NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. No. XXXIII. NEW SERIES, No. VIII. OCTOBER, 1821. C. Cushing. ART. XIII.-The first part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, or a Commentary upon Littleton, &c. By Sir Edward Coke. First American from the sixteenth European edition. Philadelphia, 1812. 3 vols. 8vo. Ir is a serious misfortune to the student of our law, that we possess no detailed account of most of the great luminaries of the science, in a form accessible to ordinary readers. While the civilians can produce many valuable works intended to guide the inquiries of the beginner through the mazes of Roman jurisprudence, and at the same time gratify his curiosity with regard to the writers themselves whose names stand in the title page of the books given him to peruse, we, on the contrary, have little knowledge of the immense mass of books and authors composing our juridical treasures, excepting what can be gleaned from the meagre columns of a bookseller's catalogue, or the voluminous repositories of general history and biography. Hoffman's Course of Study does something towards supplying this deficiency; but the whole subject has been consigned to such unworthy neglect, that it still remains almost an unwrought field for the researches of the jurist. have placed the title of the much improved American edition of sir Edward Coke's Commentary upon Littleton before this article, in order to add our mite to the department of legal biography, by laying before our readers some account of the life and writings of the distinguished commentator. New Series, No. 8. 34 We Sir Edward Coke was born in the year 1550, at Mileham, in the county of Norfolk. His father Robert, a gentleman of good family and an eminent barrister, died whilst this his only son was young, leaving him the heir of a large fortune. Edward was first sent to the free school of Norwich, thence removed to Cambridge, and after residing at the university about four years entered as student of the Inner-Temple. The quick penetration and sound judgment, which he there displayed, occasioned his being called to the bar at an early period, namely, after a novitiate of six years, which was then accounted a very extraordinary mark of approbation. The first cause in which he appeared in the court of queen's bench, as we learn from his own report of it, was in 1578, in the twenty-eighth year of his age.* About the same time he was appointed reader of Lyon's Inn, and so continued for three years, during which space his lectures were very much resorted to, in consequence of which his reputation and practice increased so rapidly, that, before he had been long at the bar, he paid his addresses to a lady of one of the first families and best fortunes in his native county. This lady, Bridget, daughter and coheiress of John Paston, he shortly after married, receiving with her thirty thousand pounds and becoming allied to some of the best houses in the kingdom. From this time he continued to rise with unexampled rapidity; the cities of Coventry and Norwich chose him their recorder, he was engaged in all the great causes of Westminster hall, acquired the favour of the lord treasurer Burleigh, and was frequently consulted on the queen's affairs. His large estate and great credit in the county of Norfolk recommended him to the freeholders of that county and procured his election as knight of the shire, in which capacity he distinguished himself so much as to be made speaker in the parliament held in the thirty-fifth year of Elizabeth. He was then queen's solicitor, from which post he was soon advanced to that of attorney-general. Mr Coke, becoming a widower by the death of his wife shortly after he received the appointment of attorney-general, paid his addresses to another lady of rank and fortune, the lady Hatton, relict of sir William Hatton, and sister of Thomas lord Burleigh, the oldest son of the lord treasurer Burleigh. * The case of Lord Cromwell in Coke's Rep. pt. iv, f. 14, a. + D'Ewes Journal of Parliament, p. 469. This secon unhappy, a little vexati riages this bishops of gent in brin guilty of a Whether it circumstanc Hatton and them above house witho tion was col lord Burlei several othe church; but ed from the the record, t ignorance of not seem to l archbishop's great esteen queen's atto tament, with common law Nor is it pro his informal the church an ordinary vote of the cathedr solicited exert chapter from under pretence the bestowmen to which he memorable say have church-liv and sale. Of the nume the latter part Fleming, Crook Hobart and ma This second marriage, which took place in 1598, proved very unhappy, and even the celebration of it caused the parties no little vexation. So much notice was taken of irregular marriages this year, that archbishop Whitgift had signified to the bishops of his province that he expected they would be diligent in bringing to prosecution all persons, who should be guilty of any irregularity in the celebration of marriage. Whether it was that the attorney-general did not advert to this circumstance, or that he looked upon the quality of lady Hatton and of himself and the consent of her family as setting them above such restrictions,-they were married in a private house without either bans or license. Hereupon a prosecution was commenced in the archbishop's court against them, lord Burleigh, the rector who officiated at the marriage, and several other persons, for contempt of the authority of the church; but on their submission by proxies they were absolved from the penalties, which they had incurred, because, says the record, they had offended, not from contumacy, but from ignorance of the law in this particular. The prosecution does not seem to have proceeded from any personal animosity of the archbishop's; on the contrary, this prelate is known to have had great esteem for Coke; and when the latter was appointed queen's attorney, Whitgift sent him a copy of the New Testament, with a message to this effect, that he had now studied