Edward Coke - Character

Character

Coke was noted as deriving great enjoyment from the law, and working hard at it, but enjoying little else. While he knew Latin classics and maintained a sizeable estate, "these things were side matters", and the law was his main concern. Francis Bacon, his main competitor, was noted as a philosopher and man of learning, but Coke had no interest in such concepts. When given a copy of the Novum Organum by Bacon, Coke wrote "purile insulting remarks" in it. Little is known of Coke's attitude and style as a barrister, but what evidence there is suggests it was a poor one. He was not alone here; most early lawyers were not noted for their eloquence, with Thomas Elyot writing that " lacked elocution and pronunciation, two of the principal parts of rhetorike", and Roger Ascham saying that "they do best when they cry loudest", describing a court case where an advocate was "roaring like a bull". Coke in court was insulting to the parties, disrespectful to the judges and "rough, blustering, overbearing"; a rival once wrote to him saying "in your pleadings you were wont to insult over misery and to inveigh bitterly at the persons, which bred you many enemies". Coke was pedantic and technical, something which saw him win many cases as a barrister, but when he became Attorney General "he showed the same qualities in a less pleasing form ... He was determined to get a conviction by every means in his power".

Francis Watt, writing in the Juridicial Review, portrays this as his strongest characteristic as a lawyer; that he was a man who "having once taken up a point or become engaged in a case, believes in it with all his heart and soul, whilst all the time conscious of its weakness, as well as ready to resort to every device to bolster it up". Writers have struggled to reconcile his achievements as a judge surrounding the rejection of executive power and the rights of man with his actions while Attorney General, with Gerald P. Bodet noting that his early career as a state prosecutor was one of "arrogance and brutality".