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Chronology of Events - Sir Edward Coke, Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke, vol. I [1600]

Edition used:

The Selected Writings and Speeches of Sir Edward Coke, ed. Steve Sheppard (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003). Vol. 1.

Part of: Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke, 3 vols.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Chronology of Events

Material to the Life, Times, Writings, and Legacy of Sir Edward Coke from the Death of Henry VIII to the Opinion in Marbury v. Madison

1The reader is cautioned as to the reliability of specific dates for conferences and hearings, particularly from 1608 to 1613. The official records often conflict; for that matter, so do private accounts and secondary sources. Most dates are recorded here relying on Coke’s notebook entries.
38 Hen. 8; 1 Edw. 6 January 28, 1547 Henry VIII dies; Edward VI becomes King.
February 1, 1552 Edward Coke is born, to Robert Coke, of Lincoln’s Inn, and Winifred Coke (née Knightley), in Mileham, Norfolk. He later said that his birth occurred so suddenly that his mother delivered him on the hearth and not in her bed.
July 6, 1553 Edward VI dies.
July 10, 1553 Lady Jane Grey proclaimed Queen.
1 Mar.; 1&2 Phil. & M. August 3, 1553 Mary Tudor, a Catholic, proclaimed Queen; Lady Jane is sent to the Tower.
October 1, 1553 Mary crowned Queen.
November 17, 1558 Mary dies. Elizabeth, a Protestant, is pronounced Queen.
1 Eliz. January 15, 1559 Elizabeth I is crowned Queen.
1561 Robert Coke, Edward’s father, dies. Edward is nine.
1561(?)-67 Coke attends the Norwich free school, studying with Mr. Walter Hawe.
October 25, 1567 Coke matriculates at Trinity College, Cambridge; he may have been tutored by Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury.
1569 Winifred Coke, Edward’s mother, dies.
December? 1570 Coke goes down from Cambridge without an earned degree. An M.A. would later be conferred by grace of the university.
January 21, 1571 Coke enters Clifford’s Inn, London.
April 24, 1572 Coke enters Inner Temple as a student of law; he gains particular attention in The Cook’s Case, argued on the quality of food served in the Inn.
April 20, 1578 Coke is called to the bar, a year early under the rules of the Inns.
1579 Coke defends a vicar, Mr. Denny, from Lord Cromwell in an action for libel based on a religious dispute and Denny’s statement that Cromwell, who hired preachers who abjured the queen’s Prayer Book, “like of men who maintain sedition against the Queen’s proceedings.” Coke wins an arrest of judgment by spotting a pleading by his opponent based on a faulty translation into English of a statute. See The Lord Cromwell’s Case, p. 105.
1579–81 Coke is counsel in Shelley’s Case, argued by order of Elizabeth I before the Lord Chancellor and all the judges of the realm. The case turns on whether land can be bound up by granting the land to a person for life, with a remainder to that person’s heirs. Coke argued successfully that such a limitation ought to be construed to create a single perpetual estate, a fee simple absolute, for the person receiving the land. This allowed the recipient and subsequent grantees greater ability to transfer the land. See Shelley’s Case, p. 6.
1579–85 Coke appears as junior barrister in numerous cases under Edmund Plowden and John Popham. He keeps a private notebook with transcriptions of cases earlier reported in manuscripts, a commonplace book, and notes of his own professional and personal life; in time, this notebook will serve as the basis for his Reports.
1580–83 Coke appointed Reader, or lecturer, of Lyon’s Inn; this appointment is extraordinary, as it usually is made to men ten years or more his senior.
1580–85 Coke purchases manors throughout Norfolk, raising concerns he is monopolizing the whole land market there. He is said to have been allowed by the Crown to purchase only “one acre more” with which he purchases an estate named “Castle Acre,” which had as much acreage as he had earlier possessed.
1582 Coke circulates a manuscript of his report of Shelley’s Case.
August 13, 1582 Edward Coke marries Bridget Paston, the “first and best wife,” whose dowry was £30,000; they would have ten children and happily reside in Huntingfield Hall, Suffolk. Throughout their marriage, Coke would commute from his house in Castle Yard to Huntingfield between terms.
1582 London municipal water is first moved in the city by mechanical pumps.
1583 Coke defends Lacey for murder.
1584 Coke first serves as justice of the peace on the Norfolk Commission of the Peace; he is reappointed in 1586, 1588, and 1591.
Coke defends Flemming for unorthodox baptism, having the indictment dismissed for failing to state its relationship to an earlier conviction, raising the chance of double jeopardy. However, he loses a case for a copyholder, despite his arguments from history and pleading requirements.
1585 Coke successfully argues that the Queen’s grant of an abbey did not also grant a dependent rectory because the general language of the abbey grant was technically insufficient to grant the rectory as a portion of the abbey.
Coke elected Recorder, a part-time judge, of Coventry.
1585–90 Edward becomes a protégé of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer and great counselor.
April 2, 1586 Coke elected Recorder of Norwich.
1586 Coke represents the Register of the Court of Admiralty in a suit for proceeds from the office of the co-Register. He represents the Vicar of Pancras, arguing against a prohibition of a dispute in the Spiritual Court for the payment of tithes. He appeals a partition of property that fails to specify either the statutory basis of the partition or the nature of the estate by which the lands were held.
1587 Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine the Great is performed, establishing blank verse as the medium of choice on the stage.
Coke argues Sir Thomas Gresham’s Case, on behalf of Lady Gresham, whom he saves from having to pay a fine for alienating a use. He also argues Cooper’s Case, an action for the killing of eighteen rabbits.
April 5, 1588 Thomas Hobbes born.
1588–90 Coke begins careful note-taking of a wide range of cases argued by both himself and others, as well as collecting information for reports of unreported cases. By 1591, he appears to have intended to publish his reports, the first of which would appear in print in 1600.
1589 Coke attends Parliament as a burgess for Aldburgh, Suffolk.
Coke wins Read and Nash’s Case, another case involving the Greshams, and The Lord Paget’s Case, both of which are cases on the regulation of uses, by which lands could be held by one person for the benefit of another. He loses an unusual case with implications for corporations, in which church wardens sue for the theft of the church bell committed before their tenure, a detail that required Coke to win a difficult argument, but he lost when the court decreed that later wardens must consider the loss to be to the parishioners, not to themselves.
