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God v Caesar: Sir Edward Coke and the Struggles of His Time
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 August 2016
Abstract
In the 1580s at Temple Church, a youthful Edward Coke, recently admitted to the bar, most likely witnessed the ‘Battle of the Pulpit’ waged between the Anglican Richard Hooker, who preached on Sunday morning, and the Puritan Walter Travers, who answered him on Sunday afternoon. That contest symbolised a broader conflict between the Anglicans and the Puritans in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England over economic and political affairs that Coke would, in his own way, try to reconcile in both the theory and practice of English law. Embracing Hooker's emphasis on the past and the seamless continuity of the English legal tradition, Coke would endeavour to make it look as though the strong contemporary impulses in favour of economic freedom and parliamentary government, close to the hearts of many Puritans such as Travers, were but a normal expression of the ‘ancient constitution’ associated with the reign of Edward the Confessor in the first half of the eleventh century. Though Coke temporarily succeeded in conciliating some of the Puritans, the compromise would not satisfy everyone.
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References
2 A fuller account of my findings is contained in D Little, Religion, Law, and Order: a study in pre-revolutionary England (New York, 1969; republished Chicago, 1984). An excellent re-examination of related matters, and especially of Coke's role in the ‘struggles of his time’, is contained in J Greenberg, The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St. Edward's ‘laws’ in early modern political thought (Cambridge, 2001).
3 Richard Hooker and Edward Coke are both the subjects of biographical portraits in M Hill and R Helmholz (eds), Great Christian Jurists in English History (Cambridge, forthcoming 2016), the particular chapters being authored by Norman Doe and David Chan Smith respectively.
4 A phrase of Kevin Sharpe's, mentioned in P Lake, ‘The historiography of Puritanism’, in J Coffey and P Lim (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008), pp 346–372 at p 360.
5 See D Como, ‘Radical Puritanism, c. 1558–1660’, and Lake, ‘Historiography of Puritanism’, in Coffey and Lim, Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, pp 241–258 and 346–372 respectively, for judicious assessments of the recent history of scholarly differences over the interpretation of Puritanism.
6 W Travers, A Full and Plaine Declaration of Ecclesiastical Discipline (Leyden, 1617), p 30.
7 J Ayre (ed), The Works of John Whitgift, 3 vols (London, 1851–1853), vol II, p 238. These volumes include the debates between John Whitgift and Thomas Cartwright, touching on civil and ecclesiastical government, between 1572 and 1577.
8 Recounted in Little, Religion, Order, and Law, p 84.
9 T Cartwright, The Second Reply against M. Doctor Whitgift's Second Answer touching the Church Discipline (?Zurich, 1575), pp 10–12.
10 Ayre, Works of Whitgift, vol II, p 582.
11 Ibid, vol II, pp 587 and 569.
12 John Lilburne, a leader of the leftish Puritan sect, the Levellers, would make clear in his England's Birthright (1645) that he opposed all monopolies, not only the one held by the established church over preaching or by the government and members of the Stationers' Company over the press, but also that held by the Merchant Adventurers over the cloth industry and by other guilds over bread and beer. In their March Petition of 1647, the Levellers called vigorously for the dissolution of the Merchant Adventurers and for the prohibition of all similar groups with monopoly control. See J Frank, The Levellers: a history of the writings of three seventeenth-century social democrats: John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn (Cambridge, MA, 1955), pp 62 and 114.
13 R Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, with an introduction by C Morris, 2 vols (London, 1958–1960), vol II, pp 362–363.
14 Ayre, Works of Whitgift, vol II, p 570.
15 J Strype, Life and Works of John Whitgift, 4 vols (Oxford, 1822), vol III, p 72.
16 Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, vol II, p 475.
17 J Keble (ed), Works of Richard Hooker, 3 vols (Oxford, 1888), vol III, p 330.
18 Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, vol II, p 29.
19 Ibid, vol I, p 176 (emphasis added).
20 Ibid, vol I, pp 194–195.
21 Ibid, vol I, p 422.
22 E Coke, The Lord Coke His Speech and Charge, given at Norwich, 1606 (London, 1607), unpaginated.
23 E Coke, The Reports of Sir Edward Coke In English in Thirteen Parts Compleat… , 7 vols (London, 1738), vol IV, Preface, pp v–vi.
24 E Coke, Coke's Institutes of the Lawes of England, vol III, (London, 1648), p 182.
25 S Thorne, Sir Edward Coke, 1552–1592 (London, 1957), p 12.
26 See J Greenberg, The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution (Cambridge, 2001), especially pp 116–117, 142–145, 167–168, 178, 193, 203.
27 See D Little, ‘Differences over the foundation of law in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America’, in R Griffith-Jones and M Hill (eds), Magna Carta, Religion and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, 2015), pp 136–154, for an elaboration of this concluding point.