Edward Coke #2: (His Teaching)

This podcast discusses the importance of returning to the undiluted equity of God's law as a means of protection against the globalist threat of the New World Order. It explores the origins and authority of common law, highlighting that it is not primarily derived from biblical law. Edward Cook, a champion of common law, played a significant role in shaping it. The podcast also discusses the Petition of Right, which was based on common law and aimed to limit the powers of the king. Parliament claimed supremacy over the king in certain rights, such as taxation and due process, but the king retained the power to convene Parliament, allowing him to continue his tyrannical ways. Ultimately, this led to the English Revolution and the execution of Charles I. Welcome everybody to GreatBibleReset.com. This is the podcast which teaches that a return to the undiluted equity of the law of God, which is summarized in Exodus 20-24, the Mosaic Covenant, is our only hope for deliverance from the New World Order globalist threat that is staring us in the face today. The name Edward Cook is almost synonymous with the concept of the common law, so we are seeking to answer the question in this session, what is the common law? Where did it come from, and to what extent, if any, does it incorporate or derive its authority from biblical law? In a nutshell, the answer is very little. But let's get into it. Let's take a look at it. Yesterday we learned that Edward Cook was the champion of the common law in the seventeenth century, the 1600s. This had been derived by grants of favor or privilege which were wrested or wrestled from one or another of the European Christian tyrant kings who ruled over the now secularized civil government following the papal revolution. For example, the rights of Magna Carta were based on coerced concessions from King John under the law of the land, and not on biblical principle or biblical authority. There is no reference to the Bible. Henry II was preceded by the Christian tyrants Robert Gussard and Roger II of Sicily, brothers of Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria in southern Italy. These were among the eleven sons of a petty Norman baron named Tancred de Hauteville, who sailed south from Normandy through the pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar to invade and establish themselves as dictators of Sicily, or tyrants of Sicily, as they were known. Roger II was followed by other Christian strongmen in this mold, including notably Henry II, the father of English common law, Philip II of France, and Frederick II of Germany over an approximately 150-year period, one after the other, basing their authority primarily on an oath of fealty to centralized feudal custom, not on biblical law. The Norsemen who had settled in the western part of the Frankish Empire in the early nine hundreds and absorbed Frankish feudal custom carried it with them to England in 1066 and a little bit earlier to Sicily and southern Italy in the 1050s. Feudal law was secular law, with God's law left in the philosophical dust. In addition, Cook had a major hand in drafting the Virginia Charter, sealed in 1606. This contained the rights of Englishmen, most of which were secured by a Magna Carta. These crept into other colonial charters, including the Massachusetts Body of Liberties. The Americans relied heavily on Cook and, by extension, Blackstone's commentaries written in 1765. These gave legal justification for their revolt against George III, but they ignored the great English jurists at those points that they found inconvenient. For example, one was the theory that Parliament was omnipotent. Here they felt that Cook had merely transferred absolute power from one tyrant, the king, to another potential tyrant, the Parliament. But again, no biblical foundation. Cook was operating in the context of an unbiblical union or relationship of church and state and an immature tyrannical king, but one well-educated by the reformed George Buchanan, ironically. He was also up against a tyrannical theory of divine right. The Church of England, or Anglican Church, was established so bishops were paid agents of the king. Elizabeth I had set up a supreme church court called the High Commission. It was like a Protestant Inquisition, trying heresies, schisms, and enormities. Cook, at much personal risk, focused on the word enormities. He used his common law courts to overturn High Commission rulings that he didn't think were enormous. In the process, he expanded, defined, and updated the common law of England. He often butted heads with the sycophantic Francis Bacon, whose only credo was knowledge is power, and the more esoteric that knowledge, the better, as in the Shakespeare plays. So what was his petition of right anyway, and what historical circumstances led up to it? Did Charles I have any biblical basis for claiming his royal prerogatives? Things got off to a rocky start when Charles succeeded to the throne in 1625 at the death of his father, James I, and immediately married the French Catholic princess Henrietta Maria. He was committed to the divine right of kings, the doctrine which provoked continual conflict with Parliament, especially with his ill-advised military forays into France and Spain that ended in disaster. These included Charles' commitments to the Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648, of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The resultant heavy-handed schemes to raise taxes provoked great bitterness. In 1637, his attempt to impose the Anglican liturgy on Scottish churches led to an unsuccessful invasion of Scotland. In 1641, thousands of English citizens were massacred in an uprising in Ireland. The Parliament refused to provide funds for an army, fearing that it would be turned against them. When Charles attempted to arrest the Parliamentary leaders, the English Revolution erupted, and Charles' army of Cavaliers was decisively defeated in 1646. Charles had no biblical basis for claiming his royal prerogative because the Bible, Deuteronomy 17 and elsewhere, teaches unequivocally that the king is under law, not above the law. He is instructed specifically to write down and read his own copy of the law of God every day of his life, in order that his heart may not be lifted up above his countrymen. And he may in fact, the king may in fact, be overridden by a senate of advisors known as the