“The Court of Chancery,” says the author of the Life of Sir Edward Coke (published for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge), “had long exercised a jurisdiction, which had formed one of the articles against Wolsey, of revising and correcting judgments which had been obtained in the courts of common law.” It was not until the reign of James, that this privilege had been called into question. Sir Edward Coke, who was tenacious of the authority of the Common Law Courts, and the twelve judges, gave it as their opinion, that Chancery had no such power; and that an appeal from a judgment at law could not be made except to Parliament. To this decision proceedings were instituted against the judges in the Star Chamber. The conduct of the judges and of the chief-justice in this matter, has been generally condemned. Whatever view the public may have taken of these transactions, they formed the first plea for that ruin of Coke to which Buckingham is said to have given an impetus, by the intrusion of his own interests upon the royal ear,[175] at this crisis of Coke’s destiny. The King, summoning the Lord Chief Justice and the twelve judges to the council at Whitehall, delivered his opinions concerning their conduct in an harangue, in which he declared “that ever since his coming to the crown, the popular sort of lawyers had been the men that most effrontedly had trodden upon his prerogative;”[176] and, having expatiated upon their offences with his usual pedantry and prolixity, he dismissed them, declaring “that in his protection of them, and expediting of justice, he would walk in the steps of the ancient and best of kings.” The firmness with which Coke conducted himself during the whole of this affair, whilst it won him a popularity which he would never otherwise have acquired, prepared the way for those who, from interested motives, sought his ruin, and, combined with his zeal and acuteness in the trial of Lord and Lady Somerset—an acuteness which the King, it is rumoured, had secret reasons to dread—completely undermined his credit at court. Footnote 175: See an able Life of Sir Edward Coke, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge, p. 8. Also, Lord Campbell’s Lives of the Chief Justices, Art. Coke, vol. i., p. 287. Footnote 176: Ibid.