The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck | Page 8

he meant; but upon this agreement he flatters himself that she will prove a very good wife." So Coke and his "very good wife" settled down together again. We shall see presently whether there was to be a perpetual peace between them.
While Bacon was meditating an information against Sir Edward Coke in the Star Chamber for malversation of office, in the hope that a heavy fine might be imposed upon him, Coke also was plotting. He discovered that Bacon, who had been made Lord Keeper early in the year 1617, had had his head turned by his promotion and had become giddy on his pinnacle of greatness; or, to use Bacon's own words, that he was suffering acutely from an "unbridled stomach." Of this Coke determined to take advantage.
Looking back upon his own fall, Coke considered that the final crash had been brought about not, as Bacon had insinuated in his letter, by offending the Almighty, but by offending Villiers, now Earl of Buckingham, and he came to the conclusion that his best hope of recovering his position would be to find some method of doing that Earl a service. Now, Buckingham had an elder brother, Sir John Villiers, who was very poor, and for whom he was anxious to pick up an heiress. The happy thought struck Coke that, as all his wife's property was entailed on her daughter, Frances, he might secure Buckingham's support by selling the girl to Buckingham's brother, for the price of Buckingham's favour and assistance. It was most fortunate that Frances was exceedingly beautiful, and that Sir John Villiers was unattractive and much older than she was; because this would render the amount of patronage, due in payment by Buckingham to Coke, so much the greater.
James I. and Buckingham had gone to Scotland. In the absence of the King and the Court, Bacon, as Lord Keeper, was one of the greatest men left in London, and quite the greatest in his own estimation. Misled by this idea of his own importance, he was imprudent enough to treat his colleague, Winwood, the Secretary of State, with as little ceremony as if he had been a junior clerk, thereby incurring the resentment of that very high official. Common hatred of Bacon made a strong bond of union between Coke and Winwood, and Winwood joined readily in the plot newly laid by Coke.
Sir John Villiers was already acquainted with Coke's pretty daughter; and, when Coke went to him, suggested a match, and enlarged upon the fortune to which she was sole heiress, Sir John professed to be over head and ears in love with her, and observed that "although he would have been well pleased to have taken her in her smoke [smock], he should be glad, by way of curiosity, to know how much could be assured by marriage settlement upon her and her issue."[12] With some reluctance Sir Edward Coke then entered into particulars, and the match was regarded as settled by both sides.
Everything having been now satisfactorily arranged, it occurred to Coke that possibly the time had arrived for informing, first his wife, and afterwards his daughter, of the marriage to which he had agreed.
Sir Edward had often seen his wife in a passion, and he had frequently been a listener to torrents of abuse from her pretty lips and caustic tongue. Although he had been notorious as the rudest member of the Bar, he had generally come off second best in his frequent battles of words with his beautiful helpmate. Stolid and unimpressible as he was, he can hardly have been impervious to the effects of the verbal venom with which she had constantly stung him. But all this had been mere child's play in comparison with her fury on being informed that, without so much as consulting her, her husband had definitely settled a match for her only child with a portionless knight. A new weapon was lying ready to her hand, and she made every possible use of it. It consisted in the fact that, much as she and her husband had quarrelled and lived apart, she had returned to him in the hour of his tribulation, had fought his battles before the King and the Council, and had even braved the royal displeasure and endured exile from the Court, rather than desert him in his need. She bitterly reproached him for repaying her constancy and sacrifices on his behalf by selling her daughter without either inquiring as to the mother's wishes, or even informing that mother of his intention.
If Lady Elizabeth was infuriated at the news of the match, her daughter was frenzied. She detested Sir John Villiers, and she implored her parents never again to mention the question of her marrying him. The mother and daughter were on one