Anxieties and triumphs jostled each other in the Dublin town house. Lady Fenton did not long survive her daughter, and a great cavalcade, headed by the Earl and his sons and sons-in-law, rode to her funeral at Youghal. In November 1631 the Earl was made High Treasurer of Ireland[27]; that winter, in leisure hours, he must have written his True Remembrances, the manuscript of which was finished and “commended to posterity” in June 1632—just after the Earl, the Lord Chancellor, and the young Earl of Kildare, had been given the Freedom of the City of Dublin. Early in that year, Dorothy had married Arthur Loftus and settled down at Rathfarnham, and that same summer Dick, “my Lord Dungarvan,” in company with Mr. Fry his tutor, set off on his foreign travels. Dungarvan’s marriage with the daughter and heiress of Lord Clifford was already on the tapis. Lord and Lady Clifford lived at Skipton, in Yorkshire; Dungarvan was to be received in audience by King Charles, and to take Yorkshire on his way abroad; and “thaffair,” so dear to the Earl’s heart, was very soon to bring him home again. A husband was to be found for Peggie, now that she was three years old; and the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Primate were to have long confabulations with the Earl on this important matter. Kynalmeaky was already proving himself an anxious, brilliant young spendthrift, and was to be sent to sea in the Ninth Whelp to learn “navigacon” and “the mathematiques” from that same Captain who wore the fringed gloves and embroidered night-cap. The sons-in-law were a trial. George Goring was continually borrowing, Kildare perpetually losing at dice and cards. He “battered and abused” with marrow-bones the Earl’s best silver trenchers, and then won £5 from his father-in-law for “discovering” to him the culprit! Lord Barrymore, after living eighteen months with his wife and all his family under the Earl’s roof, went back to Castle Lyons without so much as saying thank-you. As for the household staff, the “servant trouble” existed then as now. That Christmas of 1632 one of the Earl’s scullerymen “did most unfortunately by jesting with his knife run my undercook into the belly whereof he instantly died in my house in Dublin”—a most unpleasant domestic episode; and it happened at the very moment when the splendid black marble tomb in St Patrick’s had been finished and paid for!
But all this was as nothing to the griefs of the next few months; the premature birth of Lady Digby’s baby under the Earl’s roof, the hurried christening before it died, and the death of the young mother,—that little Sarah who, a widow at seventeen, had been married to Lord Digby, the Earl’s most comfortable son-in-law, on the Christmas Day before Robyn was born.[28]
It was a dark summer, the summer of 1633, in the Dublin town house; and the Earl and his children were still in the first days of their mourning, when Wentworth, the new Lord Deputy, arrived in Dublin: A most cursed man to all Ireland, wrote the Earl in his diary, and to me in particular.
The story of Wentworth’s government of Ireland, a government “hardly paralleled in the annals of pro-consulship,”[29] has given material for many books; but through all the chapters there runs the underplot of Wentworth’s personal relations with the Earl of Cork. From the first moment, on that July morning, 1633, when the Earl—the Lord High Treasurer—set out in his coach to meet the Lord Deputy and his suite “walking on foot towards the cytty”—a wall of enmity had stood up between these two great men. There is no more human reading than the private diary record of those uneasy years that followed; and unconsciously, by mere enumeration of daily incidents, the Earl has made his own character and the character of Wentworth stand out as clearly as if they were both alive and facing each other in a Parliament of to-day. There is the character of the strenuous old Elizabethan Protestant, with its angles and its softnesses, the man of sixty-seven, who for five-and-forty years had been the man on the spot. Royalist to the backbone, he had served in Ireland three sovereigns in succession. It was the country of his adoption. To a great extent, he felt he had made it what it was; and now, in yielding up the sword and government to Wentworth, he was proudly satisfied that Ireland was being yielded up in “generall peac and plenty.”
And there is the character of Wentworth, the man who had come—who had been sent—to rule; the much younger man, of more recent education and more cultivated tastes, of a different code of living. But he was as obstinately masterful, and his energy and insolence were that of manhood’s prime. He, too, was there to do the King’s service, none the less fervently that he had been, not so long before, a leader of the popular party in the English Parliament, and had only recently, so to speak, crossed the floor of the House. Already, in that dark head of his were schemes and purposes undreamed of in the old Earl’s homely philosophy. They were to be unfolded in those confidential letters to Laud—great schemes, known afterwards as his “policy of Thorough,” his government of all men by “Reward and Punishment.” But in the meantime, with all outward deference and ceremonial, the Earl of Cork hated Wentworth and his government in advance, and Wentworth regarded the Earl of Cork with personal dislike, for he knew him to be the most important man in Ireland—a man who would not be subservient; a man in the Lord Deputy’s path.
