ollowed, Coke retired
into private life and lived at Stoke Pogis, where he is supposed to
have encouraged his neighbour, Hampden, in his plots against the
Court.

In the year 1632 Lady Purbeck left Sir Robert Howard to live with and
take care of her father. She probably went to him on hearing that he
had been seriously hurt by a fall from his horse. In his diary[84]
Coke thus describes this accident: "The 3rd of May, 1632, riding in
the morning in Stoke, between eight and nine o'clock to take the air,
my horse under me had a strange stumble backwards and fell upon me
(being above eighty years old) where my head lighted near to sharp
stubbles, and the heavy horse upon me." He declares that he suffered
"no hurt at all;" but, as a matter of fact, he received an internal
injury.

Lord Campbell says that, from this time "his only domestic solace
was the company of his daughter, Lady Purbeck, whom he had
forgiven,--probably from a consciousness that her errors might be
ascribed to his utter disregard of her inclinations when he concerted
her marriage. She continued piously to watch over him till his death."

Lady Elizabeth was never reconciled to her husband. On the contrary,
she seems to have been very anxiously awaiting his death in order to
take possession of Stoke Pogis. Garrard, in a letter[85] to Lord
Deputy Strafford written in 1633, says: "Sir Edward Coke was said to
be dead, all one morning in Westminster Hall, this term, insomuch that
his wife got her brother, Lord Wimbledon, to post with her to Stoke,
to get possession of that place; but beyond Colebrook they met with
one of his physicians coming from him, who told her of his much
amendment, which made them also return to London; some distemper he
had fallen into for want of sleep, but is now well again." Lady
Elizabeth's keen disappointment may be readily imagined.

It is not likely that the couple of years spent by Lady Purbeck with
her father can have been very pleasant ones. He was bad-tempered,
ill-mannered, cantankerous and narrow-minded, and he must also have
been a dull companion; for beyond legal literature he had read but
little. Lord Campbell says: "He shunned the society of" his
contemporaries, "Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, as of _vagrants_ who
ought to be set in the stocks, or whipped from tithing to tithing."

Nor can Lady Purbeck have found him a very tractable patient. He had
no faith in either physicians or physic. Mead wrote[86]to Sir Martin