Sir Edward Coke--or Cook, as now pronounced, and occasionally so written
in his own times--that lord chief-justice whose name the laws of England
will preserve--has shared the fate of his great rival, the Lord
Chancellor Bacon; for no hand worthy of their genius has pursued their
story. Bacon, busied with nature, forgot himself. Coke who was only the
greatest of lawyers, reflected with more complacency on himself; for
"among those thirty books which he had written with his own hand, most
pleasing to himself was a manual which he called _Vade Mecum_, from
whence, at one view, he took a prospect of his life past." This
manuscript, which Lloyd notices, was among the fifty which, on his
death, were seized on by an order of council, but some years after were
returned to his heir; and this precious memorial may still be
disinterred.[340]
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 brutalised, 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.
Coke, already enriched by his first marriage, combined power with added
wealth, in his union with the relict of Sir William Hatton, the sister
of Thomas Lord Burleigh. Family alliance was the policy of that prudent
age of political interests. Bacon and Cecil married two sisters;
Walsingham and Mildmay two others; Knowles, Essex, and Leicester, were
linked by family alliances. Elizabeth, who never designed to marry
herself, was anxious to intermarry her court dependents, and to dispose
of them so as to secure their services by family interests.[341]
Ambition and avarice, which had instigated Coke to form this alliance,
punished their creature, by mating him with a spirit haughty and
intractable as his own. It is a remarkable fact, connected with the
character of Coke, that this great lawyer suffered his second marriage
to take place in an illegal manner, and condescended to plead ignorance
of the laws! He had been married in a private house, without banns or
licence, at a moment when the archbishop was vigilantly prosecuting
informal and irregular marriages. Coke, with his habitual pride,
imagined that the rank of the parties concerned would have set him above
such restrictions. The laws which he administered he appears to have
considered had their indulgent exceptions for the great. But Whitgift
was a primitive Christian; and the circumstance involved Coke and the
whole family in a prosecution in the ecclesiastical court, and nearly in
the severest of its penalties. The archbishop appears to have been
fully sensible of the overbearing temper of this great lawyer; for when
Coke became the attorney-general, we cannot but consider, as an
ingenious reprimand, the archbishop's gift of a Greek testament, with
this message, that "He had studied the common law long enough, and
should henceforward study the law of God."
The atmosphere of a court proved variable with so stirring a genius; and
as a constitutional lawyer, Coke, at times, was the stern asserter of
the kingly power, or its intrepid impugner; but his personal
dispositions led to predominance, and he too often usurped authority and
power with the relish of one who loved them too keenly. "You make the
laws too much lean to your opinion, whereby you show yourself to be a
legal tyrant," said Lord Bacon, in his admonitory letter to Coke.
In 1616 Coke was out of favour for more causes than one, and his great
rival, Bacon, was paramount at the council table.[342] Perhaps Coke felt
more humiliated by appearing before his judges, who were every one
inferior to him as lawyers, than by the weak triumph of his enemies, who
received him with studied insult. The queen informed the king of the
treatment the disgraced lord chief-justice had experienced, and, in an
angry letter, James declared that "he prosecuted Coke _ad correctionem_
not _ad destructionem_;" and afterwards at the council spoke of Coke
"with so many good words, as if he meant to hang him with a silken
halter;" even his rival Bacon made this memorable acknowledgment, in
reminding the judges that "such a man was not every day to be found, nor
so soon made as marred." When his successor was chosen, the Lord
Chancellor Egerton, in administering the oath, accused Coke "of many
errors and vanities for his ambitious popularity." Coke, however, lost
no friends in this disgrace, nor lost his haughtiness; for when the new
chief-justice sent to purchase his Collar of SS., Coke returned for
answer, that "he would not part with it, but leave it to his posterity,
that they might one day know they had a chief-justice to their
ancestor."[343]
In this temporary alienation of the royal smiles, Coke attempted their
renewal by a project, which, involved a domestic sacrifice. When the
king was in Scotland, and Lord Bacon, as lord-keeper, sat at the head of
affairs, his lordship was on ill terms with Secretary Winwood, whom Coke
easily persuaded to resume a former proposal for marrying his only
daughter to the favourite's eldest brother, Sir John Villiers. Coke had
formerly refused this match from the high demands of these _parvenus_.
