COKE, Thomas (c.1614-56), of Gray’s Inn, Mdx. and Melbourne, Derbys.

Coke was under the tutelage of his uncle George Coke – the future bishop of Hereford – during his early teens, and by the time he went up to Cambridge he had mastered both Latin and Greek.21Add. 69872, ff. 12, 18, 22; Oxford DNB, ‘George Coke’. He was called to the bar in 1636 and had built up what appears to have been a thriving legal practice by 1640, with chambers in Gray’s Inn. His clients included his father’s friend Thomas Withring*.22Infra, ‘Thomas Withring’; Add. 69872, ff. 48, 50, 52; Add. 69873, f. 108; HMC Cowper, ii. 254-5, 256; CCC 1846. Appointed to Lincolnshire and East Anglian sewers commissions on a regular basis from 1636, he was involved as both legal counsel to and investor in various fen drainage projects during the personal rule of Charles I.23C181/5, ff. 42v, 215v; SP16/437/13, f. 26; PBG Inn, 327; CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 637; CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 309, 447.

In January 1640, Coke’s father was hopeful that Thomas would be returned for Derby – the borough closest to the family seat at Melbourne – in the elections to the Short Parliament. One of his Sir John’s local agents, on discovering that the townsmen had rejected the candidacy of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, believed that Coke might prove more appealing to them.24Supra, ‘Derby’; HMC Cowper, ii. 251. But the Derby voters were apparently determined to reject all gentry interlopers, and Coke was returned instead for Leicester on the recommendation of the dowager countess of Devonshire (the mother of Hobbes’s patron William Cavendish, 3rd earl of Devonshire).25Supra, ‘Leicester’; HMC 8th Rep. i. 436, 437; HMC Cowper, ii. 252; G.K. Gruenfelder, ‘The electoral influence of the earls of Huntingdon 1603-40’, Trans. Leics. Arch. and Hist. Soc. l (1974-5), 25. Although Coke does not appear to have been a particularly active member of the Short Parliament, receiving just one committee appointment, it was probably Thomas rather than Henry Coke (MP for Dunwich) who was the ‘Mr Coke’ who moved on 27 April for a bill to reform abuses in ecclesiastical courts, describing some of their proceedings as ‘contrary to laws humane [sic] and divine’. The speaker demonstrated a firm grasp of legal procedure and a hostility towards the ecclesiastical courts that was typical of common lawyers such as Coke.26CJ ii. 4a; Aston’s Diary, 66-7. Writing to his father on 5 May – the day on which the Short Parliament was dissolved – Coke opined that ‘never was the moderation of the House of Commons requited with such a preposterous and sudden dissolution. God knows what may ensue to us all. There is a general discontent in every man’s heart, and the king declares he will have money other ways’. To add to Coke’s evident frustration with royal proceedings, the king failed to honour an assurance to him of the position of solicitor-general to prince of Wales, which went instead to Orlando Bridgeman*.27Supra, ‘Orlando Bridgeman’; Add. 69873, f. 118.

In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, Coke stood again for Leicester, where his ‘wise, generous carriage’ had reportedly won him ‘a great deal of respect from divers that knew him not before’.28HMC Cowper, ii. 261. Once again, the dowager countess of Devonshire wrote to the corporation on Coke’s behalf. On election day, 23 October 1640, Coke was returned in second place, with the first place going to the young Thomas Lord Grey of Groby.29Supra, ‘Leicester’. Because both Thomas and Henry were again colleagues in the House, and the clerk of the Commons did not always make clear which ‘Mr Coke’ he was referring to, it is impossible to calculate precisely how many committee appointments Thomas received in the Long Parliament. He was certainly named to at least ten committees – the majority of them in late 1640 and early 1641 – including those for investigating the activities of popish recusants (14, 28 November 1640); and to gather evidence of ‘abuses’ committed by the prerogative courts and the receivers of the customs and other ‘unparliamentary’ revenues (3, 17 December; 11, 24 February 1641).30CJ ii. 29a, 39a, 41a, 44a, 45b, 52b, 53a, 83a, 92a, 539b. In addition, his legal expertise and apparent hostility towards Laudian prelacy suggest that most of the six committees where ‘Mr Coke’ was nominated were in fact Thomas’s appointments. Committees to investigate and prepare charges against the promoters of the new Canons – notably Archbishop Laud – and to examine the alleged misdemeanours of Leicestershire’s lord and deputy lieutenants can be assigned to him with some confidence.31CJ vii. 48a, 50b, 51a, 52a, 164a, 314a.

