Sir Edward Coke held the office of Attorney General until the death of Queen Elizabeth, and with the exception of the Earl of Essex, who always disliked him, enjoyed the fullest confidence of her ministers, and in particular of Sir Robert Cecil. He had always been favourable to the title of James I., and upon the death of Elizabeth, is said to have co-operated cordially with Cecil and the other members of the late Queen’s council in making the necessary arrangements for the peaceable accession of the king of Scotland to the crown. James, upon his arrival in London, continued him in his office of Attorney General, and conferred upon his eldest son the honour of knighthood. Coke’s sound judgment and extensive legal knowledge, united with his fervent attachment to Protestantism, rendered him an invaluable officer of the crown in the various proceedings against the Roman Catholics at the close of Elizabeth’s reign, and the beginning of that of James I. In the examinations respecting the several assassination-treasons, which have been already mentioned, as well as that of Squire in 1598, of the Raleigh conspiracy in 1603, of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, and of numerous other treasonable and seditious movements imputed to the Catholics during the period that he filled the office of Attorney General, he engaged with a zeal and ardour far beyond mere professional excitement: and the temper displayed in his speeches and general conduct on the several trials is much more that of a religious partisan than of a legal advocate. It is common with Catholic writers to attribute to him the utmost barbarity in the use of the rack and the general treatment of prisoners under examination. That he, who in his writings inveighs most strenuously against the use of torture, was nevertheless in his official character the constant instrument of the Privy Council for applying this odious process, is beyond all question: but it must be remembered that what he wrote on this subject was written long after the period of which we are now speaking, and in the dawn of a better order of things; and also that the use of the rack for discovering State secrets was common throughout Europe in his time, and had been the daily practice of the Privy Council in England for centuries before he was born. There is no satisfactory proof that he was coarse and cruel in his conduct towards prisoners under examination; and on the contrary, Father Cornelius, the Jesuit, who had been examined by him respecting the Popish Plots in Queen Elizabeth’s time, told Garnet that he had found him “omnium hominum humanissimus;” and Garnet himself, in his intercepted correspondence, admits, as he also did on his trial, that he was constantly treated by him with the utmost courtesy and kindness.