The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck | Page 8

thoroughly, for the King is much incensed
against him, & by his own weakness he hath lost those few friends he
had."
It is clear from this letter that, although her husband was one of the
greatest lawyers of the day, Lady Elizabeth was not at all afraid of
pitting herself against him in Court, where indeed she seems to have
proved the better pleader of the pair.
This dispute was patched up. On 4th June Chamberlain wrote: "Sir
Edward Coke & his Lady, after so much animosity and wrangling, are
lately made friends; & his curst heart hath been forced to yield more
than ever 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