Edward Coke Biography Quotes 16 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Edward Coke was born in 1552 in Norfolk, England, into a provincial gentry world that valued land, law, and service to the Crown. From an early age he pursued the path that led promising young men toward public life: university study followed by training at the Inns of Court. He studied at Cambridge and then entered the Inner Temple, where he absorbed the working habits, precedents, and procedural subtleties of the common law. By the time he was called to the bar he had already distinguished himself as a meticulous pleader and an able advocate, particularly in matters of property, tenures, and the intricate writ system that defined late Tudor legal practice.

Rise at the Bar and Entry into Public Life
Coke's early reputation on the Norfolk and home circuits translated into positions of increasing responsibility. He earned municipal legal posts and advanced to become Recorder of London, a key station that combined legal authority with civic prestige. In Parliament he emerged as a commanding figure, adept in the forms and privileges of the House of Commons. His diligence, lucidity in argument, and evident loyalty to the Crown during the reign of Elizabeth I recommended him to leading political figures, including the great minister William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and, subsequently, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. These connections helped carry him from private advocacy to the highest offices of the law.

Attorney General and State Trials
Appointed Solicitor General and then Attorney General under Elizabeth I, Coke continued in royal service after the accession of James I. As Attorney General he led the prosecution in several trials that defined the era. He appeared against Sir Walter Raleigh in a proceeding remembered both for its political stakes and for the ferocity of the Crown's case. He was also prominent in the prosecutions that followed the Gunpowder Plot, when Guy Fawkes and others were brought to justice, and in the case against the Jesuit superior Henry Garnet. In these matters Coke revealed both the strengths and limits of a royal prosecutor: he was systematic, steeped in the record, and zealous in defense of the realm, yet his courtroom rhetoric and harsh tactics drew criticism from contemporaries and later generations, including his rival and sometime collaborator Francis Bacon.

Chief Justice and the Claims of the Common Law
Coke's career reached its apex on the bench. As Chief Justice of Common Pleas and later of King's Bench, he gave durable expression to a view of the common law as a coherent, ancient, and reasoned system that set real limits to arbitrary power. In Prohibitions del Roy he insisted that the King could not personally decide cases; justice must be administered by the courts according to settled forms. In the Case of Proclamations he argued that royal proclamations could not change the law or create new offenses without Parliament. In Dr. Bonham's Case he penned a celebrated dictum suggesting that even an act of Parliament might be controlled by the common law if it contravened common right and reason. However that statement is interpreted, the arc of his work pressed toward the rule of law and against unbounded prerogative.

These positions brought him into sharp conflict with Thomas Egerton, Lord Ellesmere, the Lord Chancellor, over the relationship between equity and common law. Coke's defense of common law jurisdiction met resistance at court, where James I, advised by Ellesmere and aided by Francis Bacon, decided in favor of equity in certain clashes. In 1616 Coke was removed from the chief justiceship of King's Bench after resisting royal direction in a case involving ecclesiastical commendams and after repeatedly asserting judicial independence. The dismissal was a personal setback, but it did not diminish his stature as the most authoritative common lawyer of his generation.

Scholarship: Reports and Institutes
Parallel to his judicial career, Coke wrote. His Reports gathered and systematized decisions, arguments, and points of learning from the courts in a style that blended narrative, analysis, and didactic commentary. They circulated widely and became indispensable to lawyers who needed to reconcile older authorities with the demands of current litigation. Later he turned to the Institutes of the Lawes of England, a four-part project that aimed to distill the foundations of the law. The First Institute, commonly known as Coke upon Littleton, was a learned commentary on Thomas Littleton's Tenures and became a cornerstone of legal education. Subsequent parts treated criminal law, the jurisdiction of courts, and constitutional fundamentals. Portions appeared in his lifetime, and further volumes were published after his death, but all quickly acquired canonical standing. Together the Reports and Institutes taught generations of lawyers to see the common law as a disciplined science grounded in experience, precedent, and reason.

