Inedited Letter from Mr. Chamberlain to Sir D. Carleton, State Paper Office.
Lady Purbeck, meantime, remained under the custody of Alderman Barkham; no friends came forward to stand bail for her; neither Lady Hatton nor her father supplied her with money. She sent to Buckingham for means to fee her council;[242] nor does the aid appear to have been refused; neither can any blame attach to the Duke for his endeavours to free a brother who was now incapable of acting for himself,--as appears fully from Lord Anglesea, Christopher Villiers being the prosecutor--from a woman who, whatever may have been the extenuation of her faults, was living audaciously in a state of infamy. Neither can we wonder at his afterwards requesting Prince Charles to insist on his leaving the Court, where she had set so fearful an example.
Lady Purbeck was driven away, however, for another reason; although a divorce was not obtained, she was sentenced by the High Commission to stand in the Savoy church in a white sheet. She fled, in the disguise of a page, into the country; and in 1634 was again domiciled in the house of her father, who at least had human sympathies, in which his wife had proved herself utterly wanting. Coke, in his old age, received and pardoned the much humiliated daughter. “She continued,” says Lord Campbell, “to watch piously over him till his death.”[243] Nor could the task have been otherwise than consolatory. An accident was the proximate cause of the breaking up of that wonderful frame that had never known rest. Coke had, in his own mind, deserved well of the world; he was wont to give thanks that he had never given his body to physic, nor his heart to cruelty, nor his hand to corruption.[244] When his friends sent him three doctors to benefit his health, he told them he had never taken physic since he was born, and would not now begin; that he had now upon him “a disease which all the drugs of Asia, nor the gold of Africa, nor the doctors of Europe could not cure, old age.” Notwithstanding Coke’s great practice, he was at one time in debt to the extent of 60,000_l._, owing, it was said, to his sons. In his will he left injunctions that he should be buried without pomp in Littleshall church, and a monument be erected for him there; and that his books might be preserved for his posterity.[245]