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Sir Edward Coke |
Sir Edward Coke (pronounced "Cook") (1 February 1552–3 September 1634), was an early English colonial entrepreneur and jurist whose writings on the English common law were the definitive legal texts for nearly 150 years.
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Coke was born at Mileham, Norfolk the son of a London barrister from a Norfolk family. He was educated at Norwich School and then Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1585, in the middle of the deserted village of Godwick, Edward Coke built a fine brick manor house, having purchased the estate in 1580. (The ruins of the house, which was E shaped with an impressive two storey porch and windows, was pulled down in 1962.) Coke became a Member of Parliament in 1589, Speaker of the House of Commons in 1592 and was appointed England's Attorney General in 1593, a post for which he was in competition with his rival Sir Francis Bacon. During this period, he was a zealous prosecutor of Sir Walter Raleigh and of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. He was appointed Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas in 1606. In 1613, he was elevated to Chief Justice of the King's Bench, where he continued his defence of the English common law against the encroachment by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, local courts controlled by the aristocracy, and meddling by the King.
Bacon encouraged the King to remove Coke as Chief Justice in 1616, for refusing to hold a case in abeyance until the King could give his own opinion in it. In 1621 Coke became an MP again, and proved so troublesome to the crown that he was imprisoned, along with other Parliamentary leaders, for six months. In 1628, he was one of the drafters of the Petition of Right. In 1606, Coke apparently helped write the charter of the Virginia Company, a private venture granted a royal charter to found settlements in North America. He became director of the London Company, one of the two branches of the Virginia Company. One of Coke's greatest contributions to the law was to interpret Magna Carta to apply not only to the protection of nobles but also to all subjects of the Crown equally, which effectively established the law as a guarantor of rights among all subjects against even Parliament and the King. He famously asserted: "Magna Carta is such a fellow, that he will have no sovereign."
The Countess of Rutland's Case (1604): the origin of the parol evidence rule is usually traced to this case. Coke wrote: "(I)t would be inconvenient, that matters in writing made by advice and on consideration, and which finally import the certain truth of the agreement of the parties should be controlled by averment of the parties to be proved by the uncertain testimony of slippery memory. And it would be dangerous to purchasers and farmers, and all others in such cases, if such nude averments against matter in writing should be admitted.” In modern parlance, parties to a written contract are barred from contending that they had a prior, inconsistent oral agreement on the same subject.
Copies of Coke's writings arrived in North America on the Mayflower in 1620, and every lawyer in the English colonies and early United States was trained from Coke's books, particularly his Reports and Institutes (see References section below), the most famous of which was his property book, The First Institute of the Lawes of England, or a Commentary on Littleton (a reference to 15th century English jurist Thomas de Littleton). Coke was a patron and mentor for American theologian and dissident Roger Williams and assisted with his education at Sutton's Hospital and at the University of Cambridge, Pembroke College. Both John Adams and Patrick Henry argued from Coke treatises to support their revolutionary positions against the Mother Country in the 1770s.
Under Coke's leadership, in 1628 the House of Commons forced Charles I of England to accept Coke's Petition of Right by withholding the revenues the king wanted until he capitulated. The Petition of Right was the forerunner of the English Bill of Rights and the U.S. Bill of Rights.
| Legal offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Sir Thomas Fleming |
Lord Chief Justice 1613–1616 |
Succeeded by Henry Montagu |
| Preceded by Sir Francis Gawdy |
Chief Justice of the Common Pleas 1606–1613 |
Succeeded by Sir Henry Hobart |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by Thomas Snagge |
Speaker of the House of Commons 1592–1593 |
Succeeded by Sir Christopher Yelverton |
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| Persondata | |
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| NAME | Coke, Edward |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | English colonial entrepreneur, jurist, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, Speaker of the House of Commons, Attorney General |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1552-02-01 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Mileham, Norfolk |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1634-09-03 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
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