No. 9. THOMAS WENTWORTH, EARL OF STRAFFORD, AND HIS SECRETARY.
Black dress.
BORN 1594, EXECUTED 1641.
After Vandyck.
THE eldest son of Sir William Wentworth of Wentworth Wodehouse, County York, by Anne Atkinson of Stowel, County Gloucester. He succeeded his father in his large estates when only twenty-one, being already the husband of ‘a fair wife.’
Shortly after his succession he was elected M.P. for York and Custos Rotulorum in place of Lord Savile, superseded on account of misconduct, an office from which the Duke of Buckingham requested him to retire that Lord Savile might be reinstated, a proceeding which nettled the high spirit of Sir Thomas, who wrote a refusal so indignant as to make a lifelong enemy of the favourite.
Until the accession of Charles the First, Wentworth, although a silent member of the House of Commons, was a zealous advocate of the Liberal party and a strenuous opposer of the encroachments of the Court. Through the instrumentality of Buckingham he was disqualified from voting by having the post of High Sheriff thrust upon him, and he was soon after summarily dismissed from his office of Custos Rotulorum. In the ensuing year he was summoned before the Council and sentenced to imprisonment for refusing to contribute to a loan (levied without the consent of Parliament), on which occasion he made a noble speech expressing his loyalty to the person of Charles the First and his desire to serve him in any way consistent with his duty to his country. On his release from prison he became a strong leader of the Opposition and an eloquent advocate of the famous ‘Petition of Rights,’ to which the King was compelled to yield his unwilling consent. Then suddenly came the adoption of that line of conduct, so differently judged and so differently accounted for by different biographers. Wentworth declared his conviction that the nation might now be content with the concessions made by the Crown, bade adieu to the party of the ‘Pyms and the Prynnes,’ walked over to the other side of the House and offered his services, head, heart, and sword, to the royal cause. By some he was termed a traitor, a time-server, an apostate, while others upheld the conduct of a man who chose the moment of impending danger to rally round the unsteady throne and the unpopular sovereign. Charles naturally received him with open arms, and loaded him with favours; but his old ally, Pym, meeting him one day, uttered these ominous words, ‘You are going to leave us, but I will never leave you while you have ahead on your shoulders’; words too cruelly redeemed.
The murder of the Duke of Buckingham made way for Wentworth’s advancement. Raised to the peerage by the title of Viscount Wentworth, he was appointed Lord-Deputy and Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, and sailed for that ‘distressful country’ with a code for his own government, drawn up by himself, in his pocket, from which he never swerved. Lord Wentworth’s administration of Irish affairs, his transient popularity, his reforms in matters civil, military, and religious, his quarrels with the Irish nobles, his punctilio in minute questions of form and ceremony, his hurried voyages to and from England, are subjects intimately connected with the history of the times, but too lengthy to be detailed here. It would have been well for the Lord-Deputy if he had taken the advice of his lifelong friend and correspondent, Archbishop Laud, and had curbed his impetuosity on many occasions.