Coke
acted as a secretary of state; in this and later parliaments he
introduced the royal requests for money, and defended the foreign policy
of Charles I. and Buckingham, and afterwards the actions of the king.
His actual appointment as secretary dates from September 1625. Disliked
by the leaders of the popular party, his speeches in the House of
Commons did not improve the king's position, but when Charles ruled
without a parliament he found Coke's industry very useful to him. The
secretary retained his post until 1639, when a scapegoat was required to
expiate the humiliating treaty of Berwick with the Scots, and the
scapegoat was Coke. Dismissed from office, he retired to his estate at
Melbourne in Derbyshire, and then resided in London, dying at Tottenham
on the 8th of September 1644. Coke's son, Sir John Coke, sided with the
parliament in its struggle with the king, and it is possible that in
later life Coke's own sympathies were with this party, although in his
earlier years he had been a defender of absolute monarchy. Coke, who
greatly disliked the papacy, is described by Clarendon as "a man of very
narrow education and a narrower mind"; and again he says, "his cardinal
perfection was industry and his most eminent infirmity covetousness."

COKE, THOMAS (1747-1814), English divine, the first Methodist bishop,
was born at Brecon, where his father was a well-to-do apothecary. He was
educated at Jesus College, Oxford, taking the degree of M.A. in 1770 and
that of D.C.L. in 1775. From 1772 to 1776 he was curate at South
Petherton in Somerset, whence his rector dismissed him for adopting the
open-air and cottage services introduced by John Wesley, with whom he
had become acquainted. After serving on the London Wesleyan circuit he
was in 1782 appointed president of the conference in Ireland, a position
which he frequently held, in the intervals of his many voyages to
America. He first visited that country in 1784, going to Baltimore as
"superintendent" of the Methodist societies in the new world and, in
1787 the American conference changed his title to "bishop," a
nomenclature which he tried in vain to introduce into the English
conference, of which he was president in 1797 and 1805. Failing this, he
asked Lord Liverpool to make him a bishop in India, and he was voyaging
to Ceylon when he died on the 3rd of May 1814. Coke had always been a
missionary enthusiast, and was the pioneer of such enterprise in his
connex