place in an illegal manner, and condescended to plead ignorance of the laws!  He had been married in a private house, without banns or licence, at a moment when the archbishop was vigilantly prosecuting informal and irregular marriages.  Coke, with his habitual pride, imagined that the rank of the parties concerned would have set him above such restrictions.  The laws which he administered he appears to have considered had their indulgent exceptions for the great.  But Whitgift was a primitive Christian; and the circumstance involved Coke and the whole family in a prosecution in the ecclesiastical court, and nearly in the severest of its penalties.  The archbishop appears to have been fully sensible of the overbearing temper of this great lawyer; for when Coke became the attorney-general, we cannot but consider, as an ingenious reprimand, the archbishop’s gift of a Greek testament, with this message, that “He had studied the common law long enough, and should henceforward study the law of God.”

The atmosphere of a court proved variable with so stirring a genius; and as a constitutional lawyer, Coke, at times, was the stern asserter of the kingly power, or its intrepid impugner; but his personal dispositions led to predominance, and he too often usurped authority and power with the relish of one who loved them too keenly.  “You make the laws too much lean to your opinion, whereby you show yourself to be a legal tyrant,” said Lord Bacon, in his admonitory letter to Coke.

In 1616 Coke was out of favour for more causes than one, and his great rival, Bacon, was paramount at the council table.[342] Perhaps Coke felt more humiliated by appearing before his judges, who were every one inferior to him as lawyers, than by the weak triumph of his enemies, who received him with studied insult.  The queen informed the king of the treatment the disgraced lord chief-justice had experienced, and, in an angry letter, James declared that “he prosecuted Coke ad correctionem not ad destructionem;” and afterwards at the council spoke of Coke “with so many good words, as if he meant to hang him with a silken halter;” even his rival Bacon made this memorable acknowledgment, in reminding the judges that “such a man was not every day to be found, nor so soon made as marred.”  When his successor was chosen, the Lord Chancellor Egerton, in administering the oath, accused Coke “of many errors and vanities for his ambitious popularity.”  Coke, however, lost no friends in this disgrace, nor lost his haughtiness; for when the new chief-justice sent to purchase his Collar of SS., Coke returned for answer, that “he would not part with it, but leave it to his posterity, that they might one day know they had a chief-justice to their ancestor."[343]