address, which gave him a great advantage over the chief justice, whose conduct, both as a lawyer and a senator, and in public and private life, was rather characterized as lofty and unbending. But while the more penetrating and comprehensive intellect was on the side of Bacon, there was in Coke a more steady adherence to conventional justice, and his general conduct, during the more advanced period of his life, must be allowed to bespeak a more generous regard to the honour and welfare of his country. There was scarcely any sort of abasement in the way to promotion in public life to which the former could not descend, but this is much more than can be affirmed of the latter. Bacon no doubt possessed the disposition to serve his country and mankind, but, unhappily, his selfish passions were too frequently the strongest. Instances there may have been in which this was the case with his rival, but these, upon the whole, were the exceptions, not the rule. Among Bacon's papers we have one which gives an account of the manner in which the enmity between himself and Coke had, upon one remarkable occasion, broken forth. The dispute arose in the Court of Exchequer, and was carried on before the strangers and others who were present. "Mr. Attorney kindled and said, 'Mr. Bacon, if you have any wrath against me, pluck it out; for it will do you more hurt than all the teeth in your head will do you good.' I answered coldly in these very words: Mr. Attorney, I respect you; I fear you not; and the less you speak of your own greatness the more I will think of it.' He replied, I think scorn to stand upon terms of greatness towards you who are less than little; less than the least;' and other such strange light terms he gave me, with that insulting which cannot be expressed. Herewith stirred, yet I said no more than this: 'Mr. Attorney, do not depress me so far; for I have been your better, and may be again when it please the queen.' With this, he spake neither I nor himself could tell what, as if he had been attorney-general; and in the end bade me not meddle with the queen's business but with mine own, and that I was unsworn, &c. I told him, 'Sworn or unsworn was all one to an honest man, and that I ever set my service first and myself second, and wished to God that he would do the like.' Then he said, 'It were good to clap a cap. utlagatum upon my back.' To which I only said he could not, and that he was at fault, for he hunted upon an old scent. He gave me a number of disgraceful words besides, which I answered with silence, and showing that I was not moved with them*." This violent altercation is in part explained by the circumstance, that the declining health of the lord chancellor Ellsmere for some time past had made it almost certain that his seat would soon be vacant; and to become his successor, which had been an object of ambition with Coke, had also been the anxious hope of Bacon. On the death of Ellsmere, * Works, vii. 338, 339. the scale of court favour turned in favour of Bacon. Why this preference was shown it is not difficult to discover. The new chancellor had sought his elevation by the usual arts of courtly servility, and might well be regarded by the king and the court as little likely to oppose himself to their wishes. Coke, on the other hand, had frequently acted with a degree of rough independence, and in instances which had proved very unacceptable to the king. On the abrupt dissolution of the last parliament, the government, as matter of necessity, directed its attention to a number of expedients for raising money. One of these schemes was a benevolence, which was to be extended from the court and the nobility, to the gentry, and to all persons of considerable substance through the kingdom. Coke described the project as illegal, and though afterwards he was induced to concur in a different opinion, all men regarded his first decision as properly his own; and his first judgment being much talked about, it was thought to have operated not a little to the injury of a proceeding on which the king and his ministers had thrown themselves as their principal resource. This attempt to raise money without consent of parliament,-a policy which Coke in his later and better days again opposed,—was resisted and censured at this time by Mr. Oliver St. John, whose patriotic conduct exposed him to a sentence in the Star-chamber, which required him to pay a fine of 5000l. But, notwithstanding such examples, the voluntary contributions from the country proved to be very small on this occasion, and it was not unnatural that the enemies of the chief justice should impute much of this failure to his conduct. Case of Peach am. 1614. Connected with the vexation arising from this source was the resentment of the court on account of the decision of the chief justice in the case of Peacham, a Puritan minister whom the king was desirous should be convicted of treason. A manuscript sermon was found in the study of this clergyman containing some severe censures on the court and the government. It did not appear that this sermon had been preached, or that it was intended to be preached, and it was not possible to convert the mere possession of such a document into an act of treason. But it was resolved that every attempt should be made to ascertain whether that act had not been connected with others, or with other parties, so as to furnish some more adequate ground for prosecution. Peacham was sixty years of age, and, at the command of the sovereign, was examined "before torture, in torture, between torture, and after torture," but all without effect. James, having violated law and humanity in vain, now insisted that the act of composing such a paper was itself treasonable. The chief justice contended that this act could not amount to more than defamation, and he moreover protested against the separate and verbal applications that were made to the judges on the question, as being contrary to law, • Howell's State Trials, ii. 889. usage, and justice. The passions of the king became more than ever influenced by this opposition. "If judges," he writes, "will needs. trust better the bare negative of an infamous delinquent without expressing what other end he could probably have, than all probabilities, or rather infallible consequences, upon the other part, caring more for the safety of such a monster than the preservation of a crown in all ages following, whereupon depend the lives of many millions; happy then are all desperate and seditious knaves, but the fortune of this crown is more than miserable*." In the issue Peacham was condemned as a traitor, but it was deemed less odious that he should be suffered to die in prison, than that he should be brought to the scaffold †. In the same year a prosecution was instituted against one Owen, a Catholic, who was charged with having affirmed that a king, excommunicated by the pope, might be lawfully deposed, and even put to death by any one. The defendant pleaded that in England this affirmation could not be interpreted as treasonable, inasmuch as the king, though a Protestant, had not been excommunicated, and could not in consequence be endangered by it. Coke at first admitted the justice of this reasoning, and in so doing placed himself again at issue both with the king and the judges ‡. About the same time there were proceedings in the Court of Chancery, Case of Owen. 1614. Court of Chancery. 