William Lee invents a knitting machine, allowing mass textile production.
1590 (est.) The microscope is invented.
1590 Coke defends Guildford, who is charged with the crime of recruiting for the Roman church, securing his release because the charge was brought too late.
Coke is made Bencher, or a senior lawyer, of the Inner Temple.
October 14, 1591 Coke is unanimously elected Recorder of London, voted £100 pension; he will serve as Recorder only until June of 1592.
1591 Coke invents a defense plea to confess and avoid a plaintiff’s title, which is useful in claiming that the defendant is the rightful occupant of property, even though the plaintiff might have a legal right to own it.
1592 Coke is appointed Reader, or lecturer on law, by the benchers of Inner Temple; he lectures particularly on uses. His lectures would be cut short by an evacuation to escape the plague.
June 11, 1592 On the recommendation of Burghley, Elizabeth I appoints Coke Solicitor General. At the time of his appointment, Coke is chastised by Elizabeth for bringing arguments against her interests in taking estates by escheat, to which he tearfully responds, assuring her of his loyalty to her.
1593 The freeholders of Norfolk elect Coke a member of Commons “unanimous, free, and spontaneous, without any solicitation on my part.”
February 19, 1593 Coke is elected Speaker of the House of Commons; his opening address as Speaker both recites an ancient tradition of strong monarchical authority and, according to the new custom, asks for freedom of speech in Commons. He is a loyal lieutenant to the Queen throughout the session, burying a bill on reformation of the ecclesiastical courts but delivering up large new subsidies, or taxes, although he did much to protect Parliament’s “ancient” rights. See Coke’s speeches, p. 1187.
April 10, 1593 Parliament is dissolved; Coke gives a speech on the antiquity of Parliament, extolling its obedience to the sovereign. See p. 1191.
June 1593 Christopher Marlowe dies.
April 1594 Thomas Egerton is made Master of the Rolls, vacating the office of Attorney General. Coke and Francis Bacon both seek the post. Coke is opposed by the Earl of Essex, the Queen’s favorite and a sponsor of Bacon’s. Coke is favored by Burghley. This is the period of Bacon’s and Coke’s first great rivalry; Bacon refers to Coke as “the Huddler.”
April 10, 1594 Coke is made Attorney General. Although Coke believes the appointment is the result of Burghley’s patronage, he is likely to have been the Queen’s own choice. Coke obstructs Bacon’s appointment as Solicitor General, performing the duties of both offices for over a year.
1594–95 Romeo and Juliet is first performed.
1595 Attorney General Coke argues for the power of the church court called the High Commission in Cawdrey’s Case, in which a priest was barred from preaching. The power of the Commission to employ the penalty for a first offense is upheld, although the penalty had been allowed under the statute only for repeat offenses. Coke’s precedent-laden report of the opinion would serve as a basis for asserting royal jurisdiction over all questions of church law. The precedents of this report were strongly attacked by the Jesuit Robert Parsons at the time, and Coke would have his own arguments with the Commission in later years. He also argues a prohibition to assess the tithes owed a rector when a vicar changed the crops in a field from corn to saffron.
1595–1603 Religious dissent from Catholics and Puritan nonconformists grows. Coke leads efforts to suppress pamphlets, attributed to the Jesuit Robert Parsons, promoting the Infanta of Spain as Elizabeth’s successor.
Elizabeth’s court is plagued by assassination plots, real and rumored. Coke oversees numerous interrogations of defendants, some under torture in prison, some in court, beginning with the trial of a Spanish spy, Elizabeth’s physician Roderigo Lopez, for conspiring to kill her.
1596 Coke, as Attorney General, represents the Archbishop of Canterbury, successfully defending him against a prohibition seeking to end tithes owed on lands taken by the Crown in the dissolution of the monasteries. See The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Case, p. 49.
Coke is elected Treasurer of the Inner Temple.
1597 Francis Bacon first publishes his Essayes. The first book of ten will be enlarged in subsequent editions to thirty-eight, in The Essaies of Sr Francis Bacon Knight (1613), and to fifty-eight, in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (1625).
June 27, 1598 Bridget Coke dies, aged 34.
August 1598 Coke courts Lady Elizabeth Hatton, granddaughter of Burghley, the widow of the nephew and heir of Lord Chancellor Hatton. Bacon is also a suitor for her, being promoted to her by Essex. Coke proposes to her at Burghley’s funeral and is accepted, thanks to support for him from her father Thomas Cecil, the new Lord Burghley, and her uncle, Robert Cecil.
November 7, 1598 Coke, aged 50, and Lady Elizabeth, aged 20, are married, “a strange match, and which seemed to afford more amusement to bystanders than comfort to the parties concerned.” They are married secretly, violating a church canon against marriages in private houses or without a license or the publication of banns. Archbishop Whitgift moves to excommunicate Edward, Lady Elizabeth, the second Lord Burghley, and the rector who married them. Edward petitions for a dispensation, which is granted on account of Coke’s “ignorance of the ecclesiastical law.”
August 23, 1599 Frances Coke, the first daughter of Coke and Lady Elizabeth, is born, ten months after their marriage, despite false rumors that Lady Elizabeth was pregnant before her wedding. Queen Elizabeth I is Frances’s godmother.
1599 Edmund Spenser, the poet and author of The Faerie Queene, dies, aged 47.
1600 or 1601 First performances of Julius Caesar and of Hamlet.
Summer 1600 Coke argues and wins The Case of Alton Woods, winning a large estate for the Queen, using very technical rules of inheritance and property law, but arguing for a narrow understanding of the estate tail, which would help tie lands up in families and diminish the free trade in lands.
June 1600 The Queen’s former favorite, Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, is tried before a special commission following his disastrous attempt to quell a rebellion in Ireland, capped by his making a private truce with the rebel leader, although his real crime was to disobey the Queen in a secret marriage to one of her maids of honor. Essex is confined to his house and then deprived of most of his honors. He loses the Queen’s favor and financial support and, apparently, becomes deranged.
