Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford (13 April 1593 12 May 1641) was an English statesman who played a major role in the period leading up to the outbreak of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. A prominent supporter of Charles I, from 1632 to 1640 he was Lord Deputy of Ireland, where he established a strong authoritarian rule. Recalled to England, he became a leading advisor to the King, attempting to strengthen the royal position against Parliament. When Parliament condemned Strafford to death, Charles reluctantly signed the execution warrant and he was executed.
Personal details Thomas Wentworth was born in London on 13 April 1593, eldest son of Sir William Wentworth, 1st Baronet, of Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire family, and his wife Anne. He was educated at St John's College, Cambridge, became a law student at the Inner Temple in 1607, and in 1611 was knighted. He married firstly Margaret, daughter of Francis Clifford, Earl of Cumberland and Grisold Hughes.
Early parliamentary career The young Sir Thomas Wentworth, 2nd Baronet, entered the English Parliament in 1614 as Yorkshire's representative in the "Addled Parliament", but it was not until the parliament of 1621, in which he sat for the same constituency, that he took part in a debate. His position was ambivalent. He did not sympathise with the zeal of the popular party for war with Spain, favoured by George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, James I's foremost advisor and favourite, but James's denial of the rights and privileges of parliament seems to have caused Wentworth to join in the vindication of the claims of the House of Commons, and he supported the protestation which dissolved the third parliament of James.
In 1622 Wentworth's first wife Margaret Clifford died. Wentworth, according to his friends, was deeply grieved by her death; but in February 1625 he married Arabella Holles, daughter of John Holles, 1st Earl of Clare and Anne Stanhope: a marriage which was generally believed to be a true love affair on both sides. He represented Pontefract in the Happy Parliament of 1624, but appears to have taken no active part. He expressed a wish to avoid foreign complications and "do first the business of the commonwealth".
In the first parliament of Charles I, in June 1625, Wentworth again represented Yorkshire, and showed his hostility to the proposed war with Spain by supporting a motion for an adjournment before the house proceeded to business. He opposed the demand for war subsidies made on Buckingham's behalf—after the death of James I, Buckingham had become first minister to Charles—and after Parliament was dissolved in November he was made High Sheriff of Yorkshire, a position which excluded him from the parliament which met in 1626. Yet he had never taken up an attitude of antagonism to the King. His position was very different from that of the regular opposition. He was anxious to serve the Crown, but he disapproved of the King's policy.
In January 1626 Wentworth asked for the presidency of the Council of the North, and was favourably received by Buckingham. But after the dissolution of the parliament, he was dismissed from the justiceship of the peace and the office of custos rotulorum of Yorkshire—which he had held since 1615—probably because he would not support the court in forcing the country to contribute money without a parliamentary grant. In 1627, he refused to contribute to the forced loan, and was subsequently imprisoned.
The Petition of Right and its aftermath In 1628, Wentworth was one of the more vocal supporters of the Petition of Right, which attempted to curb the power of the King. Once Charles had grudgingly accepted the Petition, Wentworth felt it appropriate to support the crown, saying, "The authority of a king is the keystone which closeth up the arch of order and government". He was consequently branded a turncoat.
In the parliament of 1628, Wentworth joined the popular leaders in resistance to arbitrary taxation and imprisonment, but tried to obtain his goal without offending the Crown. He led the movement for a bill which would have secured the liberties of the subject as completely as the Petition of Right afterwards did, but in a manner less offensive to the King. The proposal failed because of both the uncompromising nature of the parliamentary party and Charles's stubborn refusal to make concessions, and the leadership was snatched from Wentworth's hands by John Eliot and Edward Coke. Later in the session, he quarrelled with Eliot because Wentworth wanted to come to a compromise with the Lords, so as to leave room for the King to act unchecked in special emergencies.
On 22 July 1628, not long after the prorogation, Wentworth was created Baron Wentworth, and received the promise of the presidency of the Council of the North at the next vacancy. This implied no change of principle. He was now at variance with the Parliamentary Party on two great subjects of policy, disapproving both of the intention of Parliament to take the powers of the executive and also of its inclination towards Puritanism. When once the breach was made it naturally grew wider, partly from the energy each party put into its work, and partly from the personal animosities which arose.
As yet Wentworth was not directly involved in the government of the country. However, following the assassination of Buckingham, in December 1628, he became Viscount Wentworth and not long afterwards president of the Council of the North. In the speech delivered at York on taking office, he announced his intention, almost in the words of Francis Bacon, of doing his utmost to bind up the prerogative of the Crown and the liberties of the subject in an indistinguishable union. "Whoever", he said, "ravels forth into questions the right of a king and of a people shall never be able to wrap them up again into the comeliness and order he found them". His tactics were the same as those he later practised in Ireland, leading to the accusation that he planned to centralise all power with the executive at the expense of the individual in defiance of constitutional liberties.
