are some of the flowers of his speech. 'The extreme weakness of the evidence,' says Sir James Stephen, 'was made up for by the rancorous ferocity of Coke, who reviled and insulted Raleigh in a manner never imitated, so far as I know, before or since in any English court of justice, except perhaps in those in which Jeffreys presided' (Hist. of Crim. Law, i. 333). But there seems no reason to doubt that, with his excited ideas about Spain and the Jesuits, he honestly believed in Raleigh's guilt.
On the death of Gawdy in 1606 Coke was 'made chief justice of the common pleas, and his new office brought into light a new side of his character. Hitherto he had been engaged in the pushing of his own fortunes and in a strenuous defence of the crown ; he was now to enter on an equally strenuous and more courageous defence of the law. He had immediately to face a determined attempt on the part of the church to shake off the control of the courts of common law. In 1605 Archbishop Bancroft in the name of the whole clergy had presented to the Star-chamber his famous articles of complaint, styled in the judges' answer, after a statute of Edward II, articuli cleri, concerning the issue of prohibitions against the decrees of the ecclesiastical courts, arguing that these should have coordinate jurisdiction with the secular courts, the powers of both being held by delegation from the king. The judges answered the clerical arguments one by one, and treated them with very little ceremony : in issuing prohibitions they had acted strictly according to law, and till the law was altered by parliament they could not alter their mode of administering it (see 2 Inst. 601 ; 2 St. Tr. 131). James was flattered by the absolutist doctrines of the clergy, which were still more manifest in the unpublished canons of the convocation of 1606, and, eager to carry into practice his exaggerated notions of the prerogative, he gave his strong support to the archbishop. The controversy with the judges was but one phase of the struggle for ecclesiastical independence which tills so large a part of the parliamentary debates of the period. In the House of Commons, constituted as it was, the attempt to secure legislative independence was hopeless ; but with a less resolute opponent than Coke the claim of the ecclesiastical courts to judicial independence might very well have succeeded for a time Coke's attitude was no doubt mainly that of a jealous lawyer, but with a man like James his technicalities were more likely to prevail than any broad statement of policy. Still something more than loyal pride a real sense of the danger of extending the royal and ecclesiastical authority is needed to explain the energy with which to the end of his life he continued the struggle. But his mind habitually turned to the narrower view. In 1607, when Bancroft renewed his protest against prohibitions, the king called the judges together, and told them that, as he was informed, he might take what causes he pleased from the judges, who were but his delegates, and determine them himself. Coke, with the clear consent of all his colleagues, told him that it was not law. 'Nothing,' it has been said, 'can be more pedantic, nothing more artificial, nothing more unhistorical, than the reasoning ' which he employed. ' But no achievement of sound argument, no stroke of enlightened statesmanship, ever established a rule more essential to the very existence of the constitution than the principle enforced by the obstinacy and the fallacies of the great chief justice' (Dicey, Law of the Constitution, 18). The interview ended with a subtlety of which Coke was very fond. 'Then the king said that he thought the law was founded upon reason, and that he and others had reason as well as the judges. To which it was answered by me, that true it was that God had endowed his majesty with excellent science and great endowments of nature, but his majesty was not learned in the laws of his realm of England, and causes which concern the life, or inheritance, or goods, or fortunes of his subjects, they are not to be decided by natural reason, but by the artificial reason and judgment of law, which law is an act which requires long study and experience before that a man can attain to the cognisance of it ; and that the law was the golden met-wand and measure to try the causes of the subjects ; and which protected his majesty in safety and in peace ; with which the king was greatly offended, and said that then he should be under the the law, which was treason to affirm, as he said ; to which I said that Bracton saith, Quod rex non debet esse sub homine, sed sub Deo et lege' (12 Rep. 64, 65 ; and see Lodge, iii. 364). Bancroft, sure of the king's support, continued his efforts. In February 1609 another angry scene took place at Whitehall between the king and Coke, who with some other judges had been summoned to discuss the question of prohibitions, when the king lost his temper and Coke is said to have fallen grovelling on the ground begging for mercy (Gardiner, ii. 41).
In 1611 Coke successfully opposed, on the bench and in the council, the claim made by Abbot, the new archbishop, in Chauncy's case, that the court of high commission had full power to fine and imprison in all ecclesiastical
