On December 12th, the unfortunate officer was summoned to a council of war at Dublin Castle. On his arrival he found several other persons present, but no one could inform him of the purpose for which their attendance was required. Wentworth presently arrived and told the company that it would be their duty to hold a court-martial on Lord Mountnorris, whose language at the Lord Chancellor’s dinner-party constituted a breach of two of the articles of war by which the army was governed. By the 41st article it was ordered that no man should “give any disgraceful words or commit any act to the disgrace of any person in the army or garrison, or any part thereof, upon pain of imprisonment, public disarming, and banishment from the army”; by the 13th that “no man should offer any violence, or contemptuously disobey his commander, or do any act or speak any words which are like 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.” The words, “a brother who would not take such a revenge” were intended, according to the Lord Deputy’s interpretation, as an instigation to young Annesley to revenge himself in some more violent fashion than by the mere dropping of a footstool.
Mountnorris was stunned by this unexpected blow. He could neither deny the words imputed to him, nor offer any plausible explanation of them. The court, after a short deliberation, returned a verdict of guilty; and Mountnorris was sentenced “to be shot to death or to lose his head at the pleasure of the General.” Wentworth, who had been present at the proceedings but had taken no part in them, then addressed the prisoner and told him that he need be under no apprehensions so far as the capital sentence was concerned. “I had rather,” he said, “lose my hand than you should lose your head.” Mountnorris was kept for a short time in prison, deprived of his office of Vice-Treasurer, and dismissed from the army.[[124]]
These oppressive proceedings added yet another to the numerous enemies of Wentworth. Lord Cork, who had been compelled to disgorge the plundered revenues of the Church, and Lord Wilmot, who had been disgraced for embezzling the property of the Crown,[[125]] were already intriguing to procure his recall. With greater justice the De Burghs complained of his severity to the Galway jury. The Earl of Clanricarde was lately dead; and, though he was certainly an old man, his end was generally believed to have been hastened by vexation at the tyranny of the Lord Deputy.[[126]] D’Arcy, the sheriff of Galway, had also died not long after his committal to prison; and his death too was laid at Wentworth’s door.[[127]] By the beginning of the following year the outcry against him had become so loud that he found it advisable to proceed in person to London to justify himself before the king. He pointed with a not unjust pride to the undoubted reforms which he had effected in the government of Ireland. He had found the country on the verge of bankruptcy; he had established a large and rapidly-increasing revenue, and that without resorting to the dangerous and unpopular expedient of exacting the recusancy fines. He had transformed the Irish army from a disorderly rabble into a disciplined and efficient force; had suppressed piracy; and had developed the material resources of the island. He had set his foot upon the jobbery of the Dublin officials, and had done something, if not much, to improve the scandalous condition of the Established Church. His most arbitrary acts had been committed in his master’s interests, and were therefore such as that master was only too ready to condone. Charles signified his approval in the most gracious terms. After a few months’ absence Wentworth returned to Ireland with his enemies silenced and his position apparently impregnable.[[128]]
Rather more than a year after the Mountnorris court-martial Wentworth became involved in a dispute with another official which brought upon him an even fiercer storm of obloquy. In his conflict with Cork he had had the support of Mountnorris and Loftus; he had afterwards had the support of Loftus in his conflict with Mountnorris. The Chancellor himself was destined to be the next victim. In 1621, on the occasion of his son’s marriage to the daughter of Sir Francis Raishe, his lordship had entered into an agreement to settle £300 a year on the bride, and £1,200 in land on her children. Fifteen years afterwards he attempted to evade his obligations, alleging some technical irregularity in the marriage contract. On the petition of Sir John Giffard, the legal representative of the lady’s family, the affair was referred to the Privy Council. Loftus protested that the claim of the Privy Council to interfere was unconstitutional, and that the plaintiff ought to have filed a bill against him in his own court. He would then have been judge as well as defendant—an arrangement which promised obvious advantages to a litigant with a lax conscience and a bad case.[[129]] But it is dangerous, the old proverb tells us, to prosecute Beelzebub in the court of Hell; and Giffard was no doubt of opinion that it would be equally imprudent to proceed against the Lord Chancellor in the Court of Chancery. The Privy Council decided against Loftus, who renewed his protests—protests which came with a singularly bad grace from one who had repeatedly sat upon the same tribunal upon occasions when there had been much less cogent reasons for a departure from the orthodox method of procedure. He was thereupon deprived of the seals and imprisoned for contempt; but subsequently released on acknowledging the jurisdiction of the court. It does not appear that he had any defence on the merits; but the exalted position of the delinquent and an abominable, but apparently groundless rumour that his daughter-in-law had been Wentworth’s mistress, induced the enemies of the Lord Deputy to give the affair as much prominence as possible.[[130]]
Notes
[56]. In Harris’s Fiction Unmasked, pp. 53-60, there is an excellent summary of the pretexts put forward for these plantations. The most important papers relating to the plantation of Leitrim will be found in Desiderata Curiosa Hibernica, II., 52-77. Miss Hickson (Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, II., 276-299) has printed some interesting papers relating to the plantations of Longford and Ely O’Carroll. For an Irish view of the plantations, see David Rothe’s Analecta Sacra.
[57]. For the Composition of Connaught compare Roderick O’Flaherty’s Chorographical Description of Iar-Connaught, pp. 309-362, where the articles are given in full; Government of Ireland under Sir John Perrott, pp. 79-86; Rawlinson’s History of Sir John Perrott, p. 149; Wentworth to Coke, August 25, 1635. (Strafford Letters, I., 450-454.) In the Calendar of Irish State Papers, 1615-1625, there are several letters containing suggestions for a plantation of Connaught.
[58]. Docwra to ——, March 3, 1618. (Calendar, 1615-1625, 399.)
[59]. Falkland to Conway, September 11, 1626. (Calendar, 1625-1632, 438.) Falkland, however, had recommended this step even before the death of James. Falkland to the Privy Council, December 11, 1624. (Calendar, 1615-1625, 1324.)