charred pit coal. See COAK.

Sir Edward, was born at Mileham, county of Norfolk, February 1, 1551. His father was a bencher of Lincoln's Inn, and died in 1561. From the grammar-school of Norwich Edward Coke removed to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied for three years. He began his legal education at Clifford's Inn, London, in 1572, and was called to the bar in 1578. He had scarcely begun to practise when he was appointed reader at Lyon's Inn by the society of the inner temple; and from the able manner in which he argued the delicate cases of Lord Cromwell and Edward Shelley, his reputation as a lawyer became so great that there was scarcely a single case before the court of king's bench in which he was not concerned. In 1586 he was chosen recorder of Norwich, and he afterwards held the same office for the city of London during the year 1592. When the plague broke out in the metropolis, he was solicitor-general and reader of the Inner Temple; and on retiring from the city was accompanied as far as Romford by an escort of upwards of 50 members of the temple. In 1594 Coke was preferred to the office of attorney-general, to the great chagrin of the Earl of Essex, who had expected to secure that appointment for his protege Lord Bacon. Coke's success on this occasion drew down upon him the hatred and ill-will of his illustrious rival, and was the beginning of a feud which lasted with little intermission till the death of Bacon. The published correspondence of that philosopher is filled with reiterated expressions of discontent at his failure, and allusions equally bitter and unjust to the new attorney-general. In 1593 he was elected member of parliament for the county of Norfolk, and was chosen speaker to the House of Commons as soon as it convened. He retained his office of attorney-general till 1606, and was thus crown lawyer in the management of those important trials for treason which were so frequent after the enforcement of the penal laws against Roman Catholics in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In the conduct of these, he has been charged with unnecessary cruelty in the torture and gratuitous insolence in the examination of the accused, and with conducting the prosecutions too much in a spirit of religious zeal. His behaviour at the trial of Raleigh, above all, has been singled out and branded as peculiarly outrageous. When the prisoner was defending himself with that dignity and calmness which never forsook him in the most pressing emergency, Coke, falling in his attempt to browbeat the accused, lost his temper and his presence of mind, and began to indulge in personal invective against him. He then wound up a long sarcastic address with the long-remembered phrase, "Thou hast an English face, but a Spanish heart." His conduct, however, must be estimated according to the fiery temper of the times in which he lived. and not according to the temper of our own; and while undoubtedly he is to be blamed for his overbearing demeanour and asperity, it must be remembered that his zeal and severity were never made subservient to the promotion of his own interests at court, and that no influence whatever could prompt him to swerve from the line of duty. In 1606 he was named chief-justice of the common pleas; and in 1613 he was promoted to the chief-justiceship of the king's bench. He had not long held this office when new honours began to pour in upon him. A few days after his elevation to the chief-justiceship, he was by a special order from the king advanced to the dignity of a privy-councillor. In the following year the university of Cambridge evinced its sense of the lustre conferred upon it by its old alumnus, and appointed him high steward. The chief-justiceship Coke owed to the influence of Bacon, who suggested the promotion of his rival avowedly for the purpose of corrupting his fidelity and rendering him subservient to the wishes of the king. In this, however, he was disappointed, as Coke was not long of giving notable proofs of his independence. The king, as is well known, attached much importance to the "divine" right. In 1615 a preacher was brought to trial for treason, for having in his possession a manuscript sermon in which it was alleged that the royal prerogative was denied. After a patient hearing Coke decided, much to the king's disgust, that the accused was guiltless. In that same year the base murder of Sir Thomas Overbury was brought to light, and Coke displayed so much zeal in the prosecution of the noble murderers, that the king, whose hands were not clean in the matter, was highly offended. Finally, Coke's independence in the case of *Commendams* (1616), in which he refused to be guided by the views of the royal prerogative as propounded by the king himself, compelled his adversaries to seek occasion for his removal from office. The immediate pretext for his dismissal was this—a barrister, pleading in the court of common pleas, had let fall some expressions which had been reported to the king as throwing doubt upon the royal prerogative, which his majesty watched over with such jealous care. The king immediately issued orders that the case should be stopped and