The court now despaired of bending the stubborn integrity of the Chief Justice, and determined at all events to displace him. Accordingly, as a preliminary to his removal, he was summoned before the Council and charged with several frivolous accusations, some of them founded upon alleged malversations while he was Attorney General, to all of which he returned distinct answers. Soon afterwards, being again summoned to appear before the Council, he was reprimanded, sequestered from the Council-table during the King’s pleasure, enjoined not to ride the summer circuit as Judge of Assize, and ordered to employ his leisure in revising certain “extravagant and exorbitant opinions” set down, as was pretended, in his Book of Reports. He received his writ of discharge from the office of Chief Justice, in November, 1616; and was succeeded by Sir Henry Montague, who was expressly warned by the Lord Chancellor Egerton “to avoid the faults of his predecessor, who had been removed for his excessive popularity.” The discharge of a judge of unrivalled learning and incorruptible integrity for the exercise of the very qualities which rendered him an honour and an ornament to his station, forms a part of the long catalogue of weak and wicked actions which disgraced the reign of James I., and directed the course of events to that catastrophe by which the fate of the Stuart family was decided. From causes, not very distinctly explained in the letters and histories of the day, but which are supposed to have been connected with an intrigue for the marriage of his daughter to Sir John Villiers, afterwards Viscount Purbeck, and brother to the celebrated Duke of Buckingham, Sir Edward Coke, though he never afterwards filled any judicial situation, was, at no long interval, restored to a certain degree of royal favour; and in September, 1617, he was reinstated as a member of the Privy Council. In the course of the next three years he was employed in several commissions of a public nature; and in the Parliament which assembled in 1620 he was returned as a Member for the Borough of Liskeard in Cornwall. In this Parliament he distinguished himself as one of the most able and zealous advocates of the liberal measures which were proposed; he declared himself a strenuous opponent of the pernicious monopolies by which at that period the freedom of trade was fettered, and took an animated part in that struggle between the prerogative pretensions of James and the freedom of debate, which ended in the celebrated resolution of the Commons, “That the liberties, franchises, privileges, and jurisdictions of Parliament are the ancient and undoubted birth-right and inheritance of the subjects of England.” The consequence was, that he was arrested on one of those vague and senseless charges which prevailed in those evil days, and committed to the Tower, in December, 1621, where he remained a close prisoner until the month of August in the ensuing year. On this occasion, he was a