Born at Mileham, Norfolk, England, Feb. 1, 1552: died at Stoke Pogis, Sept. 3, 1634. A noted English jurist. He was speaker of the House of Commons 1592–93, attorney-general 1593–94, chief justice of the Common Pleas 1606, and chief justice of the King’s Bench 1613. He came into conflict with the king and Bacon on matters touching the royal prerogative, especially the right of granting commendams, and was removed from the bench Nov. 15, 1616. Among the noted cases which he conducted as prosecutor are those of Essex and Southampton in 1601, of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1603 (in which he disgraced himself by the brutality of his language), and of the gunpowder plotters in 1605. In the later part of his life he rendered notable service, in Parliament, to the cause of English freedom, his last important speech being a direct attack on Buckingham. His chief works are his “Reports” (1600–15) and his “Institutes,” which consist of a reprint and translation of Littleton’s “Tenures” with a commentary (popularly known as “Coke upon Littleton”); the text of various statutes from Magna Charta to the time of James I., with a commentary; a treatise on criminal law; and a treatise on the jurisdiction of the different law-courts.
Five sorts of people he used to foredesign to misery and poverty; Chemists, Monopolizers, Concelers, Promoters, and Rythming Poets. For three things he would give God solemn thanks; that he never gave his body to physick, nor his heart to cruelty, nor his hand to corruption. In three things he did much applaud his own success; in his fair fortune with his Wife, in his happy study of the Laws, and in his free coming by all his Offices, nec prece, nec pretio, neither begging nor bribing for preferment. 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 cloaths, well worne; and being wont to say, “that the outward neatness of our bodies might be a Monitor of purity to our souls.” In his pleadings, discourse, and judgements, he declined all circumlocutions, usually saying, “The matter lies in a little room.” In all places, callings, and jurisdictions, he commended modesty and sobriety within their boundaries, saying, “If a River swells beyond its Banks, it loseth its own Channel.” If any adverse party crossed him, he would patiently reply, “If another punish me, I will not punish myself.” In the highest Term of business, he made Vacation to himself at his Table; and would never be persuaded privately to retract what he had publikely adjudged, professing, he was a Judge in a Court, and not in a Chamber…. His most learned and laborious works on the Laws will last to be admired by the judicious posterity whilst Fame hath a trumpet left her, and any breath to blow therein.
Sir Edward Coke—that great oracle of our law.
Coke was “the oracle of law” but, like too many great lawyers, he was so completely one as to have been nothing else. Coke has said, “the common law is the absolute perfection of all reason;” a dictum which might admit of some ridicule. Armed with law, he committed acts of injustice; for in how many cases, passion mixing itself with law, summum jus becomes summa injuria. Official violence brutalized, and political ambition extinguished, every spark of nature in this great lawyer, when he struck at his victims, public or domestic. His solitary knowledge, perhaps, had deadened his judgment in other studies; and yet his narrow spirit could shrink with jealousy at the celebrity obtained by more liberal pursuits than his own. The errors of the great are as instructive as their virtues; and the secret history of the outrageous lawyer may have, at least, the merit of novelty, although not of panegyric.
He was a man of strong though narrow intellect; confessedly the greatest master of English law that had ever appeared, but proud and overbearing, a flatterer and tool of the court till he had obtained his ends, and odious to the nation for the brutal manner in which, as attorney-general, he had behaved towards sir Walter Raleigh on his trial.
Fierce with dark keeping, his mind resembled some of those gloomy structures where records and muniments are piled to the exclusion of all higher or nobler matters. For genius he had no love: with philosophy he had no sympathy.
Pedant, bigot, and savage as he was, he had qualities which bore as strong, though a very disagreeable resemblance to some of the highest virtues which a public man can possess. He was an exception to a maxim which we believe to be generally true, that those who trample on the helpless are disposed to cringe to the powerful. He behaved with gross rudeness to his juniors at the bar, and with execrable cruelty to prisoners on trial for their lives. But he stood up manfully against the king and the king’s favourites. No man of that age appeared to so little advantage when he was opposed to an inferior, and was in the wrong. But, on the other hand, it is but fair to admit, that no man of that age made so creditable a figure when he was opposed to a superior, and happened to be in the right. On such occasion, his half-suppressed insolence and his impracticable obstinacy had a respectable and interesting appearance, when compared with the abject servility of the bar and of the bench.
The leviathan of the common law, and the sublime of common sense,—a man who could have been produced only by the slow gestation of centuries, English in bone and blood and brain. Stout as an oak, though capable of being yielding as a willow; with an intellect tough, fibrous, holding with a Titanic clutch its enormity of acquisition; with a disposition hard, arrogant, obstinate, just; and with a heart avaricious of wealth and power, scorning all weak and most amiable emotions, but clinging, in spite of its selfish fits and starts of servility, to English laws, customs, and liberties, with the tenacity of mingled instinct and passion; the man looms up before us, rude, ungenerous, and revengeful, as when he insulted Bacon in his abasement, and roared out “spider of hell” to Raleigh in his unjust impeachment, yet rarely losing that stiff, daring spirit which drafted the immortal “Petition of Right,” and that sour and sullen honesty which told the messenger of James I., who came to command him to prejudge a case in which the king’s prerogative was concerned “when the case happens, I shall do that which will be fit for a judge to do.”
The lustre which, in the eye of the jurist, gathers around the name of Coke, as one of the fathers in his profession, is tarnished when memory recalls his brutal ferocity in the trial of Raleigh.
Coke also has a place in literature. His reports are, even at the present day, known without his name simply as “The Reports,” and his “Institutes” is one of the most learned works which this age produced. It is rather a collection provided with notes, but is instructive and suggestive from the variety of and the contrast of its contents. Coke traced the English laws to the remotest antiquity; he considered them as the common production of the wisest men of earlier ages, and at the same time as the great inheritance of the English people, and its best protection against every kind of tyranny, spiritual or temporal. Even the old Norman French, in which they were to a great extent composed, he would not part with, for a peculiar meaning attached itself, in his view, to every word.
The ablest, and also the most truculent and unscrupulous of English lawyers.
The height of Coke’s legal fame has overshadowed his other claims to greatness…. Of Coke as a lawyer it is difficult to speak without attaching either too great or too little weight to his vast reputation. In avoiding the indiscriminate laudation with which he has been injured there is a danger of falling into the still more unbecoming error of speaking without due respect of a great man who has exercised a really profound influence on English law.
With Coke—the victim, it was said at the time, of “pride, prohibitions, præmunire, and prerogative”—no one who has read the trials of Raleigh, or noted how the vaunted champion of national rights veered in his view of them according to the place he happened to hold, can have any personal sympathy. A pedant and a boor, the assertion of his own undignified dignity, rather than any larger motive, determined his attitude. On the other hand, it must be admitted that he was sometimes in the right, and that his attempt to make his court an imperium in imperio foreran the assertion of the important principle that law has a place in the realm altogether apart from politics.
