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Edward Coke had been chief justice of the common pleas since 1605, and was an impassioned exponent of English common law. James had no real conception of common law, having been educated in the very different jurisprudence of Scotland. Coke believed, for example, that both sovereign and subject were accountable to a body of ancient law that had been conceived in practice and clarified by usage; it represented immemorial general custom, but it was also a law of reason. This was not, however, the king’s opinion. He had already firmly stated that ‘the king is above the law, as both the author and the giver of strength thereto’. From this it could be construed that the king possessed an arbitrary authority. James alleged, for example, that he could decide cases in person. Coke demurred: a case could only be judged in a lawcourt. Coke’s own report tells the story of bad blood.
     
    James: I thought the law was founded on reason. I and others have reason as well as the judges.
    Coke: Although, sir, you have great endowments of nature, yet you are not learned in the laws of England. Causes are not to be decided by natural reason but by the artificial reason and judgment of law.
    More debate followed.
     
    James: So then I am under the law? It is treason to affirm that!
    Coke: Bracton has said that the king should not be under man but under God and the law.
    An observer noted that ‘his majesty fell in that high indignation as the like was never known in him, looking and speaking fiercely with bended fist, offering to strike him, which the Lord Coke perceiving fell flat on all fours…’ Coke might yield and beg for mercy, but over succeeding years the debate between the Crown and the law continued with ever greater volume and seriousness.
    The manoeuvres of the court were never still. The favourite, now Sir Robert Carr, needed land to complement his title. By Carr’s great good fortune Sir Walter Raleigh, still incarcerated, had forfeited his interest in the manor of Sherborne; he thought that he had conveyed it to his son, but the king’s council believed otherwise. It was given to the favourite. Lady Raleigh, accompanied by her two sons, was admitted into the king’s presence where she threw herself at his feet. ‘I maun have the land’ was his only reply. ‘I maun have it for Carr.’ This is the true voice of the king.

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    The beacons
     
    In 1605 one of the king’s ‘learned counsel’ presented him with a treatise that summoned up the spirit of a new age. Francis Bacon’s ‘Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning Divine and Human’ is better known to posterity as The Advancement of Learning; it can justifiably be said to have changed the terms of human understanding and the nature of knowledge. Bacon had been a royal servant for some years under the patronage of his uncle, Lord Burghley, and had been first enlisted in the court of Elizabeth. But the advent of a new king promised more tangible rewards and, soon after the accession, Bacon provided James with texts of advice on such matters as the union of Scotland with England and ecclesiastical polity.
    Yet The Advancement of Learning was a work in quite another key, and one that helped to create the climate of scientific rationalism that characterized the entire seventeenth century. Bacon had first to clear away the clutter of inherited knowledge. In the early pages of the treatise ‘the first distemper of learning’ is denounced as that by which ‘men study words and not matter’. Yet words, and not matter, had been the foundation of traditional learning for innumerable centuries, whether in the rhetorical humanism of the Renaissance or in the scholastic theology of the Middle Ages. Bacon declared, however, that ‘men have withdrawn themselves too much from the contemplation of nature, and the observations of experience, and have tumbled up and down in their own reasons and conceits’. It was time to look at the world.
    He further observed