Coke’s contributions to debate confirm his commitment to reforming the perceived abuses of the personal rule and punishing their authors. Thus on 11 November 1640, he denounced secretary of state Sir Francis Windebanke* for frustrating legal proceedings against several Catholic priests, including Coke’s own attempt to prosecute one of the Gunpowder plotters.32Procs. LP i. 98, 101, 102, 105, 107. Windebanke was forced to withdraw from the House as a result of such allegations, earning Coke not only ‘much applause and commendation ...[as] the man that hath overthrown the secretary’, but also the resentment of the court.33HMC Cowper, ii. 264-5, 265; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 342. At a meeting of the committee of the whole House for religion on 25 November, Coke accused the members of the 1640 Convocation of praemunire and ‘urged with much earnestness’ that action be taken against the new Canons and the et cetera oath as ‘contrary to all law’. It was apparently at his prompting that the House, on 26 November, resumed its debate on the new Canons and the clerical benevolence to assist the king against the Scottish Covenanters.34CJ ii. 37a; Add. 11045, f. 144. He scored another hit against the architects of the personal rule when, on 8 March 1641, he forced his father’s successor as secretary of state, Sir Henry Vane I, to withdraw from the committee against monopolies on the grounds of a conflict of interest.35Two Diaries of Long Parl. 17, 56. Coke’s interventions against Windebanke and Vane I were expressions not only of his reformist zeal but also of his desire to divert the House’s scrutiny and condemnation of royal counsellers away from his father.36HMC Cowper, ii. 263-4, 264-5. Similarly, the fact that he voted against the April 1641 bill for the attainder of the earl of Strafford (Thomas Wentworth†), can be explained partly with reference to his father’s close friendship with the earl.37Proc. LP iv. 51. Coke apparently had no qualms about taking the Protestation, on 3 May.38CJ ii. 133b. But his support for the assault upon personal monarchy was evidently beginning to wane by the summer, for on 11 June, in a debate on a bill for the abolition of episcopacy, he ‘spoke very earnestly for the bishops and said that we might by the same argument take away monarchy as we would take away episcopacy’ – a comment for which he was rebuked by the godly Nathaniel Fiennes I.39Procs. LP v. 94, 99.

Either Coke did not attend the House on a regular basis during the summer of 1641 or he sought appointment to very few committees and was largely content to remain silent during debate. Shortly after the House re-assembled (following the autumn recess) on 20 October, he questioned a motion by John Pym for the punishment of a parish constable for disobeying the order of the Recess Committee* against Laudian church innovations. Coke doubted ‘whether by law the House could inflict such a punishment’, which Pym, in response, ‘conceived did detract from the power of the House and was an impediment to the intended reformation...and he did conceive that the gentleman that moved [i.e. Coke] deserved to be imprisoned’. Other Members proposed even harsher punishments. But Sir John Strangways, Orlando Bridgeman and presumably other members of the incipient royalist interest in the Commons, denied that it was an offence to inform Parliament as to the extent of its legal authority, ‘and after much debate ... Coke was so approved of that the question [of his punishment] was let alone’.40HMC Cowper, ii. 293-4.

