and condemned to death.
Mountnorris had a relation of his own name who was a subaltern in the Lord Deputy’s troop of horse. He was checked by Wentworth at a review for some irregularity, and replied by an insolent gesture or grimace. Wentworth laid his cane against the young man’s shoulders, but without striking him, and threatened to ‘lay him over the pate’ if he offended so again. Annesley doubtless deserved punishment, but it was scarcely a Lord Deputy’s business to chastise offenders with his own hand. On April 18, 1635, Annesley, who was a gentleman-usher at the Castle, dropped a stool upon Wentworth’s gouty foot, and this became the subject of conversation at a dinner at the Lord Chancellor’s some three or four days later. Mountnorris said: ‘Perhaps it was done in revenge of that public affront which my Lord Deputy had done him formerly; but he has a brother that would not take such a revenge.’ Something of the kind was said, but the exact words must be very doubtful, for it is not pretended that any one took them down at the time, and they were not sworn to until nearly eight months later. In any case Wentworth should have remembered his own dictum that every word must not rise up in judgment against a man. Annesley had a brother in Mountnorris’s company of foot, and it was suggested that this was a hint to him from his superior officer ‘to have taken up resolutions of dangerous consequence.’ It seems much more probable that Mountnorris was praising his own subaltern at the expense of the Lord Deputy’s gentleman-usher. Late on the evening of December 11 he was warned by a pursuivant to attend a council of war at eight o’clock next morning. Shortly after the appointed hour Wentworth came in, said he had called the court to do himself right and reparation against Lord Mountnorris, read the alleged words from a paper which had been subscribed by Lord Moore and by the Chancellor’s eldest son, Sir Robert Loftus, and called upon the Vice-Treasurer to confess or deny them. The accused asked for counsel and to have the charge in writing, but he was told that councils of war allowed neither. To aggravate the case, Wentworth read the King’s letter of July 31 in which he had ordered the sixpenny fees to be stopped. Mountnorris said the letter was obtained ‘by misinformation.’ Wentworth said it was not his habit to misrepresent anyone, ‘and rebuked me,’ says Mountnorris, ‘with worse language than was fit to be used to a meaner man and not a peer.’ Moore and Loftus swore to the truth of what they had signed, and Wentworth then ordered Moore to take his seat as a judge in a case where he had already given evidence for the prosecution. The Lord Deputy took no actual part in the sentence, but he was present during the whole proceedings, and all men dreaded his frown. According to the account forwarded by Wentworth at the time, Mountnorris submitted to the court, ‘protesting that what interpretation soever his words might have put upon them, he intended no prejudice or hurt to the person of us the Deputy.’ Mountnorris himself, in his evidence given in 1641, says he offered to swear that he had not uttered the words, and to bring witnesses to prove that the part referring to the public affront was spoken by others. Among the witnesses whom he says he asked to have produced were the Lord Chancellor and Sir Adam Loftus’s son. He was ordered to withdraw, and after less than half an hour was called in again to hear his sentence of death, to which the court had unanimously agreed. ‘My Lord Deputy,’ he says, ‘took occasion to make a speech, and told me invectively enough there remained no more now, if he pleased, but to cause the provost-marshal to do execution; but withal added that for matter of life, he would supplicate his Majesty. And I think he said he would rather lose his hand than I should lose my head; which I took to be the highest scorn, to compare his the Lord Deputy’s hand with my head.’ The expression about his hand and his victim’s head occurs in Wentworth’s own letters. It was reported in London that Mountnorris had been actually shot, the parts of his body where bullets took effect being specified.[225]
Mountnorris not a soldier.
Martial law in time of peace.
The King receives 6000l. for Mountnorris’s place.
Mountnorris had a company, as was then customary with great men in Ireland, but he was not really a soldier, and knew nothing of military discipline. The words charged against him were spoken, if spoken at all, in private society, and it is not easy to see how they could possibly affect the discipline of the army. Yet Wentworth and his slavish council found that they constituted a breach of two articles of war. That which involved the death sentence was the thirteenth: ‘No man shall offer any violence, or contemptuously disobey his commander, or do any act or speak any words which are likely to breed any mutiny in the army or garrison, or impeach the obeying of the general or principal officer’s directions, upon pain of death.’ This article is perhaps not too severe for its purpose, especially in time of war, but does any lawyer, does any soldier, does any man of common intelligence suppose that it was intended to be applied or could properly be applied to conversation at a dinner-party? And Mountnorris swore that he had never seen the articles at the time of his condemnation under them, and did not see them until June 1636. It does not appear that they had been acted on in time of peace. Besides all this, the court-martial was held without any notice; no time was given to summon witnesses; Wentworth himself, the prosecutor, presided in person, while the accused, who was not allowed counsel, was turned out of court, and one of the witnesses for the prosecution sat in judgment. At Court many wondered ‘that a peer of the kingdom, a Privy Councillor, a treasurer at war, though a captain, should be tried in a marshal’s court for words spoken six months before, no enemy in the field, nor the Lord Deputy in any danger of his life by these words.’ Wentworth’s energetic and talkative emissary, Captain Price, ‘laid about with his tongue’ as to this and other matters, but it was the King that really silenced the voice of criticism. It was his nature to approve harsh measures, and in this case he actually made 6000l. by the transaction. Wentworth advised Sir Adam Loftus to spend money freely to secure the succession; from which we may infer that he intended it to be lucrative in the hands of a friend. Loftus promised the money to Cottington, who promptly ‘gave it to him that really could do the business, which was the King himself.’ Probably only part of the money was for Cottington, and he was to give the rest to other officials, but he got the credit of surrendering the whole sum. Before it was actually received Charles assigned it in part payment of 22,000l. which he was spending on the purchase of an estate in Scotland. We may assume that the King was ‘roundly satisfied’ without delay, for Loftus was made Vice-Treasurer at the beginning of April. The fact that the money went to provide an endowment for the Scotch archbishoprics does not greatly improve matters. Clarendon says that Mountnorris was notoriously unloved, otherwise his treatment would have been thought ‘the most extravagant piece of sovereignty that in a time of peace had been ever executed by any subject.’[226]
Mountnorris under restraint for several months, 1635-37.
Deprived of his office.
Wentworth’s motives.