Another incident occurred during this same session which is important only as an illustration of Wentworth’s high-handed methods. Sir John Dongan having made a speech unpleasing to the official party in the House of Commons, Captain Charles Price remarked in a loud tone that he did not know what he was doing. An altercation followed which Dongan evidently tried to avoid, for he said he meant no harm. Price then called him saucy, and Sir John very naturally gave him the lie. All this happened inside the bar of the House of Commons, yet the Council took the case up. Dongan was imprisoned in the Castle, forced to give a written apology, fined, and ordered to be brought by the constable of the Castle to the bar of the House and to repeat his submission there upon his knees. This was carried out to the letter a few days later, and entered in the journals, without comment. A committee of six was appointed to wait on the Lord Deputy and beg him to remit the penalty for offending the King, the offence to Parliament and to the Lord Deputy having been already purged. Price was employed by Wentworth as an agent at Court, for which purpose he had very long leave from his military duties. We may judge from a letter of Lord Keeper Coventry what sort of man he was. ‘Your servant, Captain Price, is now with us, and I assure you is not silent in anything that concerns your honour, and in truth serves you with his tongue and protests he will not fail to do it with his sword. I hope your lordship hath no need of the latter in Ireland, and your friends here are well pleased to hear how he lays about him with the former, and therefore it is hoped you will yet spare him from his garrison till he have done here what is meet to be done.’[201]
Assessment of the subsidies.
Wentworth wishes to keep his Parliament together,
but the King insists on a dissolution.
Parliament dissolved, April 18, 1635.
No subsidy had hitherto yielded more than about 30,000l., but there had been many exemptions and many cases of fraud whereby the great transferred their share of the burden to the poor. Wentworth succeeded in raising each subsidy to rather more than 40,000l. from the Commons, with over 6,000l. from the nobility, and 3,000l. from the clergy. The two last sums were to be levied by the Government, but the House of Commons, fearing lest the Deputy should be tempted to take even more than had been agreed upon, themselves assessed the amount which their constituents were to pay in each county. Leinster was set down for 13,000l., Ulster for 10,000l., Munster for 11,200l., and Connaught for 6,800l. The highest rated county was Cork, which with the city paid nearly 4,000l. Dublin city and county were assessed at 1,000l. apiece. The House of Commons also inquired into arrears due by the Crown, and these they found amounted to about 130,000l. They recommended that certain sums due to the Archbishop of Dublin, the Bishop of Meath, and the Dean of Christchurch should be paid at once in full. The next to be satisfied were ladies, the attainder of whose husbands or fathers had enriched the Crown; Lady Desmond and her daughters, Lady Mary O’Dogherty, and Lady Mary O’Reilly being mentioned by name. Arrears of pay due to civil or military officers were to be satisfied in proportion to the actual benefit derived from their services, sinecurists being left in the lurch, and all useless places recommended to be abolished. When the work of the Parliament was done, Wentworth wished to prorogue it. ‘This House,’ he said, ‘is very well composed; so as the Protestants are the major part, clearly and thoroughly with the King, which would be difficult to compass again, if you were now to call another.’ He thought that the existence of this obedient majority would serve to overawe the Roman Catholics, who alone were dangerous, and who would be deterred from opposing schemes of colonisation by the knowledge that the English recusancy laws might be passed over their heads at any moment. But Charles was of opinion that Parliaments ‘are of the nature of cats, they ever grow curst with age,’ and directed Wentworth to dissolve as soon as the necessary business was done. Coke had intercepted a large budget of letters between the Irish Recusants and their French friends, and he had no doubt that as soon as there was danger either from Spain or France ‘all would join together to replant themselves at home.’ Wentworth thought a Parliament well in hand would be a useful instrument to have ready, but he was not allowed to keep it. The royal consent was given to a number of Acts, and the subsidy arrangements being complete, the two Houses had little to do except to squabble about matters of etiquette, and were dissolved without settling them. ‘We have now,’ Wentworth wrote, ‘under the conduct of our prudent and excellent master, concluded this Parliament, with an universal contentment, as I take it.’ He thought it had done more than all former Parliaments put together, both for King, Church and subject, and that Charles was ‘more absolute master by his wisdom,’ than his predecessors had ever been by the sword.[202]
Meeting of Convocation, 1613-1615.
The Hundred and Four Articles.
Character of the Irish Articles.
‘Proctors in the Convocation House’ are officially mentioned in Henry VIII.’s time, but the first regular Convocation of the Irish Church was held in connection with the Parliament of 1613. It was summoned by the King’s writ, and met in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on May 24 in that year. It consisted of the bishops and of representatives from the four provincial synods. Lord Chancellor Jones as Archbishop of Dublin presided in the Upper, and Randolph Barlow, after wards Archbishop of Tuam, in the Lower House; both were Cambridge men. The principal business of this assembly was to pass the Articles, one hundred and four in number, which are generally attributed to James Ussher, then professor of divinity in Dublin. Ussher’s Puritanism was more pronounced in his earlier days than afterwards, and James was less hostile to that school than he later became. These Articles, which superseded those of 1566, received the royal assent, though they practically incorporated those promulgated at Lambeth in 1595. They were more Calvinistic and more polemical than the thirty-nine received by the Church of England upon which Burnet, in the interest of peace and comprehension, expended his latitudinarian casuistry. It may suffice to note that of the Irish Articles the twelfth declares that ‘God hath predestinated some unto life and reprobated some unto death: of both which there is a certain number, known only to God, which can neither be increased nor diminished’; and the eightieth that the Pope is ‘that man of sin foretold in the Holy Scriptures whom the Lord shall consume, &c.’ In 1615 this Convocation granted one subsidy to the King.[203]