or fraudulent, the coroner’s behaviour was accepted as a matter of course, and without the least hint that there was any irregularity in the action of an inferior official going behind the backs of his superiors, and finally transferring so delicate a matter out of their cognisance altogether into the hands of a third party. Such were the functions of the justices of the peace in the seventeenth century, and so wide was the reach of the magisterial arm stretched out as a weapon in the service of the administration of government. And if the justices filled so important a position, still more important was that assumed by the king’s judges. The justices were able administrators, dealers of small mercy to the evildoer, guardians of the peace in the name of which their commissions ran; but the judges took a place in the foremost rank as great officers of state. The character of their office had been determined by the famous conflict between James I and Lord Chief Justice Coke which came to a head in 1616 and ended in Coke’s dismissal.[484] The Chief Justice’s endeavour had been to erect the bench into an independent tribunal, founded on the ruins of broken agreement between king and Commons, and occupying the position of arbitrator and guardian of the constitution midway between the two. To the king and to Bacon, who advised him, this seemed intolerable; to James, because the ideal of absolutism which guided his mind could not admit in the state a constitutional oracle other than himself; to the Attorney-General, because his liberal instincts, wide statesmanship, and knowledge of political requirements made clear the impracticable nature of Coke’s ideas, the bonds of crabbed technicality with which they sought to shackle the future, their essential conservatism. Coke’s parchment knowledge, too good for James, was not good enough for Bacon. If Bacon inclined towards administrative absolutism, and Coke represented in the struggle the majesty of the law, assuredly the law for which the Chief Justice fought, for ever seeking guidance in the records of the past, was unfit to mould the future of a great nation. So when Coke fell, characteristically enough, over a sordid squabble into which a question of principle was inappropriately dragged, his fall demands our sympathy perhaps, but hardly our regret. Regret at a victory in the personal cause of the monarch and the check given to the forward march of constitutional progress is profitless. Between the ideas of Bacon and Coke there was no middle course open at the moment when a choice became necessary. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that the judges must either become an independent power in the state, an irresponsible tribunal to which constitutional questions of the highest importance should be referred for decision in strict accordance with the rules of the Court of King’s Bench, or be content to remain in subservience to the crown, supporters of the king’s prerogative, and administrators of