COKE, Sir John (c.1607-1650), of Melbourne Hall, Derbys.

The Cokes had settled near Trusley, in south Derbyshire, by the end of the fourteenth century.22Coke, Trusley, 3-4; M. Young, Servility and Service: the Life and Work of Sir John Coke, 6-7. Coke’s father, a courtier bureaucrat, represented Warwick, the Cornish borough of St Germans and Cambridge University in the 1620s Parliaments.23HP Commons 1604-29, ‘John Coke’. In 1624 he was knighted, and the following year he was appointed secretary of state – possibly on the recommendation of George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham – a post that he retained until 1640, when he was replaced by Sir Henry Vane I*.24Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘John Coke’. Sir John used the profits of court office to build up an estate worth approximately £20,000 and with an annual rental value of at least £1,500, making him one of Derbyshire’s wealthiest gentlemen. The rectory manor of Melbourne, with Melbourne Hall, near Trusley, which he purchased in 1628, became the family’s principal residence.25VCH Derbys. ii. 135; HMC Cowper, i. 361; Young, Coke, 224-7; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir John Coke’.

John Coke junior accompanied his father on the royal progress to Scotland in 1633 and was knighted at Innerwick, near Edinburgh, in July.26Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 201; HMC Cowper, ii. 37; Young, Coke, 209. Nine days later he married a wealthy widow who brought with her £1,000 in ready money and an estate worth £500 a year, with the prospect of another £200 a year on her parents’ death.27HMC Cowper, ii. 13. Eager to establish his own household, Coke took up residence at Melbourne Hall in 1635 – having lived mostly with his in-laws since his marriage – and assumed responsibility for managing the family estates.28HMC Cowper, ii. 34, 39, 64, 68-9, 78, 83, 115, 118, 163, 250; Young, Coke, 226. He did not stand for election to the Short Parliament, but contented himself with assisting his younger brother Thomas in securing a seat at Leicester.29Infra, ‘Thomas Coke’; HMC Cowper, ii. 251, 252. It is not known whether he gave his support, as requested, to Sir John Harpur in his unsuccessful bid for one of the Derbyshire county places.30Supra, ‘Derbyshire’; HMC Cowper, ii. 246.

In the elections to the Long Parliament, that autumn, Coke himself stood as a candidate for the county, possibly in partnership with Sir John Curzon*. The Coke family friend Thomas Withring* was under the impression that Coke’s return was a foregone conclusion.31HMC Cowper, ii. 262. Nevertheless, the care that Coke took to mobilise his supporters among the electorate suggests that the county places were contested and therefore that there was at least one other candidate in the running besides Curzon. Coke’s accounts reveal that he spent almost £260 in lodging and feeding 1,147 of the freeholders at Derby both before and after the election.32Supra, ‘Derbyshire’; HMC Cowper, iii. 138-41. Writing to his father on 15 November, he expressed the hope that ‘no question will be made concerning my election’.33HMC Cowper, ii. 263.

Coke was named to only a dozen committees before the outbreak of civil war in 1642 and contributed infrequently to debate.34CJ ii. 45b, 54b, 91a, 101a, 105b, 151b, 191b, 327b, 472a, 589a, 637a, 638b. Nevertheless, he took a keen interest in the proceedings of the Long Parliament and wrote regularly to his father concerning affairs at Westminster.35HMC Cowper, ii. 263, 341; Coke, Trusley, 64. His appointment to committees for settling a preaching ministry (19 Dec. 1640), to examine the crown’s alleged breaches of parliamentary privilege in 1628-9 (23 Feb. 1641) and to committees for suppressing pluralism and prelacy (10, 16 Mar.), suggests that he was sympathetic to some aspects of the campaign to reform the perceived abuses of the Personal Rule.36CJ ii. 54b, 91a, 101a, 105b. This impression is strengthened by his observation in April 1641 that ‘many good bills are preparing in the House of Commons’ and by his conviction that the judgement that the king had obtained in 1637 in favour of Ship Money had been of extremely dangerous consequence.37HMC Cowper, ii. 281, 315. Hints in his correspondence also suggest that he was aligned over the winter of 1640-1 with those at Westminster who favoured moderate reform of the episcopate rather than its outright abolition (he would refer in 1642 to the ‘intolerable abuses’ – presumably he meant puritan iconoclasm – that had followed the collapse of episcopal authority).38HMC Cowper, ii. 272, 312. In November 1640, he pledged security for £1,000 towards raising a City loan to help pay the English and Scottish armies in the northern counties.39Procs. LP, i. 229.

