So as considering (he wrote) that many of these graces are by no means to pass into laws, and not foreseeing what inconvenience might fall on his Majesty if these pressures were suffered to go on too far, I consulted these two judges and Sir George Radcliffe how we might incline the board to give them the negative answer, and take it off the King, which on Thursday last I effected.. so as now we are resolved, not only privately to transmit our humble advices on every article of the graces, but on Tuesday next to call this committee of the Commons before us, and plainly tell them that we may not, with our faith to our Master, give way to the transmitting of this law of threescore years, or any other of the graces prejudicial to the Crown; nay, must humbly beseech his Majesty they may not be introduced to the prejudice of his royal rights, and clearly represent unto the King that he is not bound, either in justice, honour, or conscience (sic) to grant them. And so, putting in ourselves mean betwixt them and his Majesty's pretended engagements, take the hard part wholly from his Majesty, and bear it ourselves as well as we may. ("Strafford's Letters," i. 279, 280.)

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There was something heroic and overwhelming in the dimensions of Wentworth's public wickedness. But it should be borne in mind that his conduct was not actuated by hatred of the Irish, but by mistaken devotion to the King. It may well be wondered at that with so loose a hold over them, the Irish made as yet no effort to shake off a government which used them so ill. But from the time of the accession of the House of Stuart a loyalty took possession of them only second to Wentworth's own. This was in part because the Stuarts were of Milesian origin, a fact on which great stress was always laid in Ireland; in part because they promised great things, and the Irish invariably believed in promises, however much experience might have warned them. When they took up arms at last, it was against the Puritans, not against the King. Besides their loyalty, apathy stood in the way of their resistance. After every struggle, with its consequent confiscation, a period of prostration ensued. And prostration there had beer in Ireland since Kinsale, and the awful close of the Ten Years' War. The Irish had not lifted a hand to prevent the laws against themselves from being carried out, even though their rulers were in a state little better than anarchy. Why did they not rise when the army to be resisted was only two thousand three hundred strong? We know they did not rise; and we know also, that, however sad their condition, however tempting the opportunity (as in 1745), they never could be roused from their lethargy when these silent periods wrapped the land as in the stillness of the grave.

The second session of Parliament opened on the 4th of November, 1634, when Lord Wentworth informed the

Commons that the King had only granted certain of the graces, as he, the Lord-Deputy, had not thought fit to transmit the others to his Majesty. This brazen falsehood was by way of following out the King's generous instructions to the effect that all the gratitude and none of the odium was to fall to his royal share. Even the poor spirit of the Commons was angered at the shabby treatment they had received, and Wentworth, who did not like to be thought mean and ungenerous, was not without his own cares. Among them Miss Cooper reckons a "Catholic conspiracy," though wherein the conspiracy existed it is not easy to find out. The Parliament, however, did credit to its Protestant majority by making the Court of Wards a legal institution. This court had been arbitrarily introduced into Ireland in the reign of James I., and "Murrogh of the Burnings," and the first Duke of Ormond were of its productions. But it had never been sanctioned by statute law till Wentworth had it instituted by the pliant Parliament of 1634, by means of "the Statute of Wills and Uses." It was no wonder that the "priests and fryers" did not like the Court of Wards, which threw the young orphans of the Catholic aristocracy and their education into Protestant hands as wards of Chancery, the King getting their fees and the Anglican clergy their souls. It was not for this last advantage, however, that Wentworth bolstered it up by arbitrary means, but because he hoped that it would bring about £3,000 per annum into the treasury.

In this Parliament the Earl and future Duke of Ormond first appears on the scene in the guise of a high-spirited young Irishman. The Lord-Deputy, like most promoters of despotism, intent on bringing all classes to a dead level under the feet of the King and his officials, had given orders that the Peers should not wear their swords in the House of Lords. Ormond, however, insisted on passing the doorkeeper girt with the obnoxious rapier, and was accordingly summoned before the Council to answer for his disobedience, when he declared that he had acted on his Majesty's commands. To prove this assertion he produced the King's writ, commanding him, as a belted earl, to attend the House of Peers wearing his sword. Wentworth, thus defeated with his own weapons, showed that he could be generous, and in recognition of Ormond's wit and spirit became his friend.

In the Protestant interest Charles certainly was foolish to dissolve this Parliament, as Wentworth had the wit to perceive, for a Protestant Parliament it indisputably was. The "Statute of Wills and Uses" was its work, and for the rest, Lord Wentworth, thanks to his knowledge of how to

manage the august legislative assembly then sitting in Dublin, contrived that the four first subsidies should reach a figure of £40,000 each, the two last £45,000. And "a gracious message" was nearly all that this magnanimous assembly received from the King in return. It was the fitting reward for men who had taken leave of their senses, if they ever had any. All that can be said on behalf of their possible sanity is that the majority, being Protestants, hoped the King would keep the Papists out of their estates. Yet they knew that even to themselves he had given no security of tenure, and some of them soon had cause to see that where land was concerned, the Lord-Deputy made no distinction between Catholic and Protestant.