1600 The first volume of Les Reports de Edward Coke is published by T. Wight. See p. 3.
February 9, 1601 Believing his life endangered following an attack on his friend Henry Wrothesley, Earl of Southampton, Essex accelerates a variety of conspiracies, which amount to rebellion. He locks four members of the Privy Council in his house and attempts to rally Londoners to assault the Queen’s guard, resulting in a few small riots that end when Thomas Cecil denounces him as a traitor. Essex is arrested the next day.
February 19, 1601 Coke prosecutes Essex and Southampton for insurrection. Coke employs savage oratory against the defendants during the trial. Essex is convicted and, on February 25, executed. Southampton is convicted, but his sentence is later commuted to life in prison.
March 1601 Coke prosecutes other conspirators in the Essex rebellion.
1601 Bacon issues a book on Essex, A Declaration of the Practices & Treasons Attempted and Committed by Robert, Late Earle of Essex (1601), which he would later repudiate in large part in Sir Francis Bacon His Apologie, in Certaine Imputations Concerning the Late Earle of Essex (1604).
Coke prosecutes Twyne’s Case, bringing a criminal action against a debtor who commits a fraudulent conveyance to prefer one creditor over another.
1601–10 Coke grows more aloof from the bar; his professional rivalry with Francis Bacon, K.C., grows more intense.
August 1601 Elizabeth I visits Coke at his house in Stoke. He presents her with jewels and gifts worth over £1,000.
1602 Le Second Part des Reportes del Edward Coke and Le Tierce Part des Reportes are published by T. Wight. See pp. 37; 58.
1 Jac.
March 24, 1603 Elizabeth I dies. James VI of Scotland is proclaimed also as James I of England.
May 22, 1603 Edward Coke is knighted. In the months that follow, his wife Lady Elizabeth becomes a confidant of the new Queen, Anne.
Spring 1603 A Catholic plot forms to capture King James and to demand concessions for recusants. The plot includes Lord Cobham, a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, whom Cobham, after his arrest, implicates in the plot, although Cobham later recants his claim.
July 25, 1603 James VI is crowned James I.
1603 James publishes a manifesto for his rule, Trewe Lawes of Free Monarchies (or, “True Laws of Free Monarchies”).
Thomas Bodley opens the restored library of the Duke Humfrey in Oxford, which in 1610 will become a repository of all copyrighted books in the realm.
1603–5 English deforestation drives lumber prices too high to use wood for industrial fuel, promoting the industrial use of coal.
Summer 1603 London is in the grip of the plague.
November 17, 1603 Coke’s nadir. He prosecutes Sir Walter Raleigh for treason, employing disgraceful invective and unfair tactics, which later contribute to the stay of Raleigh’s execution. Raleigh is imprisoned in the Tower until 1616, when he is released to prosecute a gold-stealing expedition against Spanish Guyana. It is a politically embarrassing failure, and James in 1618 would enforce the suspended death warrant, and Raleigh would be executed.
1604 The fourth volume of the Reports is published by T. Wight. See p. 93.
performed.
1605 The fifth volume of the Reports is published by the Companie of Stationers. See p. 125.
Argument of the Articuli Cleri. Archbishop Bancroft calls the law judges to answer for prohibitions against the Church. While the written answers are attributed to the law judges, the hand of Attorney General Coke may well have guided their pen.
El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, the first part of Cervantes’s masterpiece, with its ironic but profound homage to the ideals of feudal knight errantry, is published in Spain; it reaches England in translation in 1612.
John Cowell publishes his treatise on English law based on Roman law, Institutiones Juris Anglicani ad Methodum Institutionum Justiniani.
Orlando Gibbons becomes organist of the Chapel Royal.
November 4, 1605 Outside a cellar under the House of Lords, Guy Fawkes is discovered with a slow match and thirty-six barrels of gunpowder, intending to blow up Parliament during James’s state opening on November 5. Sir Robert Catesby has devised the plot, carried out with six Roman Catholic conspirators.
January 27, 1606 Coke examines and prosecutes Fawkes, Catesby, and the other Gunpowder plotters; although he develops the clear evidence of their guilt, he also is, again, unusually cruel. They are all executed.
1606 A. Islip for the Companie of Stationers publishes a table summarizing the first five volumes of the Reports. A series of updates will follow, culminating in this series in Fasiculus florum, Or a Handfull of Flowers Gathered out of the Severall Bookes of Sir E. Coke in 1618.
Ben Jonson’s comedy Volpone is first performed.
Australia is discovered, by the Dutch.
In Bates’s Case, Coke and Chief Justice Popham uphold the power of the King to slap a tariff on imported currants, upholding the opinion of the Barons of Exchequer that the King could regulate trade only if the regulation was in the public interest; this is an opinion that Coke would later regret. See p. 441.
March 28, 1606 Trial of Henry Garnett, English Superior of the Jesuits, for concealing the Gunpowder Plot. Coke prosecutes. Garnett confesses to knowing of the plot under the seal of confession. Based largely on testimony from jail-house spies, Garnett is convicted of misprision of treason and executed.
March-April 1606 Coke assists Popham in drafting the First Royal Charter of the new Virginia Company, a charter that assures that British subjects in the colony and their children born there “shall have and enjoy all Liberties, Franchises, and Immunities, within any of our other Dominions, to all Intents and Purposes, as if they had been abiding and born, within this our Realm of England, or any other of our said Dominions.” This promise is renewed in the Charter of 1609 and later charters.
June 20, 1606 Coke is created Serjeant at Law, an honorific granted by the Crown, which was necessary to serve as a senior judge. The memorial rings he had engraved to give to senior lawyers are inscribed Lex est tutissima cassis, or “Law is the safest helmet,” an abbreviation for a whole maxim: “Law is the safest helmet; under the shield of law no one is deceived.”
Coke is made Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, on the same day he is created Serjeant.
August 4, 1606 Coke presides at the Assizes at Norwich. He charges jury to punish corrupt officials. See p. 521.
1607 Sir Moyle Finch’s Case is apparently Coke’s first case as Chief Justice.
Coke assists the Chancellor in settling the rights of Prince Henry to manors in the Duchy of Cornwall, taking the manors from the grantees who had been given them in fee by Elizabeth. Coke had brought the case as Attorney General.
The sixth volume of the Reports is published by the Companie of Stationers. See p. 149.
John Smith leads 120 colonists to settle Virginia.