Coke and his brother Thomas were particularly concerned during the early months of the Long Parliament to defend the actions of their father as secretary of state.40Infra, ‘Thomas Coke’; HMC Cowper, ii. 264-5, 266-7. In one of his few recorded speeches in the House, on 26 February 1641, Coke incurred the displeasure of Sir John Culpeper and other Members for casting what were regarded as aspersions on Vane I, whom Coke believed was trying to deflect criticism of his own conduct during the Personal Rule on to Coke senior.41Procs. LP, ii. 565-6; HMC Cowper, ii. 264. Like his brother Thomas, he had strong reservations about the attainder of their father’s friend Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford. As he confided to Coke senior, ‘an indifferent man may perchance satisfy himself upon the whole matter that certainly this earl never had any such intentions as to subvert the law’. He was evidently thinking first and foremost of Vane I and his allies among the parliamentary leadership when he opined to his father that if impeaching the earl had been ‘trained into this length by private practice for private men to work out their own ends and preferments thereupon, their ambition may perchance in the end cost them as dear as it hath done the kingdom’. Nevertheless, he feared that sacrificing Strafford would be necessary in order to prevent military intervention by the Scots and London’s ‘discontented citizens’.42HMC Cowper, ii. 278, 279, 280, 281. That he did not join his brother on 21 April in voting against the bill of attainder was, he assured his father, simply because he had been ‘casually away [from the House] that evening, not expecting that vote in the afternoon so near night’. But though he would probably have voted against the bill had he been present, it had been his rule in the House ‘to keep myself from making a party of any side...not considering there was so much danger of disrepute in otioso silentio [idle silence]’.43HMC Cowper, ii. 283. In that summer’s debates and negotiations concerning a new book of rates, he was successful in reducing the imposition on lead, which was, as he noted, ‘a matter of great moment to the miners of the Peak [District]’.44HMC Cowper, ii. 289; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 358-9.

Although Coke kept a very low profile at Westminster from mid-1641, receiving but a single committee appointment between July of that year and March 1642, he seems to have attended his place regularly and was present late in November during the heated debates over the Grand Remonstrance.45CJ ii. 327b. He regarded this document as a work of incendiary propaganda and claimed that its promoters used ‘all art...to keep petitions for episcopacy from being presented to the House, such being preparing in many places’.46HMC Cowper, ii. 295. His verdict on the militia bill that Sir Arthur Hesilrige introduced in December was equally damning: ‘martial law, power of life and death, power to pardon and whatsoever, may erect an absolute tyranny’.47HMC Cowper, ii. 296. In the Commons’ debates in February 1642 concerning the nomination of lords lieutenants in the Militia Ordinance, Coke spoke in favour of William Cavendish, 3rd earl of Devonshire as ‘the fittest man and such as their country [sic] [i.e. Derbyshire] will wholly confide in’. The majority of Commons-men thought otherwise, however, and nominated John Manners*, 8th earl of Rutland as lord lieutenant of Derbyshire.48PJ i. 342. After the Militia Ordinance had passed the Houses in March 1642, Coke declared himself ‘very well contented that the earl of Rutland present not my name for a deputy lieutenant’ – and the earl did not disappoint him.49HMC Cowper, ii. 309, 310.

Coke’s omission from the ranks of Derbyshire’s deputy lieutenants would lend substance to rumours put about by Sir John Curzon that he had been sent for by Parliament ‘as one they durst not trust in the country’. To Coke, this was just another of the ‘thousands of lies that are reported every day’.50HMC Cowper, ii. 315. In May, he secured the services of his father’s friend Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke, in obtaining an order from the Lords allowing his uncle George Coke, bishop of Hereford, to retire to the country after his imprisonment as one of the 12 bishops impeached as guilty of high treason.51HMC Cowper, ii. 315; CCC, 2919. And on 27 May, Coke was appointed to a high-powered committee of both Houses to consider the defence of the kingdom – which was a precursor to the Committee of Safety* established in July.52CJ ii. 589a. During the debate on the king’s Answer to the Nineteen Propositions, on 23 June, he tried to take an even-handed approach, declaring that ‘princes are jealous of their honour and consider it as other princes value it abroad. The honour of Parliament is to settle the peace and welfare of the public’.53Verney, Notes, 181. That same day (23 June), he was named to a committee to draft a reply to the Answer’s preamble, and the next day (24 June), he was among those appointed to prepare a declaration vindicating Parliament’s authority to manage the kingdom’s military resources.54CJ ii. 637a, 638b.

