I foresee full well, how I shall be skirmished upon for it on that side causeless traducing and calumniating of me is a spirit that hath haunted me through the whole course of my life, and now become so ordinary a food, as the sharpness and bitterness of it in good faith distempers not my taste one jot. Finally, as I formerly signed the sentence together with them, so do I most heartily now join in their letters to you, where we all become humble petitioners to his majesty for his life, which was, God knows, so little looked after by me, that howbeit I hold under favour the sentence most just, yet were it left me in choice, whether he must lose his head, or I my hand, this should redeem that. His lordship was prisoner in this castle some two days, but upon his physician's certificate, that the badness of his lodging might prejudice his health, I sent him upon good bond restrained only to his own house, where he is like to remain till I receive his majesty's further pleasure concerning him." It is most unlikely that such an extraordinary favour as this had been granted on the application of a physician merely, while the lord deputy had an obvious reason for keeping out of sight the influence of the lady.

Some short time after, Mountnorris, on condition of submitting to Wentworth, and acknowledging the justice of his sentence, received his liberty. Prosecutions, however, had been lodged against him meanwhile in the star-chamber, and he felt himself a lowered and wellnigh beggared man. "At my lord Mountnorris his departure hence," writes the deputy, "he seemed wondrously humbled, as much as Chaucer's friar1, that

1 Chaucer and Dr. Donne appear to have been Wentworth's favourite poets. Chaucer indeed, to the court readers of that day, was as Shakespeare in our own. It is clear too, from the frequent

would not for him any thing should be dead; so I told him I never wished ill to his estate, nor person, further than to remove him thence, where he was as well a trouble as an offence unto me; that being done (howbeit thorough his own fault with more prejudice to him than I intended) I could wish there were no more debate betwixt us; and I told him that, if he desired it, I would spare my prosecution against him in the star chamber there." Immediately before this passage occurs, in the same letter, Wentworth had remarked :-" I assure you I have had a churlish winter of this, nor hath the gout been without other attendants that do prognostick no long life for me here below! Which skills not much. He lives more that virtuously and generously spruds one month,

use of peculiar expressions in his despatches, that the lord deputy was not unacquainted, and that intimately, with the great dramatist, though he never, as with Chaucer and Donne, quotes connected passages. It is worth subjoining, as an instance out of many, one of Wentworth's sneers at sir Piers Crosby-that "trifle Crosby," as he elsewhere calls him. "Since his departure I have neither heard from him, nor of him, more than that he vouchsafed with his pretty composed looks to give the Gallway agents countenance and courtship before the eyes of all the good people that looked upon them, gracing and ushering them to and from all their appearings before the lords; there is no more to be added in his case but these two verses of old Jeffrey Chaucer

'No where so busy a man as he ther n'as,

And yet he seemed busier than he was.'

:

When the newsmonger Garrard heard of the affair of Mountnorris, he quotes Dr. Donne, as if to communicate some tender sympathy to his lordship in that way :- "When first I heard the news, which was on St. Stephen's day, and how all men talked of it, it disorder'd me, it brake my sleep, I waked at four in the morning, it made me herd the next day less in company;-not that I believed what was said, but that I had no oracle, no such friend on the sudden to go to, who could give such satisfaction as I desired. Noblest lord, your letter hath done it; what Dr. Donne writ once is most true, Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls, for thus friends absent speak, &c."

than some other that may chance to dream out some years, and bury himself alive all the while." The life of the lord deputy had, indeed, in the intensity of sensation it had required for its sustainment, covered a larger span of existence than years can measure, and now the term that remained to it was fated to be dashed with almost unceasing anxieties and troubles, more bitter in proportion to the temperament they wrought on.