common law enough, and should thereafter study the law of God. Nor is it probable that Coke intended to slight the church by his informal marriage, because he was always a firm friend to the church and the clergy; which is apparent from an extraordinary vote of thanks given him under seal by the chapter of the cathedral church of Norwich for his gratuitous and unsolicited exertions in preserving many of the estates of the chapter from the illegal practices of persons claiming them under pretence of concealments; as also from his liberality in the bestowment of the numerous benefices in his gift, in regard to which he frequently declared, among the many other memorable sayings of his which are recorded, that he would have church-livings pass by livery and siesin, not by bargain and sale. Of the numerous distinguished lawyers, who flourished in the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth, Yelverton, Philips, Fleming, Crooke, Bacon, Popham, Anderson, Dodderidge, Hobart and many others, none was treated with greater res pect in his profession or in private life than Coke, as queen's attorney; for he was consulted by the ministry in all matters of difficulty, and furnished them with a legal color for some of their proceedings, which might otherwise have been esteemed unjust and extraordinary. The most important affair, in which he was officially concerned at this time, was the prosecution of the unfortunate earl of Essex, who, together with his kinsman the earl of Southampton, was brought to trial before the lords in the year 1600, for his ill-advised attempt to stir up the city of London to rebel and assist him in getting possession of the queen's person by force of arms. The evidence against these noblemen was full and decisive, and their guilt unquestioned; but they constantly accused the attorneygeneral, who conducted the prosecution for the crown, of misinterpreting their motives, pressing them with undue severity, abusing the ears of the lords with slanderous charges, and acting from a desire to subserve the personal enmity of the ministers toward the accused, rather than from a sincere regard to justice. The earl of Essex especially complained of being talked out of his life by corrupt orators; and Southampton, in his defence, said to Coke: you urge the matter very far and you wrong me therein; my blood be upon your head. But although the attorney-general sometimes addressed these noblemen with considerable sharpness in the course of the trial, he does not seem, from the report of it which we have in the State Trials and in Camden's Elizabeth, to have extended their crime any further than he was borne out in doing by the law and the evidence. As Coke had been in habits of intimacy and confidence with the ministers at the close of Elizabeth's reign, so he continued in the beginning of the next; there is even good reason to believe that the proclamation of king James and other state-papers of this period, were drawn up by him; and although he was not so eager, as were many persons of inferior rank, to gain admission to James, yet when the new king, on account of his peaceable accession, entertained the principal gentlemen of his kingdom at Greenwich (1603), he, together with Henry Lee, the lord mayor, and John Crooke, recorder of London, received the honor of knighthood. In the same year happened the famous trial of sir Walter Raleigh on a charge of high treason before a court of special commissioners at Winchester; in the management of which trial sir Ed a manner still n trial sir Edward Coke treated Raleigh with such intemperate and overbearing violence, as left an indelible blot upon his character. The whole plot, in which Raleigh was charged with being implicated, is now, as it was then, involved in the deepest mystery; and whether he was guilty or not, it is certain that the evidence produced at the trial was wholly insufficient, not to say palpably absurd; and the verdict must have been obtained from the jury by foul means in order to gratify the resentment of the king and his ministers against sir Walter. But the virulent abuse heaped on Raleigh by the attorneygeneral is no less remarkable than the weakness of the proofs on which the conviction was founded. Sir Edward Coke was not merely contented with continually styling Raleigh a notorious traitor, but even went so far as to bestow such epithets as viper, monster, spider of hell, vile and execrable traitor, odious fellow and damnable atheist, upon one of the most gallant and accomplished gentlemen of England, who both as a scholar and as a soldier deserved to be accounted the pride of his country, and who has rendered himself forever memorable in the history of our own, by his noble exertions in the discovery and settlement of America. The customs of that age, indeed, allowed great severity on the part of public officers toward state-criminals, the hardship of whose situation in this respect was much aggravated by their being denied counsel and obliged to reply to the charges brought against them without any preparation for defence; but sir Edward's zeal for the cause of justice, or obsequiousness to the crown, appears, in this case, to have hurried him beyond all bounds, so that on one occasion he treated the court itself with indecency. For when lord Cecil, one of the commissioners, interrupted sir Edward Coke, and, as some authors affirm, rebuked him for his conduct with much asperity, sir Edward immediately sat down and refused to speak any more, until he was urged and entreated to proceed by the commissioners, when, after much difficulty, he again rose and recapitulated all the evidence in a manner still more offensive than before his interruption.* Sir Edward Coke's behavior in this trial raised up many enemies against him at the time, and has been justly and universally condemned ever since; but he retrieved his credit soon afterwards by his vigilance and sagacity in unravelling * See Oldy's Life of Raleigh prefixed to his History of the World, and the State Trials. |