Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford

“ We might quote pages: but we will content ourselves with a single specimen: “The debts of the Crown being taken off, you may govern as you please: and most resolute I am that may be done without borrowing any help forth of the King’s lodgings.”
Such was the theory of that thorough reform in the state which Strafford meditated. His whole practice, from the day on which he sold himself to the court, was in strict conformity to his theory. For his accomplices various excuses may be urged; ignorance, imbecility, religious bigotry. But Wentworth had no such plea. His intellect was capacious. ”

“ In the summer of 1633, Thomas Wentworth, afterwards Earl of Strafford, was appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. "It was during his tenure of office as viceroy that he attempted to establish absolutism in Ireland, in order that, by the thereby enhanced power of the monarchy, he might be enabled to turn the scale in favour of a despotic government in England. And, never at a loss in the choice of his expedients, he contended for his scheme with an energy and a recklessness characteristic of the man. ”

“ He was brought up in the house of Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford. When Strafford became lord deputy of Ireland, he was at sixteen made ensign to Strafford's own company of foot, and soon afterwards lieutenant of his guard. The earl detected in him much military capacity, and foretold that he would 'outdo many of our old commanders.' After Strafford's death, Morris became captain in Sir Henry Tichborne's regiment. ”

“ Who was she?”
“She was Mistress Elizabeth Rhodes, and is now Lady Strafford.”
“Then she is your fourth wife. You will see by your own inditing that this letter was written in March, 1624.”
The date was unmistakably set down by the same hand that had penned the bold signature, “Thomas Wentworth,” and the bewilderment of the Earl increased as he recognized that here was no forgery, but a genuine letter antedating its duplicate.
“Is it possible,” he murmured to himself, “that a man has so little originality as to do practically the same thing twice?” ”

“ Strafford. [The Statesman and the Historical Period of the Poem.] It is so important that the reader of the tragedy of Strafford should start with a clear idea of the historical facts with which it deals, that I have included in my article the following extract from Professor Gardiner’s Life of Strafford in the Encyclopædia Britannica. For the benefit of such of my readers as may have forgotten the fact, I may state that, before the earldom was conferred on Strafford, he was Sir Thomas Wentworth:—“High-handed as Wentworth was by nature, his rule in Ireland made him more high-handed than ever. ”

“ In those same early days he was in conflict with another man who was to become one of the most prominent politicians of his day—Thomas Wentworth, presently Lord Strafford. Wentworth too, according to his light, was a patriot. He was sincerely desirous for the prosperity of the country, but held that strength is the essence of good government, had a contempt for constitutional forms, and in his arrogance, knowing his own good intentions, paid no respect to those who opposed him. Eliot stood at the opposite pole. Parliament was to him the voice and the majesty of the nation. ”

“ But the majority on which Pym could reckon when it came to actual impeachment, were on his side in the preliminary question also: by a trifling majority, but still in legal form, the resolution was adopted that the whole house should form the committee on Irish affairs.
It has always excited surprise that Wentworth Earl of Strafford appeared in Parliament at all. For even if he could have deceived himself so far as not to believe that impeachment and danger to his life awaited him, yet obviously he would have been much safer with the army, or in Ireland, or abroad. ”

“ We can scarcely conceive a man so wicked and so dangerous that the whole course of law must be disturbed in order to reach him, yet not so wicked as to deserve the severest sentence, nor so dangerous as to require the last and surest custody, that of the grave. If we had thought that Strafford might be safely suffered to live in France, we should have thought it better that he should continue to live in England, than that he should be exiled by a special act. As to degradation, it was not the Earl, but the general and the statesman, whom the people had to fear. ”

“ Viewing Wentworth home grounds and mansion from hence, we had no hesitation in pronouncing it to be the finest place we had ever seen.
Pursuing our interesting ride for nine miles through a continuation of that fertile country which marks this division of Yorkshire for the paradise of England, we reached the park of Wentworth-Castle, the seat of the late Earl of Strafford. The grounds, which have every advantage that nature could give them, in agreeable undulations, and "solemn midnight groves," are injured in the injudicious attempt to add a beauty to them by artificial trifles ”