1607–8 Coke begins judicial battles with the church court called the High Commission, which punishes crimes against church obedience: Prosecutions in the Commission had been stopped by prohibitions from the common law courts. Coke rules that the Commission is limited to ecclesiastical matters and can be prohibited by the law courts from disciplining a lawyer who argued before the Commission, who had applied to the law courts for a prohibition. See High Commission, p. 42cell, Langdale’s Case, p. 471, Nicholas Fuller’s Case, p. 454, Premunire, p. 447.
1607–12 In a series of cases, Coke and the judges of Common Pleas rule that the Court of High Commission has no authority to arrest laymen and that a layman who resists arrest by a pursuivant, an official of the Commission, and kills him is not guilty of murder. They issue prohibitions against the Commission, enjoining them from imprisoning people, and they grant release by habeas corpus to others. See Anthony Roper’s Case, p. 461, Case de Modo Decimandi, p. 505; High Commission, p. 425. Similar orders are entered against a variety of local courts, particularly that in York, for exceeding their jurisdiction or deciding cases without giving the degree of legal protection required. These prohibitions will set the law courts on a political collision course not only with the church and nobles but also with the King, who was pleased by the absolutist doctrines of the church courts and whose courtiers controlled the local courts.
1608 A Parliamentary commission assigned in 1603 to determine the rights in England of a Scot born after James’s kingship in England fails to resolve the question, and a test case is created by Parliament to resolve the issue in the courts. In Calvin’s Case, or the Case of the “Post Nati,” Coke, with a large majority, accepts the King’s view and agrees that Scots born after the accession of James VI as James I of England are born subject to the same sovereign and so entitled to the privileges of native English subjects. This case would have far-reaching effects as the basis for extending the law over colonial subjects. See p. 166. Prompted largely by the significance of Calvin’s Case, Coke prepares the seventh volume of the Reports, which is published by the Companie of Stationers. See p. 161.
November 10, 16081 In response to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s complaint to the King of the prohibitions of the High Commission, James moves to resolve the case himself. Coke both defends his answer in Fuller’s Case and argues against the King’s acting as a judge of law. Moving from a traditional rationale for such prohibitions that the law judges are agents of the King, Coke asserts that the law is itself the essential measure of such cases and that judges, not the King, interpret the law, which is not based on reason in general but based on the artificial reason of past cases applied by legal custom. In response to Coke’s statements a furious James nearly strikes him; Coke falls on all fours and begs his pardon, and Cecil, the Lord Treasurer, intervenes to distract the King. See Prohibitions del Roy, p. 478.
November 24 and 26, 1608 Nicholas Fuller’s cause is heard by the King’s Bench, which finds him guilty of schism; he is fined and imprisoned for nine weeks. See p. 454.
December 9, 1608 John Milton is born.
February 1609 Coke is summoned by the King to explain the fifty or sixty prohibitions entered against the court of the President of York, about which the King “had conceived great displeasure.” Coke describes the legal infirmities of three or four representative cases, apparently to James’s satisfaction. See Prohibitions, p. 501. Later that year, he appears to have been called again to a second conference on the same question.
May-July 1609 The King holds a conference of all the judges and the Privy Council on the jurisdiction of the church court of High Commission and law courts. The particular object of the debate is over the exaction of the modus decimandi, a special form of tithe, or customary tax paid to the church, and the question is whether jurisdiction to enforce this payment is to be in the church courts or the law courts, Coke arguing that only Parliament could put them elsewhere. The debate rages over several meetings, Coke convincing James that the High Commission should rule only on serious offences of church law. See de Modo Decimandi, p. 505.
1609 In Italy, Galileo Galilei develops an improved telescope for measuring heavenly movement.
February 9, 1610 Parliament is in session. Coke is Chief Justice, and so an ex officio adviser to the Lords, but is not active.
1610 Coke rules that a prohibition should not be given to a party after a ruling has been made in the Spiritual Court.
July 7, 1610 Parliament sends an address to the Crown, noting that James’s Royal proclamations had affected the liberty and property of subjects and had changed laws and penalties. James agrees to sign a law forbidding new impositions by the Crown without the consent of Parliament.
September 20, 1610 Coke is summoned to the Council by the King to declare whether the King by proclamation can restrict building in London or regulate the trade in starch, necessary for ruffed collars. In one of his most significant attacks on the royal prerogative, Coke, with Chief Justice Fleming, Chief Baron Tanfield, and Baron Altham, refuses to answer without consulting other judges, after which he issues an opinion admitting the King may require subjects to obey the law but cannot extend his prerogative beyond its legal bounds, cannot create new crimes, and cannot enlarge the criminal jurisdiction of Star Chamber. See Proclamations, p. 486.
Fall 1610 The Royal College of Physicians fines Thomas Bonham, a Cambridge medical graduate, for practicing medicine near London without a license from them to do so. The College arrests and jails him when he does not pay the fine and continues to practice. Coke, with Judges Warburton and Daniel, rules that the College could not enforce a monopoly by acting as judge in a case to which it is a party. In discussing the power of the College under its Parliamentary authority, Coke makes one of his most famous statements, “The common law will control Acts of Parliament, and sometimes adjudge them utterly void; for when an Act of Parliament is against common right and reason, or repugnant, or impossible to be performed, the common law will control it and adjudge such Act to be void.” See Dr. Bonham’s Case, p. 264.
1610–15 Despite the King’s exasperation, his respect for Coke remains strong. Coke becomes a friend and mentor to Prince Charles.
1611 The Parliament is finally dissolved on February 9, 1611. The eighth volume of the Reports is published by the Companie of Stationers. See p. 244.
William Byrd publishes his last work, Psalmes, Songs, and Sonnets.
In an effort by the new Archbishop and the King to mute Coke’s criticism of the High Commission, Coke is appointed to a newly reorganized High Commission. In an October meeting of the Commission, however, Coke refuses to sit with it, claiming not to have seen the articles for the new body, pleading ignorance of what the Commission does and arguing it was a problem not for the Court of Common Pleas but for the King’s Bench. While nothing is resolved that day, the matter seems not to have been further pressed by either side. See High Commission, Appendix I, p. 1307.
The authorized edition of the Bible, often called the King James Version, is published.