no farther proceedings instituted without his warrant. The judges immediately met to consider the king's message, and came to a resolution that it was *ultra vires* on the part of the king to interfere with them in the fulfilment of official duties. Enraged at this, James ordered them to appear before him at the council-table, and severely rebuked them for their refractory behaviour. Eleven out of the twelve, overawed by the king's authority rather than convinced by his arguments, acknowledged themselves in the wrong, and implored pardon. The twelfth, who was Sir Edward Coke, far from allowing himself to be brow-beaten by the king, maintained the legality of his procedure, and denounced the king's conduct as an interference with the administration of justice, and a violation of the law of the land. In consequence of this bold language, he was summoned before the council to give an account of his administration, and in November following was summarily dismissed from office. Attempts were made to convict him of malversation of office as attorney-general; but his defence was so masterly and complete that even his enemies had to declare themselves satisfied, and the charges against him were abandoned. Finding that his personal integrity was unimpeachable, Coke's enemies now did their best to make out against him a case of official incompetence. He was now summoned to answer twenty-eight objections to principles purporting to be contained in his "Book of Reports." On these points he gave such complete satisfaction to his judges, that the prosecutors dropped the case. It is a significant fact that Sir Henry Montague, who succeeded Coke in office, was expressly warned by the lord chancellor Egerton to avoid the faults of his predecessor, who had been removed for his excessive popularity. The marriage of his daughter with Sir John Villiers, however, paved the way for his reconciliation with the king, and he was soon afterwards received into considerable favour at court. Towards the close of the year 1617, he was reinstated as a member of the privy-council and employed in many important public services. In 1620 he was returned as a member of parliament for the borough of Liskeard, Cornwall; and probably to avenge the harassing attacks that were constantly made on him by the court party, he threw all his influence into the scale of the constitutional opposition. At this the king was highly incensed; and previous to the issue of the general pardon in 1621, he stipulated that Coke should be exempt from the benefits of the act, and caused him to be committed to the Tower. Coke was released from confinement in August 1622, but at the same time arbitrarily ordered to withdraw from court and live in retirement at Stoke Poges during the pleasure of the king. On the accession of Charles I. Coke was returned as a member of parliament; and though prevented from holding his seat by an expedient of the king, who appointed him sheriff of Buckinghamshire, the house refused to issue a new writ to supply his place. In 1628 he was returned simultaneously by the counties of Buckingham and Suffolk; and taking his seat for the former, he rendered valuable service to his country by the vigour with which he defended constitutional right, and the sagacity with which he directed the measures of the liberal party. Though now far advanced in years, he exerted himself with all the energy of youth in his various parliamentary duties. He made himself particularly conspicuous in framing the celebrated "Bill of Rights," which, chiefly by his indefatigable zeal and perseverance, was got safely through the House of Lords. The last act of his public life was to denounce the Duke of Buckingham, whose policy he exposed as the cause of much present and prospective misery to the country. At the close of the session he retired from public life, and spent the most of his time in revising and maturing those works which have perpetuated his fame as the great oracle of English law. He died September 3, 1633, repeating with his last breath the words, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done;" and was buried in the church of Titeshall, Norfolk.

In 1582 Coke married the daughter of John Paston, Esq., by whom he received a handsome fortune; and in 1598 he was again married to the widow of Sir William Hutton, daughter of Thomas Lord Burleigh. It was on this latter occasion that having been arraigned before the archbishop's court for irregularity in solemnizing his marriage without license or proclamation of banns, he escaped by pleading ignorance of the law. Of Sir Edward Coke's "learned and laborious works on the laws," it has been observed that they "will be admired by judicious posterity, while Fame has a trumpet left her, or a breath to blow therein." These are, 1. His Reports, in 13 parts, 1600, folio; 2. a Speech and Charge at the Norwich Assizes; 3. his Institutes, of which the best editions are the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth, by Hargrave and Butler, 1788, 1789, and 1794; 4. a Treatise of Bail and Mainprize, 1637, 4to; 5. Reading on the State of Fines, 27 Edw. I., 1662, 4to; 6. Complete Copyholder, 1640, 4to. See Legislation.