Coke landed in even deeper trouble with Pym and his allies on 7 December 1641, when he criticised a bill that Sir Arthur Hesilrige introduced that day for placing the kingdom’s militia forces in the hands of leading members of the parliamentary ‘junto’. Coke considered this denial of the king’s control over the militia to be conducive to a state of ‘absolute tyranny’ and worse than a bill which he claimed had been introduced against the royal prerogative in Richard II’s reign and for which its sponsor had been condemned as a traitor. In fact, as the parliamentary diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes discovered and informed the House, Coke had mis-cited this precedent, for the fourteenth-century bill had been directed against the ‘exorbitancies of the prelates’ not the king, and its sponsor had been cleared by Parliament. For these errors of citation, Coke was formally admonished by the Speaker and ordered to take care for the future ‘how he did allege or apply precedents in this House’.41CJ ii. 334b; D’Ewes (C), 246-8; Verney, Notes, 132; HMC Cowper, ii. 296. Coke’s reaction to the ‘tumults’ at Westminster later in December reveal where his political sympathies lay in the increasingly violent struggle between king and Parliament:

Here hath been the saddest and most tumultuous Christmas that in all my life I ever yet knew. This sickness that God hath been pleased to lay upon me I think hath been a great blessing to me to keep from out of their [Parliament’s] company. The mechanic citizens and apprentices have daily flocked by thousands during these holidays to Westminster to the Parliament, offering very uncivil affronts not only to the bishops’ persons, but even to the king himself, as they passed by his house.42HMC Cowper, ii. 302.

‘There is both will and power for their [Parliament’s] opposition’, he informed his father on 10 January 1642, ‘but I hope God will be pleased to send peace and quietness amongst us, and to divert all rash and preposterous counsels’.43HMC Cowper, ii. 303. By March, however, having attended the midland assizes, Coke was unsure whether to return to Westminster – as he wrote to his father from Nottingham:

I am yet uncertain how I shall dispose of myself after the circuit [is] ended. Mine own affairs and friends call me back into Derbyshire, the affairs of the commonwealth call me to London or some other place [the royal court?]. I fear that matters grow so fast to a high period that before the end of the circuit, London will scarce be a safe place of abode.44HMC Cowper, ii. 309-10.

Nevertheless, he did return to Westminster and was named to a committee set up on 23 April to consider the proceedings against Sir Edward Herbert*, the attorney-general.45CJ ii. 539b. But this would be his last parliamentary appointment.

On 2 September 1642, the Commons suspended Coke and other suspected royalists from sitting until the cause of their absence from the House had been investigated.46CJ ii. 750a. In mid-November, the House went one step further and summoned him to Westminster under guard to answer for his negligence of its proceedings.47CJ ii. 845b. When his case was reported to the House on 9 December it was objected that he had delivered a loyal address to the king when the court had visited Leicester during the summer. But understanding that it was Coke’s desire to resume his seat, the Commons voted, upon the question, to re-admit him to the House.48CJ ii. 882a; Harl. 164, f. 245. In January 1643, he was listed among those Parliament-men who consistently voted for peace.49An Honest Letter to a Doubtfull Friend (1643), sig. A2v (E.87.4). But this constitutes the only evidence that he took advantage of the 9 December order, and it is contradicted by an Commons order of 4 February that he be sent for as a delinquent ‘for his neglect and contempt in not appearing upon the summons of the House’.50CJ ii. 955a, 966a. In September 1643, the Commons again summoned him to attend its service, this time on pain of sequestration.51CJ iii. 256b. But by November, when he replaced Bridgeman as solicitor-general to the prince of Wales, Coke had thrown in his lot with the king’s party, and thus he obeyed Charles’s proclamation summoning Parliament-men to attend him at Oxford.52Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 370. On 22 January 1644, the Commons disabled him from sitting for having deserted the service of the House ‘and being in the king’s quarters and adhering to that party’.53CJ iii. 374a. On 27 January, Coke signed the letter of the Oxford Parliament to the parliamentarian commander-in-chief, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, urging him to compose a peace.54Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 574.

