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took to preaching and praying within families and larger gatherings. With their constant studies of the bible they evolved new views which soon led to great diversities of opinion and the formation of new

sects.

CHAPTER VII

Sir Thomas Wentworth. A Leader of the Country Party. Passes over to the Court. Made Lord Deputy of Ireland. His Scheme of "Thorough." His Administration of Ireland. His wholesale Confiscations. His Treatment of Lord Mountnorris and Lord Loftus.

THOMAS

WENTWORTH, born on April 13, 1593, came of an old family in Yorkshire. When he was no older than eighteen he married the Lady Margaret, eldest daughter of the Earl of Cumberland. Three years after, by the death of his father, he came into possession of the estate of Wentworth-Woodhouse, which was worth £6000 a year. His wife died after eleven years wedlock, and eighteen months after, Wentworth married Arabella Holles, younger daughter of the Earl of Clare, and sister of Denzil Holles, a bold opponent of the king in parliament. She was "a lady exceedingly comely and beautiful, and yet much more beautiful in the endowments of her mind." She died in 1631, and the year after, when he became the king's deputy for Ireland, he was privately married to a lady of less exalted rank. Eager for power, Wentworth had sought to ingratiate himself with the Duke of Buckingham, who would not suffer any one to gain favour with the king save through himself. There is still extant a letter from Wentworth to Lord Conway dated January 20,

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1625-26,1 in which he solicits Conway's good offices with the favourite to be made president of the north. Failing in this application, Wentworth now turned against Buckingham. He sat in the parliament of 1625 as knight of the shire for Yorkshire.

Fearing his opposition in the parliament of 1626, the court got him pricked as Sheriff of Yorkshire, so that he might be incapacitated from holding a seat, and he was summarily dismissed from his office of custos rotulorum while seated on the bench at York. In May 1627 he was, along with his friend, Sir George Radcliffe, committed a prisoner to the Marshalsea for refusing the royal loan. He was released after six weeks, but was kept under arrest at Dartford till the end of the year, when he again served in the third parliament of Charles I. Wentworth now joined with Eliot, Pym, and other opponents of the arbitrary actions of the king, and his boldness and powers of speaking soon made him formidable.

The assassination of the duke on August 23 of that year removed his adverse influence. After using his powerful eloquence to carry the Petition of Right, Wentworth turned against his party in the last debate.

Men like Wentworth are spirited to resist oppression directed against themselves; but are ready to employ it against others for their own aggrandisement. Charles I. repeatedly showed himself anxious to gain over the ablest of his opponents. He was notably sucessful with Montrose, Falkland, and Hyde.

1 This letter was published for the first time in The Life of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, by Elizabeth Cooper, London, 1874, vol. i., p. 27. It had been already quoted in Forster's Life of Sir John Eliot, London, 1864, vol. ii., p. 219.

Wentworth now listened to his overtures, and without any explanation, turned against his political friends. It was certainly not for past services to the crown that he was made Baron, then Viscount Wentworth, privy councillor and president of the north, the post which he had in vain solicited from Buckingham. To Charles Stuart he was willing to use the language of fulsome flattery, for he realised that the king alone could gratify his love of power; as he put it, he was willing to be the king's creature, but not to go much less as to be the creature of any other man. As an opponent of the crown he could only hope to gain influence without power. Amongst the parliamentary men he had able competitors; he could scarcely hope to lead, and was not content to follow. Though he had most carefully cultivated his rhetorical talents, he naturally preferred the exercise of direct power to fame as an orator or popularity as a patriot. As president of the northern council, Wentworth entered upon wide power over the country from the Humber to the Scottish frontier, which he extended and abused in defiance of the law. In 1633, as Lord Deputy for Ireland, he found a suitable field for his commanding energy and great administrative capacity. From the outset it was his avowed object to make the king absolute, to raise a revenue which might assist him in doing without a parliament on the other side, and to give him counsels through which he might reduce the remaining liberties of England to an empty

form.

There is no proof that Wentworth had any speculative preference for despotic rule over limited monarchy; but, if Charles Stuart were to be sultan,

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Thomas Wentworth should be his Irish satrap and the tyrant of the northern counties. The one was not to go without the other.

Wentworth was a man of tall stature with a forward stoop from the neck; he had dark hair, with a cloudy countenance and habitual frown. His imperious manner, rough speeches, and choleric temper, made him many enemies. Queen Henrietta never was his friend. Some requests made by her to him when Lord Deputy are preserved amongst the correspondence, which were met with polite refusals.1 His friend, Sir George Radcliffe, tells us that he was very temperate in his habits, yet he was much subject to gout, and though he could be genial with a few friends, smoking and jesting, he maintained at Dublin unwonted sobriety and decorum on public

occasions.

Sir Thomas Roe, a veteran diplomatist of those times, in a letter to Elizabeth, the Electrix-Palatine, in 1634, thus traces the character of Wentworth, then commencing his career as Lord Deputy for Ireland: "He is severe abroad and in business, and sweet in private conversation; retired in his friendships but very firm; a terrible judge and a strong enemy; a servant violently zealous in his master's ends and not negligent of his own; one that will have what he will, and though of great reason, he can make his will greater when it may serve him; affecting glory by a seeming contempt; one that cannot stay long in the middle region of fortune, but entreprenant.

The Earl of Strafford's Letters and Dispatches, with an Essay towards his Life by Sir George Radcliffe, from the originals in the possession of his great grandson Thomas, Earl of Malton, Dublin, 1711.