April 1611 Archbishop Abbot is installed as the new Archbishop of Canterbury.
1612 Coke prohibits extra-jurisdictional proceedings by the Lord President of Wales and by the Lord President of the North, and he reverses attempts in the Court of Marshalsea to act beyond its jurisdiction. He also prohibits the Archbishop of York from suing for a debt in the Court of Exchequer at York.
May 24, 1612 Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, Lord Treasurer, Secretary of State, and Master of Wards, and Coke’s friend and supporter, dies. A series of maneuvers in the royal court, in which Bacon moves sharply against Coke, follow over the next year.
1613 The ninth part of the Reports is published by the Companie of Stationers. See p. 287.
Coke is made a member of the Privy Council. October 25, 1613
James acts on Bacon’s advice to reduce Chief Justice Coke’s income and power by a promotion to the superior but less significant Court of the King’s Bench, a nominal promotion but actually an attempt to silence him. Attorney General Hobart is promoted to Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and Bacon becomes Attorney General. 1614
Coke’s oldest son, Robert, marries Lady Theophila Berkeley.
Chief Justice Hobart rules, in Day v. Savage, “Because even an Act of Parliament, made against natural equity, as to make a man Judge in his own case, is void in itself, for Jura nature sunt immutabilia, and they are leges legum.”
The “Addled Parliament” begins session, but the assembly is heavy with Puritans and lasts only a few weeks before being dismissed, accomplishing nothing.
James, short of funds without a Parliamentary grant of supply, demands “benevolences,” or gifts of money from the great men. Coke gives an unusually large amount, £200. Coke writes that benevolences are not illegal because they are not taxes but offerings of free will. See Exaction of Benevolence, p. 496.
Bacon prosecutes Peacham, an old clergyman, for treason, on the basis of a drafted but undelivered sermon found by agents who broke into his house. The sermon held that subjects may, in rare circumstances, resist a sovereign attempting to subvert their liberties. Peacham refused to confess treason, despite torture on the rack. Bacon seeks from Coke an opinion on the legality of the charge, prior to the trial. Coke refuses to give an opinion that does not follow the forms of argument, conference, and vote of the bench, and when his view is finally given, he decides (much to Bacon’s shock) that Peacham has not committed high treason. At a trial six months later before a hostile bench, Peacham is found guilty, although his execution is not carried out, and he dies in prison.
Coke publishes his Book of Entries, a collection of forms for pleading. See p. 567.
John Selden publishes his first major book, Titles of Honour.
The tenth part of the Reports is published by the Companie of Stationers. See p. 326.
Cambridge University elects Coke to be High Steward, an honorary office.
James meets George Villiers, later the Duke of Buckingham, who would become the King’s favorite, perhaps his private consort, effectively controlling patronage and royal authority for both James and, later, Charles I. Buckingham’s influence was necessary for anyone in Court to advance in title; his influence would lead to several disastrous wars with Spain and France and to the fall from popularity of Charles with the people and nobility, and would hasten the English Civil War.
1615 Coke rules that the Common Law makes treason of suggesting the murder of the King.
The eleventh part of the Reports, the last volume of the Reports to be published while Coke lived, is published by the Companie of Stationers. See p. 384.
1616 Sir Thomas Overbury is murdered by agents of his wife. James seeks to shield the murderers, the Countess of Essex and Robert Carr, James I’s former favorite and Earl of Somerset. Coke examines over 300 witnesses, proving Essex and Somerset had instigated the poisoning. Although his prosecution is universally praised, rumors circulate that he has also discovered evidence of other crimes and suspicious events, including the death in 1612 of Henry, Prince of Wales, rumors fanned by Coke’s dismissal the next year.
Captain James Smith, the leader of the Virginia Colony at Jamestown, publishes A Description of New England. Besides the regular run, Smith specially prints two copies with presentation title pages, one copy for Ellesmere and one “For the Right Honorable Sir Edward Coke, Lord Chiefe Justice of England.”
Ben Jonson writes Underwoods, including an homage to Coke (at LXV), who of all the King’s servants there were none “whom fortune aided less nor virtue more,” when “being the stranger’s help and the poor man’s aid, Thy just defenses made th’ oppressor afraid.”
Ellesmere, the Lord Chancellor, grants an injunction against a judgment obtained by fraud from the King’s Bench. Coke seeks to have the party who was enjoined from his judgment bring an indictment for the crime of praemunire (improperly using church procedures) against the original defendant. The grand jury refuses to indict.
James asserts the power to grant commendams, temporary church appointments that have revenues assigned to bishops.
April 1616 Deaths of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.
April 25, 1616 Bacon acts for James to assert the prerogative of Rege inconsulto, that he has the power to advise judges before they rule, and orders them to stay their judgment until he advises them. Coke and the judges rule, sending a letter to James that they must do the law, and that they did it.
June 6, 1616 James summons the bench and condemns them all for allowing lawyers’ insolence in questioning his power. All twelve, including Coke, fall to their knees and beg his pardon, but in Coke’s finest hour, he refuses to admit that the King had a prerogative to command him to stay the proceedings, which would violate his oath as judge. Bacon and Ellesmere argue that Coke was obliged to wait on the King’s counsel, a point the other law judges concede. Abandoned by his fellow judges, Coke answers that his obligation is “to do that which shall be fit for a judge to do.” James suggests that what the judge should do is to know and administer the ancient law, an injunction that well describes Coke’s later project of the Institutes. See Commendams and the King’s Displeasure, p. 1310.
June 20, 1616 James I rules the Chancellor has jurisdiction for the injunction over the law courts.
Mid-June 1616 Coke denies Buckingham, the royal favorite, the power to assign a new holder as the office of chief clerk in the Court of Common Pleas, keeping the position for judicial assignment.
June 26, 1616 Coke is summoned to the Privy Council and charged with various offenses, including failing to pay a debt to the Crown he accepted from his father-in-law, Christopher Hatton, extending his jurisdiction too far through praemunire, and insulting the King in the commendams matter. Coke’s defense falls on deaf ears. See Coke’s Hearing, 1616, p. 1323.
June 30, 1616 Lord Treasurer Suffolk, on behalf of the Privy Council, orders Coke to be sequestered in chambers, to be barred from riding as a judge on circuit to hold assizes in outlying cities, to revise his Reports and prepare them for censorship by the king, not to call himself “Lord Chief Justice of England” but only Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, and not to let his coachman ride without his hat.
