COKE, Sir Edward, lord chief justice of the King’s Bench in the reign of Jamc3 I., and one of the most distinguished lawyers England has produced, was descended of an ancient family in Norfolk, and born at Mileham in 1549. While a student at the Inner Temple, he distinguished himself by stating the case of a cook belonging to the Temple so exactly, that all the house, who were puzzled with it, admired his pleading, which was also particularly noticed by the bench. After his marriage with Bridget, daughter of John Preston, Esq. a lady of great fortune, preferments flowed in upon him. The cities of Norwich and Coventry chose him as their recorder; the county of Norfolk elected him one of their knights in parliament, and the House of Commons appointed him their speaker in the 35th year of Queen Elizabeth. The queen appointed him solicitor-general in 1592, and attorney-general the next year. In 1603 he was knighted by King James; and in November the same year he managed the trial of Sir Waiter Raleigh, at Winchester, when he treated that accomplished but unfortunate gentleman with a scurrility of [7:7:55]language hardly to be paralleled. In June this year he was appointed lord chief justice of the Common Pleas, and in • 1G13 he became lord chief justice of the King’s Bench, and was sworn a member of the privy council. In 1615 he was very active in the discovery and prosecution of the persons employed in poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower in September 1613; but the contest in which he engaged not long after with the lord chancellor Egerton, and some other circumstances, hastened the ruin of his interest at court, and he was sequestered from the council-table, as well as deprived of the office of lord chief justice. In 1621 he maintained vigorously in the House of Commons that no proclamation is of any force against the parliament; and in the same year, being looked upon as one of the great incendiaries in the House of Commons, he was removed from the council of state with disgrace; the king observing, “that he was the fittest instrument for a tyrant that ever was in England.” He was also committed to the Tower, and his papers were seized. Upon the calling of a new parliament in 1625, the court party, to prevent his being elected a member, got him appointed sheriff of Buckinghamshire; but to avoid the office if possible, he drew up exceptions against the oath of sheriff, which, however, were overruled, and he was obliged to undertake the office. In 1628 be spoke warmly for the redress of grievances, and made a speech, in which he affirmed that the Duke of Buckingham was the cause of all the miseries which the country suffered. While he lay upon his deathbed his papers and last will were seized by an order of council. He died in September 1634, in the eighty-sixth year of his age. Of Sir Edward Coke’s “learned and laborious works on the laws,” a certain author has 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 thirteen 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 Bridgman’s Legal Bibliography ; and Biographia Britannica, v. Coke.}