Both sides on the eve of civil war hoped for Coke’s support. Thus he was named to the Derbyshire commission of array in June and appointed by Parliament in August to enforce the Militia Ordinance in the county.55Northants. RO, FH133, unfol.; LJ v. 260b. But as he informed his father in July, he was anxious ‘to be absent if any clashing be either in Derby or Leicestershire betwixt the ordinance and commission of array’. ‘My prayers are for peace and that it come not anywhere to blows.’56HMC Cowper, ii. 319. He evidently used his despatch by Parliament into Derbyshire in August as an excuse to join his father in political retirement at Melbourne Hall.57HMC Cowper, ii. 320, 322.

Coke and his brother Thomas apparently felt constrained to return to London in October 1642, although they were reportedly ‘very much confused’ in their allegiance to Parliament.58HMC Cowper, ii. 324. Late in October, the Commons nominated Coke a deputy lieutenant for Derbyshire, but demanded that he affirm his loyalty to the parliamentary cause before being confirmed in this office.59CJ ii. 828a. Accordingly, on 8 November, the hitherto vacillating and pusillanimous Coke declared his willingness to live and die with Parliament’s commander-in-chief, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, and informed the House that he had sent two horses to be listed in Parliament’s service.60CJ ii. 840a; SP28/131, pt. 3, f. 123. Late in November, he left Westminster for Derbyshire, where Parliament expected him to join with Curzon, Thomas Gell*, Nathaniel Hallowes* and their fellow deputy lieutenants in executing the Militia Ordinance.61HMC Cowper, ii. 326, 327. In mid-December, however, Gell, Hallowes and other Derbyshire deputy lieutenants complained to the Speaker that Coke was more conversant with the county’s leading royalists than he was with them and had ‘absolutely refused’ to help execute the Militia Ordinance, to the great detriment of their authority. ‘He hath been but once with us since he came into the country [sic]’, they claimed,

and then he was frighted away by but desiring him to set his hand to an acquittance for the receipt of a little sum received upon the propositions [for maintaining Essex’s army]... In plain English, he hath done us hurt in the cause, but no good, since he came down. Neither can we conceive otherwise of him but that his heart is against us and with those that oppose us.62Bodl. Nalson II, f. 225.

After this letter was read there was a long debate as to whether Coke should be summoned to the House to answer for himself or whether he should be disabled from sitting altogether.63Harl. 164, f. 264v. In the event, the Commons voted that he sent up to Westminster in safe custody.64CJ ii. 892b-893a. One of Coke senior’s London correspondents informed him early in January 1643 that Coke junior’s return ‘is welcome to many in the House of Commons, where he hath gained much love and respect for his wise and temperate carriage’.65HMC Cowper, ii. 328-9.

Fearful of the ‘misery and confusion’ which would befall the kingdom ‘if by God’s mercy a settlement be not condescended upon very suddenly’, Coke evidently hoped that Parliament peace propositions to the king of early 1643 would prove successful.66HMC Cowper, ii. 329. However, he played no recorded part in drafting the propositions or in securing their passage through the Commons. Indeed, he was named to only four committees during that entire year, of which the first, on 2 March, was to draft a declaration vindicating Parliament from aspersions cast up on its proceedings in one of the king’s proclamations.67CJ ii. 986b; iii. 12a, 78b, 100a. Coke and Curzon were appointed on 1 June to draft a reply to a request from the Derbyshire committee for military supplies and also a letter of their own to encourage the parliamentarian interest in the county.68CJ iii. 111b. But like several other Members associated with the peace interest in the Commons, he required time to consider the vow and covenant – introduced by Pym upon discovery of the Waller plot – before taking the oath, on 8 June.69CJ iii. 118b, 120a. He took the Solemn League and Covenant on 3 October, but again he seems to have required time to satisfy his conscience before doing so.70CJ iii. 262a; Add. 18778, f. 58v.