Parliamentary Leadership and the Petition of Right
After his removal from the bench, Coke returned to the House of Commons and, under Charles I, helped steer a path toward constitutional settlement. Drawing on a lifetime of legal argument and on the heritage of Magna Carta, he became a principal architect of the Petition of Right in 1628. Working with figures such as John Selden and other leaders of the Commons, he articulated claims against imprisonment without cause shown, against taxation without parliamentary consent, and against the billeting of soldiers and the use of martial law in peacetime. The Petition did not resolve all controversies of the reign, but it marked a turning point in the assertion of Parliament's role and in the articulation of rights that Coke traced to the deep sources of the law.

Family, Alliances, and Rivalries
Coke's private life linked him to powerful networks and sometimes to public scandal. His first marriage, to Bridget Paston, connected him to an established Norfolk family and produced several children, including his son Sir Robert Coke. His second marriage to Lady Elizabeth Hatton, born Elizabeth Cecil and related to the influential Cecil family of Lord Burghley and Robert Cecil, brought wealth and proximity to court politics but also domestic turbulence. The most dramatic episode surrounded their daughter Frances Coke, whose marriage to John Villiers, Viscount Purbeck, brother of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, was pressed for reasons of alliance. The struggle over Frances's person, fortune, and consent involved dramatic confrontations and litigation that riveted the court. Coke's rivalry with Francis Bacon, who rose to become Attorney General and then Lord Chancellor under James I, also had a personal edge; their disagreements over legal method, royal power, and jurisdiction mirrored broader ideological divides.

Later Years and Death
In his final years Coke withdrew from high office but not from influence. He tended to his estates, organized his papers, and prepared texts for the press. From the country he watched as the tensions he had long diagnosed persisted under Charles I. Though no longer on the bench, he remained a touchstone for lawyers and MPs who cited his Reports and Institutes to frame debates over liberty and authority. He died in 1634, leaving a library, a corpus of writing, and a reputation that outlived the political fortunes of patrons and adversaries alike.

Character and Legal Philosophy
Coke's character combined pugnacity with method. In court and in print he emphasized that the law's authority arose from reason tested by long use, not from personal will, whether royal or judicial. He believed that learning was cumulative, that each case carried forward a memory of earlier decisions, and that constitutional principles were woven throughout property, criminal, and procedural doctrines. His courtroom style could be severe; as Attorney General he deployed language that shocked even contemporaries. Yet as a judge he also showed the patience of a schoolman, parsing pleadings, insisting on proper forms, and protecting the jurisdictional boundaries that ensured regular justice.

Legacy
Coke's enduring legacy lies in the consolidation of the common law as a constitutional order. His positions in Prohibitions del Roy and the Case of Proclamations gave substance to the idea that the Crown rules under law. His statement in Dr. Bonham's Case, whatever its precise scope, encouraged later jurists to ask how reason and right constrain enacted power. The Petition of Right, which he helped shape with John Selden and the leadership of the Commons, became a formative text for later struggles over taxation, detention, and military power. His Institutes and Reports trained generations of lawyers in England and influenced legal culture in the American colonies, where readers found in his pages a vocabulary for rights and limits on government. Figures from Elizabeth I and James I to Charles I, from Lord Burghley and Robert Cecil to Thomas Egerton, Francis Bacon, George Villiers, and John Villiers appear throughout his story because he engaged, resisted, and learned from them in the arena where power meets principle: the law.

Measured against the tumult of his times, Edward Coke stands as the English jurist who gave the common law a constitutional voice. Through office, judgment, controversy, and scholarship, he insisted that even the greatest must submit to rules that outlast them. His life, interwoven with monarchs, ministers, rivals, and family, left a jurisprudence that still instructs those who seek government by settled law rather than by command.

Our collection contains 16 quotes who is written by Edward, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Justice - Freedom - Honesty & Integrity.

Other people realated to Edward: John Selden (Statesman), Roger Williams (Theologian), Thomas Wentworth (Politician)

• 1628 The First Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England (Coke on Littleton) (Book)
• 1607 Prohibitions del Roy (opinion) (Essay)