1615. which became the occasion of further trouble to the chief justice. The province of that court was to decide on questions in relation to property which it was supposed had not been sufficiently provided for in the courts of law. Hence it acted more as an arbitrator than as a judge, and its forms of proceeding were in a great measure undefined and peculiar; but, as less bound by statutes and precedents than the regular courts, there was more danger of its jurisdiction being extended beyond wholesome limits, particularly as the chancellor was a member of the government, and the government was constantly manifesting a disposition toward encroachment. Coke had always shown a great solicitude for the honour of the common law; and in watching the proceedings of the Court of Chancery, and endeavouring to keep them within narrow bounds, he was acting consistently with those principles by which his general conduct was known to have been long regulated. It happened at this juncture that a judgment of the King's Bench was questioned in the Court of Chancery as having been obtained by fraud, and the party was required to answer certain questions on oath, according to the course of the Chancery. Coke maintained that this proceeding was a violation of the statute of premunire, which espe cially prohibited the removal of causes from the king's court to any other. It would have been difficult perhaps to have sustained this alle Dalrymple's Memorials, i. 54-65, State Trials, ii. 870-879. Bacon's Works, v. 336, vi. 78, 87. gation, as the prohibition of the statute adverted to had respect to the spiritual courts only, and especially to that of the pontiff. But whatever may have been the merit of this dispute, James, acting on his usual policy, approved the conduct of the chancellor, and Coke was made sensible that he had given still further umbrage to the sovereign. Another proceeding in the court of King's Bench led to a similar result. This was a cause wherein the validity of a par- Dispute beticular grant of a benefice to a bishop to be held in com- tween Coke mendam, that is, along with his bishopric, came into and the sovequestion; and the counsel at the bar, besides the special to a proceeding reign relative points of the case, had disputed the king's general pre- in the King's rogative of making such a grant. The king, on receiving Bench. 1615. information of this, signified to the chief justice, through the attorneygeneral, that he would not have the court proceed to judgment till he had spoken on this matter. Coke requested that similar letters might be written to the judges of all the courts. This having been done, the judges assembled, and by a letter subscribed with all their hands, certified his majesty that they were bound by their oaths not to regard any letters that might come to them contrary to law, but to do the law notwithstanding; that they held with one consent the attorney-general's letter to be contrary to law, and such as they could not yield to, and that they had proceeded according to their oath to argue the cause. James, who was at Newmarket, returned answer that he would not suffer his prerogative to be injured under pretexts having respect to the interest of private persons. Already he had observed it to be more boldly dealt with in Westminster Hall than in the reigns of preceding princes, and it was his determination that this popular and unlawful liberty should no longer be tolerated. As to their oath not to delay justice, it could never have been meant to prejudice the king's prerogative, supposing that, in virtue of his absolute power and authority royal, he should command them to forbear meddling any further in a cause till they should hear his pleasure from his own mouth. On his return to London, the twelves judges were made to appear before him in the council-chamber, where he set forth their misconduct, both in regard to what they had done and the tone of their letter. His majesty observed that the judges ought to check those advocates who presume to argue against his prerogative, the one part of which was ordinary, and had relation to his private interest, which might be and was every day disputed in Westminster Hall; the other was of a higher nature, referring to his supreme power and sovereignty, which ought not to be disputed or handled in vulgar argument. Of late, however, the courts of common law were grown so transcendent, that they not only meddled with the king's prerogative, but had encroached on all other courts of justice. James then commented on the form of the letter, as highly in decent, since it merely certified him as to what they had done, instead of submitting to his princely judgment what it might seem to them proper to do*. This manifest solicitude to place all considerations either of usage or law in subordination to the will of the sovereign, and this inclination to boast of an imperial power, as the means of escape from certain unwelcome restraints imposed by the law of the land, did not tend to weaken the convictions of the chief justice as to the propriety of the course which had been adopted. The judges indeed were awed into subjection by this harangue from the monarch, and on their knees solicited the pardon of their temerity; but Coke remained unmoved, and to an ensnaring question which he was required to answer, he deigned no other reply than that when such a point came regularly before him he would be found to decide upon it as became him. The effect of this uncourtly method of procedure at length was, that the chief justice was suspended from his office, while certain parties, chiefly his personal enemies, were employed in collecting matters of accusation against him. James was unwilling to remove so able a functionary, and Coke appears to have looked on such an extremity as improbable; but his unyielding spirit led to this result some months after his suspension. By one of his descendants, his disgrace at this time is attributed mainly to the enmity of Buckingham, and it is added that "Sir Edward might have been restored again to his place if he would have given a bribe, but he answered, a judge ought not to take a bribe, nor give a bribe +."" Coke is suspended from his office as chief justice. 1616. Admitted to a place in the privy council. 1617. One cause of this disagreement between the chief justice and Buckingham appears to have been the refusal of Coke to give his daughter in marriage to Sir John Villiers, the brother of the favourite; but the marriage took place soon after this time, and was followed by the restoration of Coke to a seat in the privy council. Bacon, who had spared no pains to complete the overthrow of his rival, did not see him thus rising again without alarm. All that he could do to prevent the marriage adverted to he attempted, but the effect was to bring on himself the most humiliating rebukes both from the favourite and the king. 1621. Coke, it will appear, had to render important services to his country in this and the next reign; but the career of Bacon was Fall of Bacon. approaching its close. When the parliament of 1621 assembled, his corrupt practices as chancellor formed the topic of general complaint, and led to his impeachment. No one doubted the venality of his predecessors, but it was contended that such conduct did not cease to be vicious from being of long standing, and *Hallam, i. 373-375. + Coke's Detection, i, ubi supra. |