“ Among these epoch-bringing events were the emergence of the Puritans from the chaos of internecine church squabbles, the determined raising of the voice of the people in the Long Parliament, where King and people finally came to an open clash in the impeachment of the King's most devoted minister, Wentworth, Earl Strafford, by Pym, the great leader in the House of Commons, ending in Strafford's execution ”

“ WENTWORTH, HENRIETTA MARIA, Baroness Wentworth (1657?–1686) , mistress of the Duke of Monmouth, born in all probability towards the close of 1657, was the only child of Sir Thomas Wentworth, baron Wentworth (1613–1665) [q. v.] , by Philadelphia (d. 4 May 1696) , daughter of Sir Ferdinando Carey. On the death of her grandfather, Sir Thomas Wentworth, fourth baron Wentworth of Nettlestead and first earl of Cleveland [q. v.] , she succeeded to the barony of Wentworth. The early years of Lady Wentworth appear to have been passed at the family manor of Toddington in Bedfordshire. ”

“ On the scaffold on Tower Hill Strafford told the vast crowd assembled to see him die that he had always believed ‘parliaments in England to be the happy constitution of the kingdom and nation, and the best means under God to make the king and his people happy,’ asking further whether it was well that the ‘beginning of the people's happiness should be written in letters of blood.’ Refusing to bind his eyes he, after prayer, spread forth his hands as a sign to the executioner, and the axe ended his life. He was buried at Wentworth-Woodhouse. ”

“ Immediately after the dissolution of Parliament Wentworth had obtained his price from the King, and was appointed to be his right-hand man in administering the kingdom. A man of great 34shrewdness and insight, he seems to have struggled to govern well, according to his lights; but he despised law and acted upon the belief that the people should be slaves, unpermitted, as they were unfit, to take any share in governing themselves. After a while Laud was made archbishop; and Wentworth was later made Lord Strafford. ”

“ In the tragedy, on the other86 hand, Strafford is the champion of the King's will against the people's, but yet looks forward to the ultimate reconciliation of Charles and his subjects, and strives for it after his own fashion. He loves the master he serves, and dies for him, but when the end comes he can proudly answer his accusers, 'I have loved England too.'"
The play opens at the important moment of Wentworth's return to London from Ireland, where for some time he had been governor. ”

“ England could not boast of a greater patriot than the great Earl of Strafford, while he was yet a private commoner. No man exposed better, or more zealously, the encroachments and oppressions practised by the court upon the kingdom, or contended more loudly for a redress of grievances: But he was no sooner got into the court, but he began openly to counter-act the whole course of his past life: He devised new ways of terror and oppression, heightened all those grievances of which he had complained ”

“ Wentworth is appointed President of the North.
Persons who change sides in politics or in religion are very apt to go from one extreme to another. Their former friends revile them, and they, in retaliation, act more and more energetically against them. It was so with Strafford. He gradually engaged more and more fully and earnestly in upholding the king. Finally, the king appointed him to a very high station, called the Presidency of the North. His office was to govern the whole north of England—of course, under the direction of the king and council. ”

“ WENTWORTH, WILLIAM CHARLES (1793–1872) , the “Australian patriot,” who claimed descent from the great Strafford, but apparently without sufficient reason, was born in 1793 in Norfolk Island, the penal settlement of New South Wales, where his father D’Arcy Wentworth, an Irish gentleman of Roscommon family, who had emigrated in 1790 and later became a prominent official, was then government surgeon. ”

“ We are now upon the point of giving, as much as in us lies, the final sentence unto death or life, on a great minister of the state and peer of this kingdom, Thomas, Earl of Strafford, a name of hatred in the present age for his practices, and fit to be made a terror to future ages by his punishment. ”

