God v Caesar: Sir Edward Coke and the Struggles of His Time

Abstract

In the 1580s at Temple Church, a youthful Edward Coke, recently admitted to the bar, most likely witnessed the ‘Battle of the Pulpit’ waged between the Anglican Richard Hooker, who preached on Sunday morning, and the Puritan Walter Travers, who answered him on Sunday afternoon. That contest symbolised a broader conflict between the Anglicans and the Puritans in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England over economic and political affairs that Coke would, in his own way, try to reconcile in both the theory and practice of English law. Embracing Hooker's emphasis on the past and the seamless continuity of the English legal tradition, Coke would endeavour to make it look as though the strong contemporary impulses in favour of economic freedom and parliamentary government, close to the hearts of many Puritans such as Travers, were but a normal expression of the ‘ancient constitution’ associated with the reign of Edward the Confessor in the first half of the eleventh century. Though Coke temporarily succeeded in conciliating some of the Puritans, the compromise would not satisfy everyone.