Coke made no recorded impact upon the Long Parliament’s proceedings between early October 1643 and 15 June 1644, when he granted a month’s leave of absence.71CJ iii. 531a. But having returned to the House by late August, he began to receive committee appointments on a more regular basis and to identify more openly with those at Westminster who favoured ending the war by means of a negotiated settlement – a faction now led by the earl of Essex and his foremost adherents in the two Houses. A number of Coke’s 27 committee appointments between late August 1644 and early 1647 – when he was sent as a parliamentary commissioner to receive custody of the king – and all three of his tellerships during this period suggest his alignment with the Presbyterian, or ‘Essexian’, interest in the Commons. On 29 August 1644, for example, he was named to a committee for preparing a letter to Essex, thanking him for his fidelity to Parliament following his refusal to entertain peace overtures from the king.72CJ iii. 611a. Five days later (3 Sept.), he was appointed to a committee of both Houses – the establishment of which had been keenly opposed by the war party – for reconciling differences between the army commanders and the county committees.73CJ iii. 617a; Harl. 166, f. 112a. His first tellership in the House, on 30 December, saw him partner the leading Essexian, Sir Philip Stapilton, in furtherance of the Presbyterians’ unsuccessful efforts to secure a reprieve for Sir John Hotham*. The winning tellers were the Independent grandees Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire and Oliver Cromwell.74Infra, ‘Sir Philip Stapilton’; CJ iv. 4b.

Coke’s association with the cause of new modelling Parliament’s armies was apparently confined to his appointment on 24 March 1645 to a committee on the Self-Denying Ordinance.75CJ iv. 88a. He seems to have shown more interest in matters relating to the oversight of the excise and the system for taking public accounts.76CJ iv. 107a, 116a, 123b, More revealing still, perhaps, was his nomination in second place to a committee set up on 17 April to draft an ordinance for abolishing the Book of Common Prayer and replacing it with the Presbyterian Directory of Worship. This committee was dominated by Members with a keen interest in godly reform – notably, its probable chairman, Francis Rous.77CJ iv. 114a. Granted another leave of absence on 2 May, Coke had returned to the House by 25 July, when he was named to a committee for advising with the Westminster Assembly concerning the election of elders within the province of London.78CJ iv. 130b, 218a. True to his Presbyterian leanings, he was critical on 21 August of the proposal to recruit the House – a scheme that the Essexians feared would strengthen the Independent interest in the Commons.79Add. 18780, f. 106; D. Underdown, ‘Party management in the recruiter elections, 1645-8’, EHR lxxxiii (1968), 238-9. Five days later, however, in a debate on 26 August concerning the settlement of church government, he revealed a strongly Erastian side to his political character that would not have pleased the Presbyterians’ Scottish allies. Parish presbyteries, he declared, would not be competent judges when it came to deciding who was fit to receive the sacrament. There was ‘greater reformation of manners in the Church of England’, he insisted, ‘than in any church where that discipline [he apparently meant Presbyterianism] is used’, and he asked the rhetorical question ‘Shall not Westminster Hall have a power over them [the clergy] if they do amiss?’ Parliament should retain ultimate authority when it came to punishing ‘scandalous men...and not hang the keys [i.e. ecclesiastical authority] to the girdle to [sic] the clergy’.80Add. 18780, f. 109. On 8 October, he was named to a committee on the ordinance for excluding scandalous and ignorant persons from the sacrament.81CJ iv. 300b. And on 15 October, he partnered another Erastian Presbyterian MP, John Glynne, in a division on whether to give a second reading to a proviso (proposed by William Ashhurst) in this ordinance that would allow a minister, ‘with the consent of the eldership and approbation of the classis’, to exclude persons guilty of ‘notorious sin’ as long as Parliament was informed about the matter. Intended to secure a compromise acceptable to all sides in the House, Ashhurst’s proviso succeeded in splitting its Erastian majority, for all four tellers were opponents of clericalist Presbyterianism. Although Coke and Glynne lost this division, and the proviso was given its second reading, the House then rejected it and stuck to the line that presbyteries could suspend communicants only for offences specified in the ordinance.82Supra, ‘William Ashhurst’; infra, ‘Zouche Tate’; Add. 18780, f. 143v; CJ iv. 308b-309a. That same day (15 Oct.), the Commons voted that Coke be added to the Westminster Assembly in place of the recently deceased William Strode I*.83CJ iv. 309a; LJ vii. 645b. He was granted leave of absence again, on 10 November, and received only one further appointment before mid-April 1646 – to a committee set up on 11 December to investigate the publication of an Independent pamphlet that the Assembly claimed cast a scandal on its proceedings.84CJ iv. 337a, 373a.