The parliamentary session of 1629 ended in a breach between the King and Parliament, which made the task of a moderator hopeless. Wentworth had to choose between either helping the House of Commons dominate the King or helping the King to dominate the House of Commons. He chose the latter course, throwing himself into the work of repression with characteristic energy and claiming that he was maintaining the old constitution and that his opponents in Parliament were attempting to alter it by claiming supremacy for Parliament. From this time on, he acted as one of two principal members (the other being Archbishop William Laud of Canterbury) in a team of key royal advisors (the "Thorough Party") during an 11-year period of total monarchical rule without parliament (known both as "the Personal Rule" and the "eleven-year tyranny").
Lord Deputy of Ireland
The 1st Viscount Wentworth, as he had become, became a privy counsellor in November 1629. On 12 January 1632 he was made Lord Deputy of Ireland, arriving in Dublin on 23 July the following year. He had recently suffered the loss of his beloved second wife Arabella in childbirth. Despite his genuine grief for Arabella, his third marriage to Elizabeth Rhodes in 1632 was also a happy one; but through a strange lapse of judgement, he did not announce it publicly for almost a year, by which time damaging rumours about the presence of a young woman in his house (who was reputed to be his mistress) had gained wide circulation. Wedgwood remarks that it was typical of Wentworth to be oblivious to the bad impression which actions like this might make on the public. Gossip later linked his name with that of Eleanor Loftus, daughter-in-law of The 1st Viscount Loftus, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, but although a strong bond existed between them, and her death in 1639 caused him much grief, there is no evidence that their relationship went beyond friendship.
In his government here he proved to be an able ruler. "The lord deputy of Ireland", wrote Sir Thomas Roe to Elizabeth of Bohemia, "doth great wonders and governs like a king, and hath taught that kingdom to show us an example of envy, by having parliaments and knowing wisely how to use them." He reformed the administration, summarily dismissing the inefficient English officials. He succeeded in so manipulating the parliaments that he obtained the necessary grants, and secured their cooperation in various useful legislative enactments. He started a new victualling trade with Spain, promoted linen manufacture, and encouraged the development of the resources of the country in many directions. The Court of Castle Chamber, the Irish counterpart of the Star Chamber, which up to that time had only operated intermittently, was transformed into a regular and efficient part of the Irish administration.
Customs duties rose from a little over £25,000 in 1633–34 to £57,000 in 1637–38. Wentworth raised an army, put an end to piracy, imposed Arminian reforms onto the Calvinist-dominated Church of Ireland, and launched a campaign to win back Church lands lost during the Reformation. His strong administration reduced the tyranny of the wealthy over the poor. Yet these measures were all carried out by arbitrary methods which made them unpopular. Their aim was not the prosperity of the Irish but the benefit to the English exchequer, and Wentworth suppressed the trade in cloth "lest it should be a means to prejudice that staple commodity of England." Castle Chamber, like its model Star Chamber, was accused of brutal and arbitrary proceedings. Individual cases of unfairness included those of Robert Esmond, a ship's captain, and cousin of Laurence Esmonde, Lord Esmonde, accused of customs evasions, whom Wentworth was alleged to have assaulted, so causing his death, Lord Chancellor Loftus and Lord Mountnorris, the last of whom Wentworth caused to be sentenced to death to obtain the resignation of his office, and then pardoned. Promises of legislation such as the concessions known as 'The Graces' were not kept.
Wentworth ignored Charles' promise that no colonists would be awarded land, to the detriment of Catholic landholders, in Connaught. In 1635 he raked up an obsolete title—the grant in the 14th century of Connaught to Lionel of Antwerp, whose heir Charles was—and insisted upon the grand juries finding verdicts for the King. One county only, County Galway, resisted, and the confiscation of Galway was effected by the Court of Exchequer, while Wentworth fined the sheriff £1,000 for summoning such a jury, and cited the jurymen to the Castle Chamber to answer for their offence. In Ulster the arbitrary confiscation of the property of the city companies aroused dangerous animosity against the government. His actions in Galway led to a clash with the powerful Burke family, headed by the ageing Richard Burke, Earl of Clanricarde. Clanricarde's death was said by some to have been hastened by the clash: Wentworth, on hearing these reports, said he could hardly be blamed for the fact that Clanricarde was nearly seventy. It was, however, unwise to have made an enemy of the new Earl, Ulick Burke, 5th Earl of Clanricarde, who through his mother Frances Walsingham had powerful English connections: Clanricarde's half-brother, Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, by 1641 was to become one of Wentworth's (who became Earl of Strafford in 1640) most implacable enemies.