His anticipations of the enmity that would be provoked against him by the case of Mountnorris, were more than realised. Laud ventured to intimate to him-"I find that, notwithstanding all your great services in Ireland, which are most graciously accepted by the king, you want not them, which whisper, and perhaps speak louder where they think they may, against your proceedings in Ireland, as being over-full of personal prosecutions against men of quality. . . . . And this is somewhat loudly spoken by some on the queen's side. ... I know you have a great deal more resolution in you, than to decline any service due to the king, state, or church, for the barking of discontented persons; and God forbid but you should: and yet, my lord, if you could find a way to do all these great services and decline these storms, I think it would be excellent well thought on." 1 To this advice succeeded

1 Strafford Papers, vol. i. p. 479. Lord Cottington's account was something different:-"You said right, that Mountnorris his business wou'd make a great noise for so it hath, amongst ignorant, but especially ill-affected people; but it hath stuck little among the wiser sort, and begins to be blown away amongst the rest. His lordship, in the same letter, communicates to Wentworth a remarkable sequel to the affair. The lord deputy, in order to procure Mountnorris's offices for his favourites (chiefly young Loftus, the husband of a lady who has been before adverted to), had proposed to distribute 6000l. as a sort of purchase of them, to the principal English ministers. (Strafford Papers, vol. i. p. 508.) The sly old courtier Cottington, however, into whose hands the business

other galling announcements. Lord Clanricarde died suddenly, from a broken heart it was said, in consequence of the Galway proceedings; and the death of the sheriff of that county, who had been imprisoned by Wentworth, immediately followed. Both of these deaths were laid at his door. "They might as well," exclaimed the lord deputy, adverting to the first-" they might as well have imputed unto me for a crime, his being threescore and ten years old!" With cooler satire he put off the fate of the sheriff. "They will lay the charge of Darcy the sheriff's death unto me. My arrows are cruel that wound so mortally-but I should be more sorry, by much, the king should lose his fine." Still this did not subdue the daily increasing murmurs; one exaggeration begot another; and he resolved at last, by a sudden public appearance in England, to confound his accusers, and, even in their very teeth, to throw for new marks of favour.

Permission having been obtained from the king, Wentworth appeared at the English court in May, 1636. He was received with the highest favour, and so delighted the king with his account of the various measures by which he had consolidated the government of Ireland, that he was entreated by his majesty to repeat the details “at a very full council.” "Howbeit I told him, I feared

fell, hit on a more notable expedient. "When William Raylton first told me," he writes, "of your lordship's intention touching Mountnorris's place for sir Adam Loftus, and the distribution of monies for the effecting thereof, I fell upon the right way, which was, to give the money to him that really could do the business, which was the king himself; and this hath so far prevailed, as by this post your lordship will receive his majesty's letter to that effect; so as there you have your business done without noise.' The money happened to be particularly welcome to Charles, who had just been purchasing an estate ! See Strafford Papers, vol. i. p. 511.

his majesty might be wearied with the repetition of so long a narrative, being no other than he had formerly heard, and that I desired therefore I might give my account to the lords without his majesty's further expence of time, yet he told me it was worthy to be heard twice, and that he was willing to have it so."1 No wonder ! A more striking description was never spoken. He detailed all the measures he had accomplished for the church, the army, and the revenue, for manufactures and commerce, for the laws and their administration,—and through every vigorous and well-aimed word shone the author of all those measures! Wentworth adverted, towards the close of his relation, to "some particulars wherein I have been very undeservedly and bloodily traduced." He mentioned the slanders that had been circulated, proclaiming him " a severe and austere hardconditioned man, rather indeed a basha of Buda, than the minister of a pious Christian king." His report of what followed is a direct illustration of much that has been advanced in this memoir. "Howbeit, if I were not much mistaken in myself, it was quite the contrary; no man could shew wherein I had expressed it in my nature, no friend I had would charge me with it in my private conversation, no creature had found it in the managing of my own private affairs, so as if I stood clear in all these respects, it was to be confessed by any equal mind that it was not any thing within, but the necessity of his majesty's service, which inforced me into a seeming strictness outwardly. And that was the reason indeed. For where I found a crown, a church, and a people spoiled, I could not

1 See Strafford Papers, vol. i. pp. 13-22. The despatch in which Wentworth again, for the third time, details his remarkable narrative, is addressed to Wandesford, who, in the meanwhile, was administering the Irish government.