After the prorogation of Parliament which soon followed, Coke retired into private life and lived at Stoke Pogis, where he is supposed to have encouraged his neighbour, Hampden, in his plots against the Court.

In the year 1632 Lady Purbeck left Sir Robert Howard to live with and take care of her father.  She probably went to him on hearing that he had been seriously hurt by a fall from his horse.  In his diary[84] Coke thus describes this accident:  “The 3rd of May, 1632, riding in the morning in Stoke, between eight and nine o’clock to take the air, my horse under me had a strange stumble backwards and fell upon me (being above eighty years old) where my head lighted near to sharp stubbles, and the heavy horse upon me.”  He declares that he suffered “no hurt at all;” but, as a matter of fact, he received an internal injury.

Lord Campbell says that, from this time “his only domestic solace was the company of his daughter, Lady Purbeck, whom he had forgiven,—­probably from a consciousness that her errors might be ascribed to his utter disregard of her inclinations when he concerted her marriage.  She continued piously to watch over him till his death.”

Lady Elizabeth was never reconciled to her husband.  On the contrary, she seems to have been very anxiously awaiting his death in order to take possession of Stoke Pogis.  Garrard, in a letter[85] to Lord Deputy Strafford written in 1633, says:  “Sir Edward Coke was said to be dead, all one morning in Westminster Hall, this term, insomuch that his wife got her brother, Lord Wimbledon, to post with her to Stoke, to get possession of that place; but beyond Colebrook they met with one of his physicians coming from him, who told her of his much amendment, which made them also return to London; some distemper he had fallen into for want of sleep, but is now well again.”  Lady Elizabeth’s keen disappointment may be readily imagined.

It is not likely that the couple of years spent by Lady Purbeck with her father can have been very pleasant ones.  He was bad-tempered, ill-mannered, cantankerous and narrow-minded, and he must also have been a dull companion; for beyond legal literature he had read but little.  Lord Campbell says:  “He shunned the society of” his contemporaries, “Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, as of vagrants who ought to be set in the stocks, or whipped from tithing to tithing.”

Nor can Lady Purbeck have found him a very tractable patient.  He had no faith in either physicians or physic.  Mead wrote[86]to Sir Martin Stuteville:  “Sir Edward Coke being now very infirm in body, a friend of his sent him two or three doctors to regulate his health, whom he told that he had never taken physic since he was born, and would not now begin; and that he had now upon him a disease which all the drugs of Asia, the gold of Africa, nor all the doctors of Europe could cure—­old age.  He therefore both thanked them and his friend that sent them, and dismissed them nobly with a reward of twenty pieces to each man.”  Doubtless a troublesome invalid for a daughter to manage.