Coke’s parliamentary career continued on its Presbyterian-oriented course in 1646. His appointment on 16 April to a committee for examining the Westminster Assembly’s controversial petition to Parliament of 23 March probably owed more to his familiarity with the Assembly than to any Erastian sympathies he may have shared with the committee’s chairmen, Hesilrige and Henry Marten.85CJ iv. 511a. On 2 May, he was a majority teller with the Presbyterian grandee Denzil Holles in favour of allowing the royalist peer Lord Poulett to compound on the Exeter articles.86CJ iv. 529b. He may have been involved, as a committeeman, in the Presbyterians’ efforts that summer to render the Newcastle peace propositions more palatable to the Scots.87CJ iv. 576a. On 11 July, he was named to two committees for discovering those responsible for the proto-Leveller publication, A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens.88CJ iv. 615b, 616a. On the other hand, he avoided nomination to any of the committees that the Commons established that summer to press Parliament’s grievances against the Scots and their army in the northern counties. Having taken further leave of absence, on 17 July, he received several Commons’ orders in August for sending some of Derbyshire’s parliamentarian troops over to Ireland and for disbanding the remainder.89CJ iv. 620a, 633a, 656b. During the autumn, he was named to committees for assessing whether the major-generals represented value for money (the Presbyterians thought they did not), to consider a suitable allowance for the remaining bishops and on an ordinance for the maintenance of the ministry.90Supra, ‘Sir William Brereton’; CJ iv. 689a, 712a, 719b.

Early in January 1647, Coke was appointed to the Presbyterian-dominated commission of both Houses that was sent to Newcastle to take custody of the king from the departing Scots.91CJ v. 43a, 44a; LJ viii. 648b. When Cornet Joyce and his troops arrived at Holdenby early in June to take custody of the king, Coke joined Richard Browne II and John Crewe I in asserting that had they sufficient forces of their own they would uphold the trust that Parliament had reposed in them (as the king’s custodians) with their lives.92Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 517. Confronting Joyce at army headquarters a few days later, Coke and Crewe insisted that ‘he deserved to lose his head for what he had done’.93Clarke Pprs. i. 124. With their role as custodians of the king usurped by the army, Coke, Browne and Crewe requested late in June to be discharged from the committee, but to no avail.94Mems. of the Great Civil War ed. Cary, i. 273. On 6 September, both Houses instructed the commissioners to present the Newcastle Propositions to the king– which he rejected, as he had done the army’s terms for settlement.95CJ v. 293a; LJ ix. 424b. The day after Charles’s flight from Hampton Court on 11 November, Coke and his fellow commissioners received the thanks of the House for their ‘faithful service’, and on 25 November, he was granted leave of absence for six weeks.96CJ v. 357a, 368b.

Coke and Curzon were appointed on 23 December 1647 to expedite the collection of Derbyshire’s assessment quota, but pleading ill health, he obtained leave on 9 February 1648 to go to the continent for eight months.97CJ v. 400b, 459a. His failing health aside, it is likely that the defeat of the Presbyterians in August 1647, and the failure to reach a settlement with the king, had eroded his loyalty to Parliament. By May he had arrived in the vicinity of Caen in northern France, prompting Sir Richard Browne to request his fellow royalist exile, secretary of state Sir Edward Nicholas†, to present his services to Coke and to congratulate him ‘that he is come out of Sodom’.98Add. 78194, f. 74. By early 1650 he had reached Geneva.99HMC 7th Rep. 457.

Coke died – apparently intestate and greatly in debt – in Paris in about July 1650 and was succeeded by his brother Thomas.100Infra, ‘Thomas Coke’; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 282; CCC 1845. His date and place of burial are not known. His nephew, Thomas’s eldest son, sat for Derby in 1685 and 1689.101HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘John Coke II’.