“ To assist the king and council in what was felt to be a critical emergency, Wentworth, now Strafford, returned, though suffering from a painful complaint. He left orders for the immediate levy of an army of eight thousand men, and Charles took measures for the raising in England of fifteen thousand foot and four thousand horse, which he thought would serve to overawe Parliament; and, what is singular, the order for the raising of these troops and providing artillery and ammunition was signed by Laud, so little had he an idea of an archbishop being a minister of the Prince of Peace. ”

“ Sure I were the most solitary man without them that ever served a king in such a place’ (ib. i. 194) . He praised in a similar strain their great services in the parliament of 1634 (ib. i. 352) . In all legal matters Radcliffe was Wentworth's chief adviser, and in the management of the farm of the customs and other financial measures he was his right-hand man (ib. ii. 21; Rushworth, Trial of Strafford, pp. 249, 410; Lloyd, Memoirs of Excellent Personages, p. 149) . ”

“ Wentworth was in England from September to March 1639-40, and as the result of this visit steps were taken to levy 8000 foot and 1000 horse in Ireland. This was the germ of the policy which ruined both Charles I. and James II., and which has never succeeded with any statesman. To lean upon Irish Roman Catholic support in order to crush opposition in Protestant England was plainly the idea of Charles himself much more than of Strafford; for the latter saw the danger clearly enough, though he wilfully neglected it in pursuit of his ‘thorough’ ideal. ”

“ P. 103, No. xcv.—This is nothing more than a broad-sheet ballad published in 1641, the year of Strafford’s execution, with the title Verses lately written by Thomas Earl of Strafford. Two copies, of different issues, but of the same date, and identical in text, exist in the British Museum, while in The Topographer, vol. ii. p. 234, there is printed another, and in some respects an improved text. The fall of the great statesman from his pride of place has here kindled one with perhaps but ordinary gifts for ordinary occasions to a truly poetical treatment of his theme ”

“ Than Pym's free virtue chose,
When the proud force of Strafford he controll'd.
IV.—3. But what is man at enmity with truth?
What were the fruits of Wentworth's copious mind,
When (blighted all the promise of his youth)
The patriot in a tyrant's league had join'd?
Let Ireland's loud-lamenting plains,
Let Tyne's and Humber's trampled swains,
Let menaced London tell
How impious guile made wisdom base;
How generous zeal to cruel rage gave place ”

“ Wentworth laughed, pleasantly and frankly. "You are a good man, Sparks, and— you are right. Your newspaper training has taught you to read character. Are you, by any chance, suggesting that I am this criminal?" ”

“ Wasted and white, upon my forehead once;
Wentworth . . . he's gone now! . . has talked on, whole nights,
And I beside him; Hampden loves me; Sire,
How can I breathe and not wish England well—
And her King well? ”

“ Wentworth's attempt to build up a government in Ireland on the comfort of the people came to nothing. Englishmen had too much to do at home, and the expected settlers for Connaught or other districts were not to be had, and Wentworth himself was interrupted by a summons to shore up the tottering monarchy in England. That he should have judged fairly the men who broke in upon his beneficent labours was not to be expected. To Laud, writing on 10 April 1638, he expressed a wish that Hampden and his like ‘were well whipped into their right senses’ (Strafford Letters, ii. 156) . ”

“ To begin, then, at the commencement I must sail back many years. I am an old man now, and have had a rough cruise through life. I was then a young lad just ready to be launched out on the sea of life; it is forty years gone by now, but I remember all as if it had happened yesterday. The Earl of Wentworth, your father, was then but just of age, and had been celebrating his majority with great merry-making. ”

“ Fancy that beastly creature barging in on us! He must have been mad. I don't blame you for running away... You are all alone and want me to come over?... Will I come? I most certainly shall — just as soon as I get rid of some bothersome people... Oh, in about an hour. Somebody is coming into the room and I can't talk any more. Till we meet!"
Wentworth grinned at the inspector as he handed the telephone back to the butler. ”