Parliament was no sooner prorogued than Wentworth profited by his leisure to set in motion a "Royal Commission for the Inquiry into Defective Titles," of which the first object was to obtain the whole province of Connaught for the Crown. Wentworth, perhaps, deserves some credit for his moderation in that he chose the most barren of the four provinces. But there were rich men in Connaught; and wherever there was a rich man, Wentworth seemed impelled by a law of his being to fly thither and put his hand into that man's pocket for the benefit of the King. The examination of titles in Connaught could hardly be described as the free and unbiassed action of the law. It might seem strange that the LordDeputy selected as jurors men of wealth and estate in the coveted province; but he did nothing which was not dictated by forethought and wisdom. If the jurors found for the Crown, means might be taken to prevent their being altogether losers; but if they did not, the result would eventually be the same, and their pockets would also be rifled as a punishment for their disloyalty. "I resolved," wrote Wentworth, "to have persons of such means as might answer the King in a round fine in the Castle Chamber, in case they should prevaricate, who, in all seeming, even out of that reason, would be more fearful to tread shamefully and impudently aside from the truth, than such as had less or nothing to lose.' He certainly made no allowance for their consciences. Some of them, indeed, showed that they had none, or at least none of so much fortitude as was required to find against the Crown after the charge which Wentworth gave them, and which intimated pretty plainly what obstinate jurors had to expect. The juries in Roscommon, Sligo, and Mayo considered that the nature of this charge made it incumbent on them to find for the King. The Galway jury alone gave an adverse verdict. Great were the Lord-Deputy's astonishment

and indignation at their boldness; but he had already so contrived that it should turn to the advantage of the King. For having opposed the pecuniary interests of his Majesty, they were fined £4,000 apiece, and imprisoned till such time as the sum should be paid, while all their estates were confiscated to the Crown. It even appears, from Wentworth's letters, that the counsel whom he had permitted to plead against the Royal claim were thenceforth debarred from practising their profession.

For

The attention of the Defective Titles Commission was not long confined to the kingdom of Connaught. It was presently at work in the east and south; and it is satisfactory to know that the unfortunate Celt was not the only sufferer, and that justice of a rough, unconscionable sort was executed on many of the families who had stepped into the property of others under the auspices of James I. or Elizabeth. The Boyles, who, penniless a generation back, had made a rapid fortune in Ireland, were obliged to compound for their estates; the City of London redeemed its lands in Derry for £20,000; and even the young Earl of Ormond, in spite of Wentworth's friendship for him, was glad to avoid becoming the victim of a confiscation by paying a heavy sum into the treasury. Wentworth was no hater of the Irish race. They were not to him "foreigners, and of all foreigners the most hated." He wished for their well-being, so far as that well-being was compatible with the King's pecuniary advantage, and it appeared that, as a general rule, the two things were synonymous. He misunderstood the Irish as much as is implied by his misunderstanding their religion, and that is a good deal; but he had none of the vulgar feeling of the time against "Teague.' His hand fell heaviest on the wealthy of all classes. He was kind to the poor, and wished to encourage them to labour and steady cultivation of the soil. He was not much before his time in his notions of political economy; but he introduced the linen trade with the hope of its being to Ireland what the wool trade was to England. It was hardly to be expected however that he should be very popular after the Defective Titles Commission.

After all, it went hard with the terrible Deputy. He did not enjoy being hated; yet he incurred hatred, and spent a good part of his own income in serving a king who refused to recognize his zeal by making him an earl, and whom he could hardly keep from squandering offhand the wealth which so much toil and so much crime had laid up in the Irish exchequer. The career of Wentworth opens out views of the intense meanness of Charles I. which would not have been

revealed even by his continual duplicity towards the Irish Catholics and the English Puritans. He was loath to reward a servant whose chief fault was an unscrupulous devotion to his welfare, and who had accepted his destined position as the scapegoat of his shabby and unprincipled dealings. Occasionally Charles came down from the Olympian heights of his royal dignity to express a cold recognition of Wentworth's merits when, by fair means or foul, he had been particularly successful in gratifying the King's continued desire for money, or had performed some disagreeable piece of service well. Still Wentworth felt deeply the contrast between his own loyal devotion and the King's coolness. He was anxious to be advanced in the peerage, not for ambition's sake, but because the advancement would be a mark of approbation from the King in the eyes of the world. Perhaps Charles did not wish that approbation to be made public. Perhaps he objected to the principle of loyal subjects receiving rewards for services which it was only their bounden duty to render. Whatever his motive, he certainly delayed conferring an earldom on Wentworth. In 1636, however, the Lord-Deputy received some crumbs of comfort. He went to London to give an account of his doings, and was kindly received by the King; and he also had an opportunity of meeting his friend Laud, who, with all his faults, was a sincere man. Yet if Laud was one of Wentworth's few faithful friends, in one respect he gave him trouble. His laughable theory of English Catholicism, and of the bounden duty of his Majesty's subjects to profess his Majesty's religion was one which even a High Church statesman with a grain of sense would never attempt to bring into practice. Laud's sword cut every way; and as he urged the King to persecute the Puritans in England and Scotland, so he had always urged Wentworth to persecute the Catholics in Ireland. Wentworth had refused in this matter to gratify his archiepiscopal friend. He disliked the Catholic Church, but knew that no amount of persecution would rob her of her Irish children. He was therefore more surprised than pleased when, on returning to Ireland, he found that the Protestant bishops had re-established the hated Sunday fine, in accordance with instructions from Laud. He angrily stopped their proceedings, his biographer thinks, only just in time to prevent a rebellion; but we incline to the opinion that the people were not ripe for rebellion at that time; it required a Parsons and a Borlase to ripen them. It should also be remembered that when the civil war of 1641 did at last break out, it was not instigated by "the priests" at all, but by a company of

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