Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/76

62 The guilty earl and countess are said to have retired together into the country, not to the felicity of innocent affection, but, as it was said, to mutual hatred and recrimination. The countess died in 1632; the earl, who never recovered his estates, lived on thirteen years longer. Their only child. Lady Ann Carr, who was born in the Tower, was married to William, the fifth earl, and afterwards duke of Bedford, and became the mother of the celebrated lord William Russell, who perished on the scaffold under Charles II. Out of such a soil can rise such plants; nay, even the daughter of this infamous couple is declared to have been a woman of the purest and noblest character; and so carefully was the horrible history of her parents kept from her, that it never reached her ears till a few years before her own death. The earl of Essex, so cruelly treated in this revolting affair, lived to lead with high distinction the army of the commonwealth.

Fast on the fall of Somerset followed that of the chief justice Coke. He had rendered distinguished service to James in hunting out the evidence and bringing to punishment the favourite and his wife; but he had neutralised this benefit by his haughtiness and opposition to the royal authority in other respects. Coke and Bacon had pursued two opposite systems of policy in their courses towards the highest honours of the state. Bacon had affected liberalism, and a championship of popular rights, which the higher he rose the more he sacrificed to the pleasure of the monarch. There was a profound flattery in this, for it seemed to give an additional value to his growing attachment to the crown, that it was won from his original bias towards the people. On the other hand, Coke commenced as a thorough-going supporter of the prerogative, and as his abilities were preeminent, and his prosecution of state offenders unrestrained by any scruples of conscience, he did the work of that despotic prince with a gusto and a ruthlessness which highly delighted his employer. No lawyer, except Jefferies, in a later age, ever indulged in the same unsparing abuse of those against whom he was retained. His disposition was not merely unfeeling, it was truculent, and the insolence of his language was beyond all former experience. When let loose on a victim, he certainly was no respecter of persons; an Arabella Stuart or a Raleigh were abused in a style which would not now be tolerated towards the most abject criminals. But when Coke had reached the summit of his ambition, and thought the height to which he had climbed secure, he began to display the inherent pride of his nature, by assuming an independence of manner, and a haughtiness of opinion, exhibited even towards the throne, which astonished and irritated James. In the commons he openly opposed the claims of prerogative, came out in defence of popular rights, and ended where Bacon had begun. From abject servility he rapidly passed to daring opposition. On the subject of the late benevolences, he stood forward as a patriot in the commons; in the case of Peacham, that which was prosecuted as treason. Coke declared was only defamation; and in that of Owen he agreed with the prisoner that he had committed no treason by saying that the king, if excommunicated, might lawfully be killed, because the king not having been excommunicated, the opinion could not apply to him. These declarations, both in parliament and on the bench, roused James to a keen resentment, and this was continually augmented. He set his own court of the king's bench above every other, and threatened with the penalties of a præmniure the judges of the court of chancery, and all other judges who should grant relief in equity after judgment had been pronounced in the king's bench; and he extended the same menace to all suitors who sought for such relief. The judges of the courts of admiralty, of high commission, of requests, of the duchy of Lancaster, and even the president of the councils of the north, and of Wales, felt their jurisdictions invaded and repressed by his pretensions. The court of star-chamber even, hitherto above all law, was called in question by him, and its power to levy fines in many cases denied. He went farther, and, as in the case of Owen and Peacham, dictated to the privy council, and contradicted the very sovereign to his face.

All this was beheld with infinite satisfaction by Bacon, whose eyes were steadily fixed on the chancellorship, which Ellesmere, lately created viscount Brackley, could not, from his age, long retain. Coke once out of it, it must fall to Bacon.

It would seem as if at the very time when Coke was hunting down his former benefactor, Somerset, the secret decree had gone out from the king against himself. Somerset was condemned on the 25th of May, and on the 30th of June Coke received an order from the king to absent himself from the council chamber, and not to proceed on his circuit, but to employ himself in correcting the errors in his book of reports. He had outraged James's sense of his own supreme authority, by opposing him in the matter of commendams and bishoprics, and had, moreover, contended with Villiers, the new favourite, respecting a patent place at court. Long before he received this startling order for the suspension of his diplomatic and judicial functions, the archbishop, the chancellor, and Mr. Attorney-general Bacon, had been employed by royal command to collect charges against him, so that, as we have observed, his fall must have been decreed before or whilst he was working out that of Somerset.

He was now charged with concealing a debt of twelve thousand pounds, due from the late chancellor Hatton to the crown; with contempt of the king's authority in declaring from the bench that the common law would be overthrown by proceedings in equity, or by claims of prerogative; and for disrespect to the crown in the affair of the commendams.

The charge regarding the money Coke refuted when brought before the council, and confirmed his case by a decision at law: as to the second charge, he explained it as in no way reflecting on the king; and for the third, he humbly solicited his majesty's forgiveness. James professed to retain the highest regard for the lord chief justice, and intended, on his showing a proper humility, to continue to him his favour; but when Coke brought in his report on his book, and maintained that he could only find five trivial errors in it, James, in great anger for his "deceit, contempt, and slander of government," dismissed him from the bench, and made Montague, the recorder of London, chief justice in his place. Coke, with all his harshness and cutting style to others, felt for himself keenly, and is said to have wept