Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 08.pdf/319

 290

Bacon, his great rival, had been a suitor. and subserviency in the Overbury murder She made him very unhappy, however; and case, Coke was as little amenable to royal when one reads the record of his disgrace discipline in the King's Bench as he had ful conduct in the State Trials, in which he been in the Common Pleas; he resisted prosecuted as Attorney-General, it is diffi the advances of the King as firmly as the cult to feel any very acute regret at the fact. encroachments of the Court of Chancery, One can hardly imagine such language as and in November, 1616, he was removed that in which Coke addressed Sir Walter from his office. One might be tempted to Raleigh being used by any educated gentle think that jealousy of Bacon was the prime man, or tolerated by cause of his inde the Bench, at any pendent judicial con period in English duct, but for the fact legal history : "Thou that he was equally bold in his defense of art a monster; thou hast an English face, popular liberty in his but a Spanish heart!" subsequent parlia mentary career, which "Thou viper, for I thou thee, thou stretched right up to traitor!" "Thou art and beyond the pre thyself a spider of sentation of the hell," and so on. Petition of Right in Coke was scarcely 1628, and is matter less violent in his of history. Coke behavior on the died in 1633. His prosecution of the private character was gunpowder plotters. irreproachable, and Soon after that mem his services to the orable trial (viz., in law cannot be better June, 1606) he had described than in his reward in the the language of chief-justiceship of Bacon : " Had it not the Common Pleas been for Sir Edward MR. JUSTICE CAVE. — an office which Coke's Reports, the law by this time had been almost like a ship he held with dignity and unexpected impar without ballast, for that the cases of modern tiality till 161 3, when, at the instance of his experience are fled from those that are rival, Francis Bacon, he was transferred to the chief-justiceship of the King's Bench, in adjudged and ruled in former time." consequence of his resistance to James's attempts to extend his prerogative. Bacon SIR NICHOLAS CONYNGHAM TYNDAL. and James calculated that the hope of ele Sir Nicholas Conyngham Tyndal, the son vation to the Privy Council, which Coke's transfer to the King's Bench would dangle of an attorney near Chelmsford, and the before his eyes, would bring him to a more relative of perhaps more legal and theolog accommodating frame of mind. But this ical celebrities than any lawyer before or expectation was doomed to be grievously since, was born in 1776 and educated at disappointed. Notwithstanding a single Trinity College, Cambridge. He commenced lapse into his old bad habits of invective his professional career as a special pleader