So the diary tells its own story: the story of the troublous official life of the Council Chamber and of Wentworth’s Irish Parliaments; the story of Wentworth’s sharp pursuit of the Earl’s titles to his Irish lands; and the story of the private life in the Earl’s Dublin house, with its social duties and family anxieties. Wentworth had married his third wife privately, in England, a year after the death of his second wife, and not long before his departure for Ireland. She had been sent over to Dublin six months before him, to live rather mysteriously in Dublin Castle, under her own unmarried name—as “Mistress Rhodes.” But immediately on Wentworth’s arrival, her identity was revealed: the Lords Justices were duly presented to the Lord Deputy’s lady, and permitted to salute her with a kiss. And the diary records kind visits, and return visits, between the Castle and the Earl of Cork’s Dublin town house; little card-parties at the Castle, when the Chancellor and the Treasurer both lost sums of money to the Lord Deputy; games of “Mawe,”[30] also for money, and private theatricals acted by the Lord Deputy’s gentlemen. The old Earl sat through a tragedy, on one occasion, which he found “tragicall” indeed, because there was no time to have any supper. And then, but six months after Wentworth’s arrival, there came the first hint of the trouble about Lady Cork’s black marble tomb in St Patrick’s.
Mr. Bagwell has pointed out[31] how, to the old Elizabethan, whose “Protestantism was not of the Laudian type,” there was nothing amiss in the fact of a Communion-table standing detached in the middle of the Church. The Earl, in erecting his monument, had indeed improved the Chancel of St. Patrick’s, which had been earthen-floored, and often in wet weather “overflown.” He had raised it, with three stone steps and a pavement of hewn stones, “whereon,” the Earl wrote to Laud, “the communion-table now stands very dry and gracefully.” Laud himself had found it hard to interfere, in the face of general opinion supported by two Archbishops.[32] But Wentworth was obdurate, and the King himself was appealed to. It was considered a scandal that the Cork tomb should remain “sett in the place where the high altar anciently stood.”[33] In the end, the great black marble monument was taken down, stone by stone; and in March 1635 Wentworth was able to write to Laud: “The Earl of Cork’s tomb is now quite removed. How he means to dispose of it I know not; but up it is put in boxes, as if it were marchpanes or banqueting stuffs, going down to the christening of my young master in the country.”
The reference to “my young master” is evidently to Lady Kildare’s baby, whose birth—and the fact that it was a boy—was the event of the moment in the Cork household: indeed, the old Earl had a bet on with Sir James Erskine, on the subject. In November 1635 the tomb had been re-erected where it now stands, in the south side of the Choir, and outwardly, at least, after a long struggle, the matter was ended. Lord Cork knew nothing of that sneer in Wentworth’s letter to Laud about the marchpanes and the banqueting stuffs; and when Wentworth arrived at the Earl’s house one evening in December 1635—he was rather fond of dropping in unexpectedly—and joined the Earl and his family at supper, the diary records that the Lord Deputy “very nobly and neighbourlyke satt down and took part of my super without any addicon.” But between July 1633 and that December evening of 1635, many things had happened in the Cork family.
The captain of the Ninth Whelp had been obliged to report that Lewis, my Lord Kynalmeaky, had run badly into debt at Bristol. Dungarvan had been recalled, and sent to England with his tutor, about “thaffair” of his marriage with Mrs. Elizabeth Clifford. George Goring had been assisted with money to buy a troop of horse; and “our colonel”—and poor Lettice after him—had sailed for the Netherlands, and soon settled at The Hague. Little Peggie, her prospective jointure and husband provided, had been put meanwhile, with Mary, under the care of Sir Randall and Lady Clayton at Cork; and Mr. Perkins, the London tailor, had sent the Earl his new Parliament robes of brocaded satin and cloth of gold. Dorothy Loftus’s first baby had been born at Rathfarnham, and Katherine Jones’s first baby at Athlone Castle. Both were girls; hence, that wager of the Earl’s that his daughter Kildare’s next baby would be a boy. The Earl of Kildare, with his dice and cards, had been causing everybody anxiety; and there was a quarrel about family property going on between the Digby and Offaley family and the “Faerie Earle.” Wentworth had interfered, and in the autumn of 1634 Kildare, having taking offence, had “stolen privately on shipboard,” leaving his wife and children and a household of about sixty persons “without means or monies.” The delinquent was very soon to come home again; but late in 1634 the old Earl had broken up the Kildare establishment and settled his daughter and her children in his own newly built house at Maynooth, riding there with her, and dining with her “for the first time in the new parlour”, and sending her two fat oxen “to begin her housekeeping there.”
Dick, “my Lord Dungarvan,” on the other hand, had been proving himself a very satisfactory son: not very clever, perhaps, but eminently good-natured and sensible. He had acquitted himself admirably in England, writing comfortable letters to his father, who was much gratified to hear that his boy had taken part in the Royal Masque. It must have been the great Royal Masque in Whitehall, on Shrove Tuesday night, February 18th, 1634: the Cælum Britannicum, which followed on the still greater Masque of the Inns of Court. The words were by the poet Carew, the music by Henry Lawes, who had set Milton’s Comus; and the scenery was by Inigo Jones. The King himself and fourteen of his chief nobles were the Masquers, and the juvenile parts were taken by ten young lords and noblemen’s sons. No wonder that the old Earl was proud of “Dick”.