Coke, in prosperity, "sticking at ten thousand a year, and resolving to
give only ten thousand marks, dropped some idle words, that he would not
buy the king's favour too dear;" but now in his adversity, his ambition
proved stronger than his avarice, and by this stroke of deep policy the
wily lawyer was converting a mere domestic transaction into an affair of
state, which it soon became. As such it was evidently perceived by
Bacon; he was alarmed at this projected alliance, in which he foresaw
that he should lose his hold of the favourite in the inevitable rise
once more of his rival Coke. Bacon, the illustrious philosopher, whose
eye was only blest in observing nature, and whose mind was only great in
recording his own meditations, now sat down to contrive the most subtle
suggestions he could put together to prevent this match; but Lord Bacon
not only failed in persuading the king to refuse what his majesty much
wished, but finally produced the very mischief he sought to avert--a
rupture with Buckingham himself, and a copious scolding letter from the
king, but a very admirable one;[344] and where the lord-keeper trembled
to find himself called "Mr. Bacon."
There were, however, other personages than his majesty and his favourite
more deeply concerned in this business, and who had not hitherto been
once consulted--the mother and the daughter! Coke, who, in every-day
concerns, issued his commands as he would his law-writs, and at times
boldly asserted the rights of the subject, had no other paternal notion
of the duties of a wife and a child than their obedience!
Lady Hatton, haughty to insolence, had been often forbidden both the
courts of their majesties, where Lady Compton, the mother of Buckingham,
was the object of her ladyship's persevering contempt. She retained her
personal influence by the numerous estates which she enjoyed in right of
her former husband. When Coke fell into disgrace, his lady abandoned
him! and, to avoid her husband, frequently moved her residences in town
and country. I trace her with malicious activity disfurnishing his house
in Holborn, and at Stoke[345] seizing on all the plate and moveables,
and, in fact, leaving the fallen statesman and the late lord
chief-justice empty houses and no comforter! The wars between Lady
Hatton and her husband were carried on before the council-board, where
her ladyship appeared, accompanied by an imposing train of noble
friends. With her accustomed haughty airs, and in an imperial style,
Lady Hatton declaimed against her tyrannical husband, so that the
letter-writer adds, "divers said that Burbage could not have acted
better." Burbage's famous character was that of Richard the Third. It is
extraordinary that Coke, able to defend any cause, bore himself so
simply. It is supposed that he had laid his domestic concerns too open
to animadversion in the neglect of his daughter; or that he was aware
that he was standing before no friendly bar, at that moment being out of
favour; whatever was the cause, our noble virago obtained a signal
triumph, and "the oracle of law," with all his gravity, stood before the
council-table hen-pecked. In June, 1616, Sir Edward appears to have
yielded at discretion to his lady, for in an unpublished letter I find
that "his curst heart hath been forced to yield to more than he ever
meant; but upon this agreement he flatters himself that she will prove a
very good wife."
In the following year, 1617, these domestic affairs totally changed. The
political marriage of his daughter with Villiers being now resolved on,
the business was to clip the wings of so fierce a bird as Coke had
found in Lady Hatton, which led to an extraordinary contest. The mother
and daughter hated the upstart Villiers, and Sir John, indeed, promised
to be but a sickly bridegroom. They had contrived to make up a written
contract of marriage with Lord Oxford, which they opposed against the
proposal, or rather the order, of Coke.
The violence to which the towering spirits of the conflicting parties
proceeded is a piece of secret history, of which accident has preserved
an able memorial. Coke armed with law, and, what was at least equally
potent, with the king's favour, entered by force the barricadoed houses
of his lady, took possession of his daughter, on whom he appears never
to have cast a thought till she became an instrument for his political
purposes, confined her from her mother, and at length got the haughty
mother herself imprisoned, and brought her to account for all her past
misdoings. Quick was the change of scene, and the contrast was as
wonderful. Coke, who, in the preceding year, to the world's surprise,
proved so simple an advocate in his own cause in the presence of his
wife, now, to employ his own words, "got upon his wings again," and went
on as Lady Hatton, when safely lodged in prison, describes, with "his
high-handed tyrannical courses," till the furious lawyer occasioned a
fit of sickness to the proud crest-fallen lady. "Law! Law! Law!"
thundered from the lips of "its oracle;" and Lord Bacon, in his
apologetical letter to the king for having opposed his "riot or
violence," says, "I disliked it the more, because he justified it to be
law, which was his old song."
The memorial alluded to appears to have been confidentially composed by
the legal friend of Lady Hatton, to furnish her ladyship with answers
when brought before the council-table. It opens several domestic scenes
in the house of that great lord chief-justice; but the forcible
simplicity of the style in domestic details will show, what I have often
observed, that our language has not advanced in expression since the age
of James the First. I have transcribed it from the original, and its
interest must plead for its length.