October 2, 1616 Coke reports to the Privy Council that he has repaired the Reports, listing five quite minor corrections. The primary charge was against Coke’s report in Dr. Bonham’s Case, in which he made no real changes. Bacon continues to agitate for his dismissal.
October 17, 1616 At another hearing, Coke is advised to consider five new points in his Reports. Bacon draws up a list of Coke’s moves against the King’s powers and favorites, which he sends the King.
November 14, 1616 James resolves to remove Coke from the bench for his “perpetual turbulent carriage.”
James issues a supersedeas, drafted by Bacon, which removes Coke as Chief Justice of the King’s Bench: “For certain causes now moving us, we will that you shall be no longer our Chief Justice to hold pleas before us, and we command you that you no longer interfere in that office, and by virtue of this presence, we at once remove and exonerate you from the same.”
November 18, 1616 Henry Montague is sworn in as Chief Justice of the King’s Bench by a triumphant Ellesmere, who admonishes Montague to remember “the removing and putting down of your late predecessor, and by whom: the great King of Great Britain.”
1616–21 Coke is given no major positions but is assigned a series of Star Chamber prosecutions of Dutch merchants exporting coin, of Lord Treasurer Suffolk on charges of bribery, and of Attorney General Yelverton, on political grounds. He is assigned to royal commissions on banishing Jesuits and seminarians, on negotiating a treaty with the Dutch regarding East Indian trade, on inquiring into fines owed as taxes on manors, and on examining the trade in weapons to foreign lands.
1617 Coke and Lady Elizabeth have a prolonged, very public fight over the control of their properties.
March-July 1617 In a blatant move to restore his fortunes at court, Coke contrives to marry his daughter Lady Frances to Sir John Villiers, the penniless brother of Buckingham, the royal favorite. Without consulting his wife or daughter, Coke offers her hand to Villiers, who is twice her age but smitten with her beauty and wealth. Lady Elizabeth hides her daughter and tries to marry her to the Earl of Oxford by a ruse based on a forged letter from him. Coke gets a search warrant and leads an armed party to Oatlands, a summer house of his wife’s cousins, breaking in and taking Frances by force back to his house, Stoke Pogis. Bacon attempts to intercede with Buckingham and the King to prevent the marriage. Bacon, on a charge by Attorney General Yelverton, prosecutes Coke in the Star Chamber for kidnapping. Lady Elizabeth attempts to take her daughter back but fails, and she also is prosecuted and jailed. The King and Buckingham side with Coke, and the King chides Bacon for jealousy. Bacon supports the match.
September 29, 1617 Lady Frances and Sir John Villiers are married. James I gives her away. Coke provides a dowry of £10,000. Lady Elizabeth acquiesces, from prison. Lady Frances will later elope with Sir Robert Howard, fleeing the country in man’s clothing, give birth to a bastard son, and die abroad.
Late 1617 Coke is restored to the Privy Council.
November 2, 1617 Lady Elizabeth is released from her imprisonment(in a London alderman’s house) and renews a life dedicated to ridiculing her husband.
1619 (circa) William Harvey discovers the role of the heart in the circulation of blood.
1620 Coke is made a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury.
Coke is elected to the new Parliament in an honest election for the borough of Liskeard, Cornwall.
Bacon publishes his book on philosophical method, Instauratio Magna, also known as Novum Organum, in which he attacks the sufficiency of most general principles as a basis for deduction, to great critical acclaim.
November 21, 1620 A group of 102 radical Puritans of the English Separation Church land well off course from their target in Virginia. They found Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts Bay and would become known as the “Pilgrim Fathers,” following a speech by Daniel Webster in the nineteenth century. Tradition suggests that they carried a copy of Coke’s First Institute among their possessions on their ship, the Mayflower.
January 30, 1621 Parliament commences.
January-June 1621 A Bill for Supply, a request by the King for the Commons to grant him funds, is moved by Secretary Calvert. Coke, de facto leader of the opposition in Commons, moves that the request for supply and the petition for grievances against Parliament’s privileges be referred together to a committee of the whole House. Coke presents a defense of Parliament based on Magna Carta. He is assisted in his efforts throughout the Parliament by John Selden, who is not then a member.
Coke attacks a parliamentarian named Sheppard, who is expelled from the House for arguing against a Puritan-sponsored bill to ban dancing on the Sabbath, which he held should be Saturday.
Coke assists in several impeachments, including proceedings against Bacon for twenty-eight charges of misconduct as Chancellor, mainly by accepting gifts of money from litigants before him (although many of these donors lost their cases). Bacon is fined £40,000, banished from office and Parliament, and imprisoned in the Tower, although his fine is later remitted and he serves just one day. The King would pardon him in 1624.
Coke supports bills for free trade and against monopolies.
James suggests that Parliament be suspended from May to November, which Coke opposes as against Parliament’s privileges to decide on its adjournment, even though the King could dismiss it. Coke succeeds in obstructing a royal commission requiring adjournment of the Commons, after which a majority of the House vote to adjourn. See p. 1194.
June 21, 1621 On Coke’s recommendation, Roger Williams, a future champion of religious tolerance and leader cellf the colony of Rhode Island, is admitted to be a scholar in Sutton’s Hospital, a school later named Charter House. Williams would later serve as a copyist for Coke, recording hearings in Star Chamber and elsewhere. He later attends Pembroke College, Cambridge, and appears to have briefly studied law under Coke before emigrating. See Sutton’s Hospital, p. 347.
1621 Robert Burton publishes The Anatomy of Melancholy.
November- December 1621 Parliament returns. Coke moves Parliament to pass resolutions to the King advising him against an alliance, through marriage, with Spain. The King orders the House not to discuss such matters and denies them any privileges by right. Coke authors a protestation arguing for the liberties of Parliament, including parliamentarians’ freedom of speech, as “the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England.” See p. 1214.
December 14, 1621 Coke is passed over for Lord Treasurer when a raft of new judges is appointed.
December 18, 1621 The Protestation is enrolled in the House Journal.
