Sir Edward Coke was likewise among those who incurred the displeasure of James for freedom of speech. Imprisonment in the Tower followed his offence. The locks and doors of his chambers in the Temple were sealed up, and several securities for money taken away. Immured in prison, his family not being suffered to approach him, he had yet another trial to encounter. James, whose meanness equalled his improvidence, took this base occasion to sue Coke for an old pretended debt due from Sir Christopher Hatton to Queen Elizabeth. The reply of the Solicitor-general, Sir John Walter, when the brief of this iniquitous case was sent to him, is worthy of a nobler character of mind than that usually imputed to the English lawyer of that period. “Let my tongue,” he answered, “cleave to the roof of my mouth whenever I ope it against Sir Edward Coke;” yet the suit was rigorously prosecuted. “That spirit of fiery exhalation”[333] was not daunted even by this petty and malignant persecution. It was observed of him that he lost his advancement in the same way that he got it[334]—by his tongue. To the last, he steadily resisted the oppressions of the crown, and his character, odious as it was to his contemporaries, odious when we reflect upon him as the vituperative judge of Ralegh, and too justly censured by Bacon “for insulting misery,”[335] has received the respect and gratitude of posterity for its general political independence. Footnote 333: Wilson. Footnote 334: Life of Sir Edward Coke, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge, p. 22. Footnote 335: “Perhaps,” says Mr. Amos, “Sir Edward Coke never descended lower in point of wit and insult of misery, than when he told Cuffe, when under trial for high treason, ‘that he would give him a cuff that should let him down by-and-by.’”—Grand Oyer of Poisoning, p. 460. The fate of Bacon himself excited a still more mournful interest in good minds, than the injuries inflicted upon Coke. It becomes necessary for the biographer of Villiers, to examine into the circumstances of an affair with which, as with every public event of the day, he was intimately connected. Bacon, in afterwards addressing James, alludes to Buckingham when he imputes his degradation to the personal views of some secret foe. “I wish that, as I am the first, so I may be the last of sacrifices in your times; and when, from private appetite, it is resolved that a creature shall be sacrificed, it is easy to pick up sticks enough from any thicket, whither he has strayed, to make a fire to offer it with.”[336] Footnote 336: Life of Bacon, by Basil Montague. Preface, p. 9.