n 1604; and the English merchants who opposed the union and
community of trade with the Scots were "roundly shaken by him." In 1608,
in the great case of the Post Nati, he decided, with the assistance of
the fourteen judges, that those born after the accession of James I. to
the throne of England were English subjects and capable of holding lands
in England; and he compared the two dissentient judges to the apostle
Thomas, whose doubts only confirmed the faith of the rest. He did not,
however, always show obedience to the king's wishes. He opposed the
latter's Spanish policy, and in July 1615, in spite of James's most
peremptory commands and threats, refused to put the great seal to the
pardon of Somerset. In May 1616 he officiated as high steward in the
trial of the latter and his countess for the murder of Overbury. He was
a rigid churchman, hostile to both the Puritans and the Roman Catholics.
He fully approved of the king's unfriendly attitude towards the former,
adopted at the Hampton Court conference in 1604, and declared, in
admiration of James's theological reasoning on this occasion, that he
had never understood before the meaning of the legal maxim, _Rex est
mixta persona cum sacerdote_. In 1605 he opposed the petition for the
restitution of deprived Puritan ministers, and obtained an opinion from
the judges that the petition was illegal. He supported the party of
Abbot against Laud at Oxford, and represented to the king the unfitness
of the latter to be president of St John's College. In 1605 he directed
the judges to enforce the penal laws against the Roman Catholics.

His vigorous and active public career closed with a great victory gained
over the common law and his formidable antagonist, Sir Edward Coke. The
chancellor's court of equity had originated in the necessity for a
tribunal to decide cases not served by the common law, and to relax and
correct the rigidity and insufficiency of the latter's procedure. The
two jurisdictions had remained bitter rivals, the common-law bar
complaining of the arbitrary and unrestricted powers of the chancellor,
and the equity lawyers censuring and ridiculing the failures of justice
in the courts of common law. The disputes between the courts, concerning
which the king had already in 1615 remonstrated with the chancellor and
Sir Edward Coke,[9] the lord chief justice, came to a crisis in 1616,
when the court of chancery granted relief against judgments at common
law in t