December 27, 1621 James sends Coke, John Selden, William Prynne, and other leaders of the opposition to the Tower. Coke’s house, Holborne, is sealed and his legal papers are seized. See Coke’s Arrest after Parliament, p. 1329. His failure to pay Christopher Hatton’s debt is again revived, this time in the Court of Wards, but over the following months, no evidence of disloyalty can be produced against him.
December 28, 1621 The King prorogues Parliament, or suspends it until the next term. He orders the Journal be seized, and tears the Protestation Coke had drafted from it with his own hands.
January 6, 1622 James dissolves Parliament.
1622 While in the Tower, after several months’ confinement without books, Coke’s conditions are mediated; he apparently begins work on his commentary on Littleton’s Tenures, which will become the First Institute.
August 1622 Following intercession by Prince Charles with James, Coke is paroled, but he is dismissed as a privy councillor.
1622 Architect Inigo Jones, Surveyor of the King’s Works, completes the new Banqueting House at Whitehall in the Palladian, or Italian Renaissance style, marking the effective end of the age of English perpendicular gothic buildings.
1623 Shakespeare’s First Folio is published.
Coke is named to a commission in Ireland, as a form of banishment. He responds by agreeing to “discover and rectify many great abuses” and is allowed to remain at home.
February 1624 Coke enters the new Parliament as an ally of Buckingham, with whom he is briefly reconciled. Coke successfully promotes acts abolishing monopolies and creating a system of patents for the protection of inventors’ rights in their inventions.
May 1624 Coke conducts the impeachment of the Lord High Treasurer Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, an opponent of Buckingham, for bribery. Cranfield is banished from office, fined £50,000, and sent to the Tower.
May 29, 1624 Parliament ends. Coke returns to Stoke Pogis to write, although he is restored to the Privy Council.
March 27, 1625 James I dies.
1 Car.
March 27, 1625 Charles I becomes King, at the age of 24.
1625 Dutch law scholar Hugo Grotius publishes De Jure Belli ac Pacis, or On the Law of War and Peace.
London and other cities are in the grip of a severe plague outbreak.
June 22, 1625 A new Parliament is formed. Coke begins the first Parliament of the new King moderately, without his by-then customary motion for the first day from the last two parliaments, with a motion to appoint a committee of grievances. However, Coke soon opposes heavy taxes and joins opposition to the Duke of Buckingham, the favorite.
November 1625 Charles I appoints Coke, then aged 73, as Sheriff of Buckinghamshire, thus barring him from sitting in Parliament, because sheriffs are required by statute to remain in their counties. The same trick is played on Edward Alford, William Fleetwood, Sir Francis Seymour, Sir Robert Phelips, Sir Guy Palmes, and Sir Thomas Wentworth, opposition leaders in earlier parliaments. Coke refuses to take the ancient oath as sheriff, which he claims is anti-Protestant. The judges administering it agree with him in part, but he is ordered to take most of it, and so he must serve. See Sir Edward Coke’s Case (The Sheriff’s Oath), p. 1332.
February 2, 1626 Charles I is crowned king.
February 10, 1626 Coke returns to Parliament, elected from Norfolk. The King questions the ability of Coke and other sheriffs to be seated. Parliament appoints a committee to examine their election and privilege, which relies in part on an earlier statement of Coke’s to determine that sheriffs cannot sit. Coke returns home and spends his time drafting his Institutes.
March 1626 Francis Bacon, while driving through a London suburb wondering whether refrigeration could preserve meat, stops his carriage, purchases a hen, and stuffs it with snow; he contracts bronchitis and dies on April 9.
June 15, 1626 Parliament, including Coke’s son Clement, having been fairly obstreperous, is dissolved. On its last day it passes a resolution to consider Coke a de facto member, entitled to the privileges of a member against lawsuits.
1627 Charles, embroiled in an expensive and losing war with Spain and in want of money, orders all knights to lend him money and orders the arrest of the many who don’t pay as well as those who won’t collect it.
November 22, 1627 Argument of The Five Knights’ Case, in which four lawyers, led by Selden, defend Sir Thomas Darnel, Sir John Corbet, Sir Walter Earle, Sir John Heveningham, and Sir Edward Hampden, who had been committed to prison for not paying forced loans and who had sought release by habeas corpus, claiming that they could not be imprisoned unless they had violated a law passed by Parliament. Selden and others mount a defense of this point from Magna Carta that would bar the Privy Council from ordering imprisonment without a prior statute. The King’s Bench refuses to grant the bail requested under the habeas, and refuses to keep them there without more from the King. The prisoners linger until the seventy-six who refused to pay are all released on January 2, 1628.
1628 The First Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England, or, A Commentarie upon Littleton, is published by the Companie of Stationers. See p. 573. Coke is elected from Buckinghamshire and, separately, elected from Suffolk to a new Parliament. The Commons is heavy with opposition and legal talent, including Thomas Wentworth, John Selden, William Noye, his co-counsel from the Five Knights’ Case, the lawyers John Pym, John Eliot, and Duddley Digges, as well as the young, still-obscure Oliver Cromwell.
March 17, 1628 Charles I’s opening address warns members not to be foolish and interfere in his affairs.
March-June 1628 Coke moves for a Parliamentary committee of the whole to consider grievances and supply. He argues for the protection of habeas corpus, moving for a Petition of Right. The House of Lords introduces an amendment to save the “sovereign power of the Crown.” Coke persuades Commons to defeat the amendment, and the Lords to agree with its removal. The King, advised by Buckingham, gives an evasive answer that would not amount to acceptance of the Petition as law. Coke denounces Buckingham as the cause of the King’s insult to the House. The Lords and Commons make a joint address to Charles I, asking him to assent. Charles I assents to the Petition of Right as a statute of the realm. A supply bill is passed. See p. 1225.
June 26, 1628 Charles I prorogues Parliament.
August 23, 1628 Buckingham, Charles I’s favorite and closest adviser, who has been largely responsible for the war with France and has personally led a disastrous military campaign to relieve the Huguenots of La Rochelle, is assassinated. The masses in London celebrate.
January 21, 1629 Parliament recommences briefly. Coke does not attend.
1629–34 Although the idea has long been with him, and manuscript parts of the Institutes, particularly the commentaries on Magna Carta, had been written prior to 1621, Coke is believed during this period to have prepared the manuscripts for the Second, Third, and Fourth Institutes for publication.
