usy at the celebrity obtained
by more liberal pursuits than his own. The errors of the great are as
instructive as their virtues; and the secret history of the outrageous
lawyer may have, at least, the merit of novelty although not of
panegyric.

Coke, already enriched by his first marriage, combined power with added
wealth, in his union with the relict of Sir William Hatton, the sister
of Thomas Lord Burleigh. Family alliance was the policy of that prudent
age of political interests. Bacon and Cecil married two sisters;
Walsingham and Mildmay two others; Knowles, Essex, and Leicester, were
linked by family alliances. Elizabeth, who never designed to marry
herself, was anxious to intermarry her court dependents, and to dispose
of them so as to secure their services by family interests.[341]
Ambition and avarice, which had instigated Coke to form this alliance,
punished their creature, by mating him with a spirit haughty and
intractable as his own. It is a remarkable fact, connected with the
character of Coke, that this great lawyer suffered his second marriage
to take place in an illegal manner, and condescended to plead ignorance
of the laws! He had been married in a private house, without banns or
licence, at a moment when the archbishop was vigilantly prosecuting
informal and irregular marriages. Coke, with his habitual pride,
imagined that the rank of the parties concerned would have set him above
such restrictions. The laws which he administered he appears to have
considered had their indulgent exceptions for the great. But Whitgift
was a primitive Christian; and the circumstance involved Coke and the
whole family in a prosecution in the ecclesiastical court, and nearly in
the severest of its penalties. The archbishop appears to have been
fully sensible of the overbearing temper of this great lawyer; for when
Coke became the attorney-general, we cannot but consider, as an
ingenious reprimand, the archbishop's gift of a Greek testament, with
this message, that "He had studied the common law long enough, and
should henceforward study the law of God."

The atmosphere of a court proved variable with so stirring a genius; and
as a constitutional lawyer, Coke, at times, was the stern asserter of
the kingly power, or its intrepid impugner; but his personal
dispositions led to predominance, and he too often usurped authority and
power with the relish of one who loved them too keenly. "You make the
laws too much lean to y