24 MAY 1957, Page 18

A Lawyer's Paradoxes

The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke. By Catherine Drinker Bowen. (Hamish Hamilton, 42s.)

SIR EDWARD COKE is one of the most fascinat- ingly paradoxical characters in our history. His career covers the transition from arbitrary government to modern constitutionalism. Born under Edward VI, he lived until six years before the meeting of the Long Parliament : his career as a Parliamentary leader began at the age of sixty-nine. As Attorney-General under Elizabeth and at the beginning of James I's reign Cokc secured convictions in ideological treason trials by using confessions obtained by .torture, and savaged his victims with a vituperativeness worthy of a more sophisticated age. But under James I Coke denounced administrative arrest, proclaimed that 'there is no law to warrant torture in this land,' fought tooth and nail to establish the judiciary's independence of the government, and put both Magna Carta and the writ of Habeas Corpus to new uses in order to protect individuals against arbitrary imprisonment. He gave respectability to the onslaught on the High Commission and the oath ex officio. 'The eccle- siastical judge,' he said, 'cannot examine any man upon his oath, upon the intention and thought of his heart. . . . No man may be punished for his thoughts. For it hath been said in the Proverb, THOUGHT IS FREE.' In the Parlia- ment of 1621, though still a Privy Councillor, Coke led an attack on monopolies and govern- ment corruption; in the Parliament of 1628 it was he who first dared to name the great Duke of Buckingham as 'the cause of all our miseries.' Coke was the main architect of the Petition of Right, which prohibited arbitrary taxation and arrest.

During Coke's lifetime the government tried to censor his Reports: after his death Charles I seized all his papers and refused to allow the last three volumes of the Institutes and the last two volumes of the Reports to be published. They appeared only after the meeting of the Long Parliament had rendered thought free. Hence- forth they were the Bible of the common lawyers. The seventeenth-century English Revolution pro- duced no Code Cromwell to parallel the Code Napoleon which arose out of the French Revo- lution. In so far as English law was modernised and adapted to the needs of a commercial civilisation, this came about through the victory of Coke's views over those of the royal lawyers.

Even in his personality Coke looks back as well as forward. The great father of the common law himself cheerfully broke the law in order to marry a rich widow, Lady Hatton (a marriage whose thirty-six years of strife gave him ample leisure to repent his haste). With a dozen armed retainers he broke violently into a house in order to snatch his marriageable daughter from his wife's custody. The law, for the letter of which he professed such exaggerated respect, he would himself treat cavalierly enough, selecting and re- jecting at will, and when all else failed he quoted Scripture to prove that arrest without cause shown was unreasonable even though the judges had de- clared it to be lawful.

A vivid, powerful character : one of those un- lovable Englishmen to whose dubious motives English liberties owe so much. He amassed sufficient money to make ninety-six separate pur- chases of land, to the value of more than £100,000; and he begat sons enough to dissipate

a great part of this wealth before his own death. Mrs. Bowen writes vividly about him. 'I make no claim to the discovery of new material,' she says, modestly and justly; 'my aim is introduction and

evocation.' Much of her long book is concerned with general history rather than with Coke's own life; it is a noble story this, of the Parliamentary battles of the early seventeenth century; but it is a familiar one. The proof-reading has been careless enough to leave one reference to 'Episcopal bishops' and another to 'idolatrous popish pantings,' and on one occasion to con- fuse Sir Edward Coke with Sir John Croke. But for the general reader this is a colourful and well- informed introduction to a life in which much of English history is concentrated. Coke would have enjoyed the coincidence which made him die on September 3, the thirty-fifth birthday of Oliver Cromwell, whose victories at Dunbar and Worcester on September 3, 1650 and 1651 respec- tively, were to ensure the ultimate triumph for the English-speaking peoples of the principles of Sir Edward Coke over those of the Stuarts.

CHRISTOPHER HILL