1630 John Winthrop and approximately a thousand Puritans sail for Massachusetts.
May 3, 1632 Coke’s horse stumbles, pinning him beneath; although Coke believes he is not hurt, he is. His daughter, the now-reconciled Lady Frances, returns home to nurse him.
August 29, 1632 John Locke is born.
1633 Third edition of the First Institute is printed by M.F.I.H. and R.Y. Assignes of I. More.
Hearing a rumor that Coke is dead, Lady Elizabeth sends her brother to take possession of his house. He is not dead, and Lady Elizabeth must wait another year and a half.
Summer 1634 Coke grows ill.
September 1, 1634 Secretary of State Sir Francis Windebank and attendants arrive at Stoke Pogis to search for seditious papers on orders of the King and Privy Council. They find Coke on his deathbed and seize his manuscripts, will, and letters.
September 3, 1634 Coke dies, aged 82. He is buried in Tittleshall, next to Bridget, his first wife.
1635 Coke’s A Little Treatise of Baile and Maineprize is first published.
1640 Hobbes circulates his manuscript of The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic.
November 3, 1640 The Long Parliament commences.
May 12, 1641 Parliament gives to Coke’s heirs the right to publish the later volumes of the Institutes.
1641 The colonial General Court of Massachusetts adopts The Body of Liberties, which is thought to be based on Coke’s view of the law.
Coke’s The Compleat Copyholder is first published. See p. 563.
1642 Coke’s Second Part of the Institutes is first published. See p. 745.
1642–51 English Civil Wars.
1644 Coke’s The Third Part of the Institutes and The Fourth Part of the Institutes are first published. See p. 944 and p. 1053.
1647 General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony orders the purchase of two copies each of Coke’s Reports, First Institute and Second Institute, and Book of Entries, as well as of two other law books. Coke’s books are the legal mainstay of all colonial libraries.
January 20, 1649 Charles I’s last armies and allies have been defeated in the field, and he is brought before a specially constituted high court of justice in Westminster Hall. Charged with high treason and “other high crimes against the realm of England,” the king refuses to recognize the court because “a king cannot be tried by any superior jurisdiction on earth.” Despite his refusal to plead, he states that he represented the “liberty of the people of England.” He is found guilty and, on January 27, sentenced to death.
January 30, 1649 Charles I is executed.
1651 Hobbes publishes Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil.
1653–59 Protectorate. Oliver Cromwell rules Britain.
1656 The Twelfth Part of the Reports is first published.
James Harrington publishes Oceana, a utopian and imaginative work of political theory, arguing for stable economy, stable laws, and a limited aristocracy.
1658 Oliver Cromwell dies.
1658–59 First English edition of the Reports, parts 1–11, is published.
1659 Certain Select Cases in Law, the thirteenth volume of Coke’s Reports, is published. See p. 499.
1 Car. 2
May 29, 1660 The restoration of the monarchy; Charles II is crowned.
1674 England’s Independency upon the Papal Power, a pamphlet drawn from Coke’s and John Davis’s writings, is published in London.
1681 A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Law is published anonymously, although it is widely known to be the work of Thomas Hobbes. An extended criticism of Coke’s view of law, it presents a more moderate view of sovereignty than Leviathan.
1680 Henry Care publishes a tract strongly influenced by the Second Institute, English Liberties: Or, The Free-Born Subject’s Inheritance. This will go through several printings, including American printings in 1721 and 1774.
1 Jac. 2 February 6, 1684 James II is crowned.
1684 Edward Coke’s notes on Readings on Fines and Recoveries are first published.
1687 William Penn, the new governor of Pennsylvania, writes The Excellent Priviledge of Liberty & Property Being the Birth-Right of the Free-Born Subjects of England, a book heavily influenced by Coke’s writings.
1688 The Glorious Revolution.
1W&M
Feb. 13, 1689 William and Mary are crowned.
1690 John Locke publishes the Two Treatises of Government.
1701 Parliament passes the Act of Settlement, which bars Roman Catholics from the crown and, among many other limits on the royal prerogative, establishes judicial independence from royal dismissal.
1 Anne March 8, 1702 Anne is crowned.
1708 Thomas Wood, who would write his own Institutes of the Laws of England in 1720, based on Coke’s Institutes, argues for university lectures based on Coke’s works in Some Thoughts concerning the Study of the Laws of England in the Two Universities. A chair along such lines would be first established in Oxford fifty years later.
1711 The Conductor Generalis, a manual for justices of the peace and other legal officials, is first published in New York. As with George Webb’s 1736 The Office and Authority of the Justice of the Peace, published in Williamsburg, the book is influenced by Coke’s Reportsy and Institutes, as will be later manuals for justices of the peace.
1 Geo.
August 1, 1714 George I is crowned.
1 Geo. 2
June 11, 1727 George II is crowned.
1747 Thomas Coke, Sir Edward’s grandson, is made Viscount Coke and Earl of Leicester; this line becomes extinct on the death of Thomas, Lord Coke, and will be re-created in a later Thomas, Lord Coke, in 1837, whence the title continues.
1748 Montesquieu publishes L’Esprit des Lois, arguing, among other things, for separation of powers.
1758 Charles Viner’s chair in law, the first chair for lecturing on the Common Law in an English university, is filled by William Blackstone.
1 Geo. 3
October 25, 1760 George III is crowned.
1761 James Otis, a Massachusetts lawyer, argues from Bonham’s Case, Coke’s Institutes, the Petition of Right, and Magna Carta that crown writs of assistance (search warrants letting customs officers search any house for smuggled goods without limit) violate fundamental law. The Superior Court in Boston rejects his argument, one of the first causes of the American Revolution. The case is watched and reported by a young John Adams, who later bases the Fourth Amendment requirements of reasonable searches and limited warrants on Otis’s argument.
1762 A typical law student of the age, Thomas Jefferson is required to read Coke’s Institutes, particularly the First, with predictable results: “I do wish the Devil had old Coke, for I am sure I never was so tired of an old dull scoundrel in my life.”
1764 A new edition of Coke’s Law Tracts is published in London by B. W. Hawkins.
1765–69 William Blackstone’s four-volume Commentaries on the Laws&