The Lion and the Throne
by Catherine Drinker Bowen
Summary
The Lion and the Throne is the life and times of Sir Edward Coke, the Elizabethan and Jacobean jurist who did more than any other single person to establish that the law stands above the king. Catherine Drinker Bowen follows Coke from Norfolk through his rise as Elizabeth's Attorney General, where he prosecuted Essex and Raleigh with a brutality the book does not excuse, to the great turn of his life: as Chief Justice under James I he began telling the crown no. The confrontations Bowen stages are the founding scenes of constitutional government. Coke facing James's claim to judge cases himself with the answer that the king is under God and the law; Coke dismissed from the bench and returning to Parliament in old age to force through the Petition of Right of 1628, the document that carried his doctrine into the English constitution and on to America. Bowen wrote biography for general readers, without footnotes but from deep research in the sources, and she had a dramatist's instinct for the courtroom and the council chamber; her Coke is vain, harsh, learned beyond anyone in England, and magnificent in exactly the crises that matter. The book was a Book of the Month Club selection and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1958, along with the Phillips Prize in jurisprudence from the American Philosophical Society. American lawyers had particular reason to read it: Coke's Institutes trained the revolutionary generation, and the principles Bowen dramatizes, due process, habeas corpus, no taxation without consent, run straight into the American Bill of Rights.
Historical Context & Significance
Bowen published the book in 1957, when memories of McCarthyism gave a biography about the rule of law obvious contemporary force, and readers took the point. She came to Coke after celebrated lives of Justice Holmes and John Adams, and she was among the most read biographers in America despite academic sniffing at her novelistic technique. The 1958 National Book Award answered the sniffing. Her Philadelphia family was itself distinguished, and she wrote about the craft of biography in books that are still assigned. The Lion and the Throne remains the standard popular life of Coke, constitutional historians still send general readers to it first, and law schools have kept it on reading lists as the most painless route into the origins of the common law.