Jurist; born at
Mileham, Norfolk, England, Feb. 1, 1552; educated at Trinity College,
Cambridge, Clifford's Inn, and the
Inner Temple; began the practice of law in 1578, and quickly rose to the highest rank.
Passing through different grades of judicial office, he became lord chief-justice of
England, opposed in his whole course by a powerful rival,
Francis Bacon.
Coke was a violent and unscrupulous man, and carried his points in court and in politics by sheer audacity, helped by tremendous intellectual force.
As
attorney-general, he conducted the prosecution of
Sir Walter Raleigh with shameful unfairness; and from the beginning of his reign King James I. feared and hated him, but failed to suppress him.
Coke was in the privy council and in Parliament in 1621 when the question of monopolies by royal grants was brought before the
House in the case of the council of Plymouth and the
New England fisheries.
Coke took ground against the validity of the patent.
and so
[
233]
directly assailed the prerogative of the
King.
In other cases he took a similar course; and when the
King censured the House of Commons, as composed of “fiery, popular, and turbulent spirits,”
Coke, speaker of the
House, invited that body to an assertion of its rights, independent of the
King, in the form of a protest entered on its minutes.
The angry monarch sent for the book, tore out the record of the protest with his own hands, dissolved Parliament, and caused the arrest and the imprisonment of
Coke,
Pym, and other members for several months in the Tower.
After that he was a thorn in the side of James and his successor.
In 1628
Coke retired from public life, and died in Stoke Pogis,
Buckinghamshire, Sept. 3, 1634.
His
Reports and other writings upon law and jurisprudence were numerous and most important.
He published
Coke upon Littleton in 1628.