Coke’s activities and whereabouts during the rest of the first civil war are unclear. By June 1646 he was in Rouen, France, which was a favoured place of residence for exiled royalists, but how long he stayed there and why is not known.55CCSP i. 321. In 1647 or early 1648, he petitioned the parliamentary committee at Gloucester to compound for his delinquency, and in August 1648, the Committee for Compounding* set his fine at £500 for having deserted Parliament and joined the king at Oxford.56SP23/219, p. 777; CCAM 742; CCC 1844. Pardoned by ordinance on 12 August, he was nominated by the king, and accepted by Parliament, as part of Charles’s legal team at the treaty of Newport.57CJ v. 666b, 668b, 694b; LJ x. 435b, 474b, 484b. As a result of his attendance upon the king at Newport he seems to have been drawn closely, perhaps for the first time, into royalist counsels.58HMC Portland, i. 592-4. In February 1649, the Committee for Advance of Money* ordered that Coke be taken into custody for non-payment of his fine, but he evaded the authorities, and in August he returned to France, where he attended Charles II at the royal court at St Germain. He was part of the legal team that the king took to royalist-held Jersey in September to advise the privy council in its negotiations for a royal alliance with the Scottish Covenanters.59CCAM 742; Charles the Second and Scotland in 1650 ed. S. R. Gardiner (Scottish Hist. Soc. xvii), 154; Add. 15750, ff. 39, 39v.

Having then accompanied the court to Breda, in Holland (where he was involved in royal negotiations with the Prince of Orange), Coke returned to England in June 1650, with instructions from the king to coordinate a series of royalist and Presbyterian uprisings intended to coincide with a Scottish invasion. Coke travelled extensively throughout England in pursuit of this objective, but then in August, having learnt of his elder brother’s death in France, he obtained permission from the council of state to come to London to compound for the family estate that he had inherited.60HMC Portland, i. 576-92, 594-604; Mems. of the Great Civil War ed. Cary ii. 418; CCSP ii. 73; Charles the Second and Scotland ed. Gardiner, 132-3, 154, 155; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 282, 517; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 20, 36-40. The Committee for Compounding set his new composition fine at a third, which was calculated to be worth £2,200 – one of the largest fines imposed on any Derbyshire royalist.61SP23/219, pp. 777-8, 785; CCC 1844; Coke, Trusley, 68. He had little time to enjoy his inheritance, however, for in March 1651 one of his fellow royalist conspirators, Isaac Birkenhead, informed on him to the authorities, and he was apprehended and committed to the Tower. Faced with the prospect of execution for high treason, he managed to save his life only by revealing all he knew about the king’s counsels and royalist plotting.62CJ vi. 550b-551a, 555a, 579b-580a; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 93, 94, 97, 98, 119, 122, 137, 222, 523; HMC Portland, i. 576-92, 594-604; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 46-7. On learning of Coke’s beytrayal, Sir Edward Nicholas† pronounced him a ‘perfect and prudent Presbyterian’. But Sir Edward Hyde* insisted that Coke was ‘as far from loving the Presbytery as you or I’ and expressed the hope that he had made a less extensive confession than was reported.63Nicholas Pprs. i. 240-1; CCSP ii. 101. In fact, Coke’s voluminous disclosures ensured that ‘the king’s business and friends in England’ were ‘totally ruined’ for the duration of the Rump, and his name became a royalist byword for treachery.64CJ vi. 604a; Nicholas Pprs. i. 234, 237, 240-1; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 47-8, 62, 318. In the summer of 1652, the Rump voted to include Coke’s estate in a bill for the sale of property forfeited for treason.65CJ vii. 144a, 157a, 159b; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 303. He was not released from prison until some point in the second half of 1653.66CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 4, 65; CCC 2777.

Coke died in London, reportedly of a fever, in the summer of 1656 and was buried at Melbourne on 23 August.67CCSP iii. 168; Coke, Trusley, 67, 68. No will is recorded. Hyde mourned his passing, insisting that Coke had been genuine in his allegiance to the king and a man of ‘very great parts’.68CCSP iii. 168. Coke’s son, John, who was only three years old when he succeeded his father, sat for Derby in 1685 and 1689, and his grandson was returned for Derbyshire in five Parliaments under William and Anne.69HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘John Coke II’; HP Commons 1690-1715, ‘Thomas Coke’.