Edward Coke, 7th Earl of Leicester

Edward Douglas Coke, 7th Earl of Leicester, CBE, DL (6 May 1936 – 25 April 2015), styled Viscount Coke between 1976 and 1994, was an English nobleman. The Earl of Leicester was one of Norfolk's leading figures and played a key role in preserving and modernising the Holkham Estate over the last 40 years.

Lord Leicester was the son of Anthony Coke, 6th Earl of Leicester, and Moyra Joan Crossley, Countess of Leicester. Born in 1936 in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where his father had settled as a young man, he spent much of his childhood on a remote farm in South Africa. His grandfather, a younger son of the 3rd Earl of Leicester, had been killed at Gallipoli a week after providing covering fire for the first troop landings, which took place a hundred years to the day before his grandson's death.

By the 1960s it was clear that Edward Coke's father was next in line to succeed to the Holkham estate, and that he was himself the next heir. In 1965, at the age of 26, Coke came to England and settled in the Holkham area in order to take up farming and familiarise himself with the estate.

By early 1973 Coke had taken over the management of the estate, which had become severely in need of improvement. Of the 300 houses on the estate, only around thirty had bathrooms, the Hall was still heated by open fires, and, as he later said, the Park Farm was possibly the only loss-making farm in the country. This was the start of a lifelong project to modernise farming, the estate's buildings, and the Hall, to ensure a viable legacy for future generations. In 1996 he won the Laurent Perrier Award for Conservation, specifically recognising outstanding conservation work carried out to ensure the sustainability of the grey partridge population.

In 1976, following the death of the 5th Earl of Leicester and the decision of his father, the 6th Earl of Leicester, to go on living in South Africa, as Viscount Coke he took over full responsibility for the management and leadership of the Holkham Estate. Upon the death of his father in 1994, he became the 7th Earl of Leicester.

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