UNJUST CONFISCATIONS 117 was in the nation when the Lord Deputy came there were now a hundred may be put down as sheer bounce.1 It would be impossible to give any adequate notion of the overbearing rapacity, brimming-over insolence, and merciless hatreds of this man, without going into farther details than our plan allows. With the one design to increase the king's revenue his venal lawyers were sent through Ireland to find flaws in the possession of estates long enjoyed. Any pretext was good enough, defective titles, neglect to pay old cesses, defaults of rents, failures of penalties for rebellion of ancestors, forgotten or allowed to lapse. He even courted resistance that his forfeitures might be made more sweeping. Wentworth's claims for his unworthy master comprised almost the whole province of Connaught save the county of Leitrim. They were brought before juries studiously packed and tempted by covetousness and fear, who all granted him what he demanded in Roscommon, Sligo, and Mayo; but in Galway the influence of Earl St Albans, a great proprietor, was so far effective that a jury found against the king, mainly on the plea that Connaught had not been conquered by Henry II. (460 years before), but had only submitted to him, and so the king did not acquire the property of the lands with the dominion. But they were quickly taught that juries were intended not to judge what they thought right, but to cover the injustice of the Lord Deputy. The jurors were tried for attempting to defraud the king, and fined £4000 each, to be imprisoned till the fines were paid, and were com 1 See Carte's Life of the Earl of Ormonde, London, 1736, vol. i., p. 87. pelled upon their knees to acknowledge in court that they were guilty in not finding the king's title good. A nephew of Lord St Albans was fined £500 because he pulled a brother juryman by the sleeve while the Lord Deputy was speaking to him. Wentworth got the fort of Galway repaired, brought a regiment of infantry and a troop of horse into the county, and wrote to the king to confirm his action, and forbid Lord St Albans to leave England, and his son to defend their property in Ireland. The king's title to Connaught by conquest was declared good, and the holders of estates were obliged to submit when they received patents on paying large sums into the exchequer. The king approved of the proceedings of his faithful proconsul. In Ulster large sums were raised by fines upon grants for plantations declared to be illegal or to have been forfeited for some breach or neglect of covenant. The city of London was summoned for non-performance of certain articles in their covenant of the plantation of Londonderry and Coleraine. The case was brought before the Star Chamber; the lands were declared forfeited, and a fine of £70,000 imposed. It was a maxim of Wentworth's policy to oust the Catholics and the native Irish for English proprietors, and the sudden dispossession of so many families from estates which they had held unchallenged through generations, on grounds only understood as mere pretexts, with the other acts of high-handed injustice of the Lord Deputy, provoked a deep sentiment of wrong and hatred which led to a bloody revenge. Nevertheless the immediate results were pleasant VEXATION AND WEARINESS 119 to his master. He soon paid off the king's debts in Ireland, and as early as December 1634, he was able to write "the king is as absolute here as any prince in the whole world may be, and may be still if it be not spoiled on that side." In six years he was able to transmit to his master a yearly subsidy of about £60,000, and maintained a standing army of 2000 foot and 1000 horse, carefully recruited, well armed, and disciplined, besides ordnance, military stores, and ships of war. The Lord Deputy was put out of humour by courtiers now and then appearing to realise lavish grants from the king of estates in Ireland, or what was worse, with orders to pay large sums out of the treasury. Then there would come over his haughty head messages conferring appointments on unfit persons, pardoning offenders with whom he wished to deal severely, or remitting fines or awards after they had been paid into the treasury or to the aggrieved persons. Against these inconsiderate derangements of his political machinery Wentworth would indite telling remonstrances. Yet if the excellent king were to be made absolute, why should he not do what he desired? or was his deputy's sense of what was prudent to stand in the way any more than the mere rights of his Irish subjects? Wentworth's knowledge of history might have taught him that it is dangerous to increase a monarch's power without increasing his capacity, and that absolute power includes the right to misgovern. Amidst the strenuous and unremitting attention to all the details of government, the cries of suffering and weariness escape from the overburdened Lord Deputy. He was tormented with gout, and paroxysms of pain, apparently from renal calculus, which kept him in misery for days and nights at a time. He complains of an intermitting pulse and night sweats and dimness of sight which scarcely allow him to see what he wrote, and his only consolation was the enjoyment of power and the progress of the work of reducing Ireland to a tame subjection to the Stuart king. His unquiet thoughts gave him no peace. He knew that, save Laud, he had scarcely a friend at court. In his letters and dispatches he keeps busy defending himself against anticipated or real attacks, "those shameless impudent untruths which have ever as so many ghosts haunted me in every place where I have lived." In reply to a prayer for an audience to prevent his master's ear being abused by malicious reports, Charles wrote that he gives little welcome to accusers and a willing ear to his servants. But Wentworth knew the king's character better than he did himself: he knew the inconstancy of his resolutions, the unequal frame of his mind, and justly feared that devoted service might not always be a shield against incessant attacks. It was a main feature in Wentworth's policy to terrify and humiliate all who opposed him. Arthur Annesley had raised himself from a low rank by time serving arts to become Lord Mountnorris and ViceTreasurer of Ireland. He was a permanent official who had seen many deputy-lieutenants, and it was said that after each had quitted Ireland he was sedulous to record their mistake and injure their reputation. On April 7, 1635, Wentworth had written to Secretary Coke complaining that Mount COURT-MARTIAL ON MOUNTNORRIS 121 norris was most impertinent and troublesome in the debate of all businesses, and that he was a man of scandalous life, and a tricky gamester, and proposing that he should be deposed and his office given to Sir Adam Loftus. The obnoxious treasurer had escaped attack; but he was captain of a company of Foot, and Wentworth was both Lord Deputy of Ireland and general of the little standing army of Ireland, so Mountnorris was amenable to martial law, and martial law is much what the general makes it. Wentworth in his letters to Laud expresses his desire to get rid of the common lawyers, for though the lawyer may not be attached to justice he is always attached to forms, and this made injustice slow. Tale-bearers reported a saying of Lord Mountnorris through which he might be brought before a court-martial. A report not extant was transmitted to King Charles, who declared it to be an offence much unbeseeming the gravity of a privy councillor and the duty of a captain to his general, and not to be suffered in any well generalled army. The Lord Deputy now calls a council of war and charges the said Mountnorris with the offence which is thus stated in the report of the court-martial: "That within three or four days, or thereabouts, after the end of the parliament, it being mentioned at the Lord Chancellor's table, that after we the Lord Deputy had dissolved the parliament, being sitting down in the presence chamber, one of our servants, in moving a stool, happened to hurt our foot, then indisposed through an accession of the gout; that one, then present at the Lord Chancellor's table, then said to the Lord Mountnorris, being there likewise, that it was Annesley his Lordship's kinsman, |