Sanhedrin, or which came to be known as the Sanhedrin, as was the case when Jonathan was spared by the people from King Saul, his father's foolish decree during a war against the Philistines. Well, again, the basic question is, is the petition of right based on common law or biblical law? And what is the difference? How does the basic authority under common law differ from that under biblical law? Well, the petition of right is based primarily on common law. According to M.P. Mack, quote, the common law was entering one of its strongest hours as a bulwark of the parliamentary party in the struggle against the king that led to the petition of right in 1628, end of quote. Common law is judge-made law that has accumulated in England over many centuries. Precedent is added to precedent with no touchstone in Bible law to keep it in line, and it created an unwieldy collection that was beyond the capacity of most men to comprehend. Now, Cooke, Edward Cooke, was the master of it, at least the best master of it available in England. Many Christians claim that the common law traced its ancestry back to Bible law codes laid by Alfred the Great, but the biblical foundation had long since been eviscerated by the authority of human reason and common sense following the papal revolution and the parsing of Justinian's Roman law code by the schoolmen of the universities. Only a residue of biblical law survived, if that. The common law had been loosed from its biblical moorings starting with the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and was adrift on a sea of rationalism. And this had been initiated by St. Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that we talked about earlier. This led to the conflict between Charles I and Parliament over acceptance of the Petition of Right. When the Petition of Right was submitted to the King, it was returned unsigned, accompanied by pleasantries and empty words of assent. According to John Fiske, in the beginnings of New England, quote, for a moment the House was overcome with despair, deprived of all constitutional methods of redress. They suddenly saw yawning before them the direful alternative, slavery or civil war. Then did grim Mr. Prynne and Sir Edward Cook mingle their words with sobs, while there were few dry eyes in the House. Presently they found their voices, and used them in a way that wrung from the startled King his formal assent to the Petition of Right. What specific right did Parliament claim in the Petition of Right that would give it supremacy over the King, and what right did the King retain that effectually nullified that right? Without a doubt, the power to tax is the power to destroy, and Charles I had been exercising that power against the English with little mercy to finance his foreign military expeditions, notably the Thirty Years' War, which was brutal. He who holds the power to tax holds the power to control another's property, and ultimately his liberty. The right to own and control property is the evidence of political liberty, and when property is attacked through unbiblical taxation, liberty disappears. The right not addressed by the Petition of Right that enabled Charles to continue his tyrannical ways was the power for Parliament to convene itself, which was denied, or was ignored. In 1628, however, Charles was forced to acquiesce to the Petition of Right in exchange for war funds, but in 1629 he dismissed Parliament and ruled alone for eleven years. During this period, he resumed his policies of oppressive taxation. Finally, in 1640, he was forced to reconvene Parliament to raise money for war funds in an army to invade Scotland. The so-called Long Parliament refused the King's demands and assumed the power not to be dissolved without its own permission, and from that point things were all downhill for Charles I, leading to his execution by Parliament under Cromwell. What other rights does Parliament declare to be violated by the King in the Petition of Rights? Well, in addition to taxation without representation, Charles was requiring forced loans from members of the English aristocracy with threat of prison for failure to comply. Englishmen were subject to arbitrary arrest and denied due process of law, such as failure to provide the right of habeas corpus. The denial of habeas corpus, which means literally bring forth the body, meant that a prisoner could languish in jail for long periods without a formal charge brought against him, such as we see today with the January 6th prisoners today. Parliament had also imposed martial law on the countryside, with the intended suspension of property rights, including forced billeting of troops in civilian homes. So why all this expensive violence? Well, as a zealous Catholic sympathizer, Charles was eager for a leading role in the Thirty Years' War in the Counter-Reformation, as we noted earlier, which again ran from 1618 to 1648, thirty years, to subdue the Protestant uprising of the Reformation under a biblical militia system of 1 Chronicles 27, Old Testament. Each military-aged man serves one month a year at his own expense for police service and defensive wars only. So how did the Petition of Rights deal with the issue of taxation? Who has the ultimate authority on tax issues under the Petition? Under the Petition of Rights, no person should be compelled to make any loans to the king that gives his will, nor should he be compelled to contribute to any tax, tollage, aid, or other like charge not set by common consent in Parliament. It has been well said that the power to tax is the power to destroy. Thus, the Petition of Rights removed this powerful privilege from the arbitrary will of the king, transferred it to the people's representatives in Parliament, and thus was established in English law the principle of no taxation without representation, which became the rallying cry of the American Revolution in the following century. However, Parliament is not granted any such arbitrary power of taxation by the Bible, which was one of the penalties that God imposes for rejecting or ignoring His law, a gradual descent into tyranny such as we are experiencing today. We are not innocent victims of the New World Order or the globalists. We need to repent before God of this neglect of His law. I really appreciate your attention today. Please like, comment, and subscribe at GreatBibleReset.com and get your free copy of Keys to the Classics at KingswayClassicalAcademy.com.