarieth round about them that feare him, and delivereth them.’ Et nomen Domini benedictum, for it was his work!”

He died on the 3rd of September, in the following year, repeating with his last breath the words, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” He was interred in the burying-place of the Coke family in the church of Titeshall, in Norfolk.

Lloyd, in his “State Worthies,” gives the following account of Sir Edward Coke:—“His parts were admirable; he had a deep judgment, faithful memory, active fancy. And the jewel of his mind was put into a fair case,—a beautiful body with a comely countenance;—a case, which he did wipe and keep clean, delighting in good clothes, well worn, and being wont to say ‘that the outward neatness of our bodies might be a monitor of purity to our souls.’”

The most celebrated of Sir Edward Coke’s works is the treatise commonly known by the name of Coke upon Littleton, or the First Institute. It consists of a minute and laborious Commentary upon the text of Littleton’s Tenures, in the course of which almost the whole learning of the common law, as it existed in his time, is embodied and explained. Ever since the time of Sir Edward Coke to the present day, this book has been considered as a work of the highest authority in the municipal law of England. The Second Institute contains Commentaries on several ancient statutes; the Third Institute is a Treatise on Criminal Law; and the Fourth Institute relates to the Jurisdiction of different Courts. Besides these works, Sir Edward Coke was the author of a Treatise on Copyholds, entitled “The Complete Copyholder,” and of a “Reading on Fines.” He also published a collection of Reports, which are still of great value to the profession; and at the time of their appearance formed an epoch in the history of the law. Sir Francis Bacon speaks of this produce of the industry and learning of his great rival in terms of high and deserved commendation; and justly ascribes to the Reports the praise of having preserved the vessel of the common law in a steady and consistent course; “For the law,” says he, “by this time had been like a ship without ballast, for that the cases of modern experience are fled from those that are adjudged and ruled in former time.”