Council, in conformity with the provisions of Poynings' Act. It was suddenly discovered, when it was conveniently too late, that in consequence of the omission of these formalities the issuing of the writs was illegal and void. No fresh writs were forthcoming, and the promised Parliament for confirming the "Graces" was relegated to the limbo of violated pledges.

CHAPTER II.

THE WENTWORTH SCOURGE. A.D. 1632-1641.

FALKLAND was driven to resign by the Irish Council, who persecuted him on account of his leniency towards the Roman Catholics, and the government was left temporarily in the hands of Lords Justices, Lord Cork and Lord Loftus.* Charles had a pet scheme for governing the three kingdoms by means of a favourite minister in each, reserving a general control over the whole to himself. Laud was to answer for England, the Marquis of Hamilton for Scotland, and the man of all others for Ireland was Lord Wentworth, who, as President of the North, had screwed up the revenue of his province from £2000 to £10,000 a year. Accordingly, in the spring of 1632 Wentworth was appointed lord deputy, and took up his residence in Dublin in the July of the following year.

Sir Thomas Wentworth was a Yorkshire baronet of ancient lineage. Shortly after attaining his majority he became his own master, and the possessor of what was then the princely income of £5000 a year, by the death

* Adam Loftus, nephew of the Earl of Sussex' chaplain, was Lord Chancellor of Ireland in 1619, and created Viscount Loftus of Ely in 1622.

of his father. His ambition prompted him to take part in the stirring public life of the day; all his associations and predilections attached him to the royalist party; and he came into Parliament as representative of his native county, with Calvert, the king's secretary of state, as his colleague. At first he took no part in debate, and gave a silent support to the Government; but having incurred the enmity of the Duke of Buckingham, and hoping to increase his importance by showing an independent spirit, he began to form an alliance with the opposition. This drew down upon him the vengeance of the court, and he was successively pricked for sheriff, deprived of the office of custos rotulorum of his county, and sent to the Marshalsea for refusing to pay a forced "benevolence" to the Crown. His advances spurned by the Government, and his indignation boiling over at his six weeks' imprisonment, he flung himself into the arms of the patriots, and made common cause with the leaders of the popular party. All through the stormy session of 1628 he denounced the arbitrary government of the king, and stood shoulder to shoulder with Eliot and Pym in support of the petition of right. His violence and desertion of the royal cause had their reward. On the prorogation of Parliament, Charles opened communications with him. His liberal friends, being of no further use to him, were cast aside, and he returned to his allegiance to the king. Then came the reward—a peerage, and the presidency of the north.

Charles had won a devoted servant, Lord Wentworth a career for his ambition.

Such had, shortly, been the previous history of the new lord-deputy. In his presidential court at York he had given the reins to his imperious will. A fine field for despotic rule lay open in Ireland. With Laud to support him at the council board in England, he prepared to carry out his policy of "Thorough," both in Church and State, and to make the sister isle an example for the rest of the kingdom to follow.

Wentworth had a supreme contempt for the sordid oligarchy in whose hands he found vested the government of Ireland. He believed in paternal government, and honestly wished to rule the Irish people with justice and moderation, so long as the king's interests were not interfered with. His hand was heavy on the jobbers of the Castle, the mushroom nobility of the plantations, and the great landowners of the west, because both the one and the other resisted his plans for draining their pockets into the king's treasury. But to the mass of the people he endeavoured to secure a just administration of the law; to the recusants he desired to be tolerant, holding that "Our own Church should be first reformed." He secured the shipping trade by sweeping the swarms of Algerine pirates from the sea; and though he ruthlessly crushed the woollen trade, for fear it should. compete with that of England, he had the wit to see that the soil was suitable for the growth of flax; and having imported Flemish weavers and erected mills, laid the foundation of the Irish linen manufacture. His main objects were to make Charles "the most absolute prince in Christendom," and that, too, in the person of the

king's deputy; to raise a large revenue to relieve the king's necessities in England, and so render him independent of English Parliaments; to discipline and reform the Irish army, which might perhaps become an important factor in any dispute between the king and his English or Scotch subjects; and to drive the Low Church Irish clergy into the High Church ceremonial and doctrine of Archbishop Laud.

His first step on arriving in Dublin was to summon a Parliament. Charles was horrified at the suggestion. He had had experience of "that hydra," and had found it "as well cunning as malicious." But Wentworth knew what he was about, and saw that an Irish Parliament clenched in the vice of Poynings' Act could be used as a tool without risk of its becoming dangerous.

He had got the Irish Council well in hand, having snubbed them into sullen obedience at his first interview. On their showing signs of independence at the drawing up of the heads of bills for transmission to London, he had rated them soundly, and awed them into silence. The time-honoured claim of the lords of the Pale to be consulted on the projected measures was contemptuously set aside, and the only thing remaining to be done was to manipulate the elections. So dexterously was the packing of the Parliament managed, that the Protestants and Roman Catholics nearly balanced each other; and a picked handful of military men were returned who could be depended on to turn the scale as the lord-deputy desired.

Wentworth was careful to open Parliament with a