Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford

English politician

• Born: April 13, 1593
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: May 12, 1641
• Place of death: London, England

A controversial figure, Strafford was one of the principal advisers of Charles I during the era of personal rule, from 1629 to 1640. As such, he became a focus for the dissatisfaction and resentments of nearly all segments of British society against Charles’s arbitrary exercises of royal power and pretensions toward absolutism.

Early Life

The first earl of Strafford (STRAF-uhrd) was born Thomas Wentworth, the son of William Wentworth of Wentworth Woodhouse, Yorkshire, and his wife, Anne Atkinson of Stowell, Gloucestershire. The Wentworths were an important and wealthy family of southern Yorkshire, with extensive family and political connections among the gentry and peerage of northern England. Thomas Wentworth attended Saint John’s College, Cambridge, and studied law at the Inner Temple in London and traveled in France. In 1611 he married Lady Margaret Clifford, daughter of the earl of Cumberland; after Lady Margaret died in 1622, he married Lady Arabella Holles, daughter of the earl of Clare. These marriages allied Wentworth with powerful families, but his relations, at least with the latter, were strained. Even at this early point, Wentworth evinced the harsh and austere personality and the authoritarian tendencies that later made him so useful to the king and so disliked by his contemporaries. His second wife died in 1631, and Wentworth later married Elizabeth Rodes, who long survived him.

Life’s Work

Through his family connections, Wentworth represented Yorkshire in the Parliament of 1614, the Addled Parliament, in which Crown and Parliament fought each other to a stalemate over the growing fiscal and constitutional problems of the country. This was a formative experience for Wentworth, for in this Parliament he first witnessed the intransigence of the Crown and the increasing aggressiveness of the House of Commons and became fully aware of the growing crisis that was to form the background to his adult life.

For a long time Wentworth refused to take sides or accept the possibility that politics might have become hopelessly polarized. Instead, he acted on the assumption that it was possible to reconcile the differences between Crown and Parliament and to restore the balance of the Elizabethan era, which he believed to be the traditional form of governance. He was always clear, however, that the Crown was the supreme authority in the state and that Parliament, in case of conflict, must defer to it, especially during a national emergency. Wentworth was elected to the parliaments of 1621, 1624, and 1625, in each of which he insisted that reconciliation was possible on the major issues of the day and strove to overcome the increasing polarization of public life by means of compromise and negotiation. Wentworth did, however, oppose the Crown’s fiscal policies, and he firmly refused to repay a compulsory loan, an offense for which he was briefly imprisoned in 1627.

Wentworth emerged briefly as a leader of the Commons in 1628, largely on the strength of his resistance to forced loans; he also opposed the policies of the first duke of Buckingham, the king’s favorite. Wentworth still insisted that it was possible to find a way to preserve the traditional rights and privileges of the subject without injury to the traditional prerogatives of the Crown. The result of this conviction was the Petition of Right , of which he was a principal mover.

Wentworth’s position as a parliamentary leader was, however, based not on a general opposition to the royal regime but rather on objections to specific policies, which he believed were weak, corrupt, or ineffective. After the passage of the Petition of Right in 1628, Wentworth began to move rapidly toward the royal camp. Shortly after the prorogation of Parliament, he was created Baron Wentworth, and after the death of the duke of Buckingham he became in rapid succession a viscount, president of the Council of the North, and a member of the Privy Council.

In time, this shift came to be viewed as apostasy to the Parliamentary cause and Wentworth was regularly described as “Black Tom Tyrant” and the “grand apostate”; as late as the nineteenth century he was labeled the “Satan of Apostasy” by Thomas Babington Macaulay. He soon emerged as by far the most able, if also the least popular, of all royal advisers. It is perhaps ironic, in the light of the violent criticism heaped upon him because of his shift to the royal side, that Wentworth appears never really to have enjoyed full royal favor until the last year of his life and that he felt personally aggrieved that the king would not take full advantage of his abilities.

Between 1629 and 1633, Wentworth’s principal sphere of activity was northern England, where as lord president of the Council of the North he was a powerful representative of the Crown’s interests at all levels and had ample opportunity to demonstrate his harsh, often brutal, manner. He was named lord deputy of Ireland in the summer of 1631 but only took up office in 1633, sailing for Ireland in July of that year. He retained his position in northern England, henceforth exercised through a deputy, and undertook his rule in Ireland with a grant of extraordinary powers from the king.

Once in Ireland, Wentworth immediately undertook to apply his theories of “Thorough” to the country, by which he meant a fiscal, legal, and administrative reorganization carried out to the benefit of the Crown. He was especially interested in the economic development of Ireland, and he had some considerable successes in this line, but the ultimate beneficiaries were intended to be England and especially the king. Land tenure was the most complicated and volatile question in Ireland, and Wentworth was determined to seize every opportunity, and to make opportunities where none clearly existed, to extend the royal interest and to centralize royal power.

Wentworth tried to establish royal control over virtually the entire province of Connaught and sought to continue the practice of supplanting the native population with English settlers. He made no effort whatsoever to comprehend and work within the traditional structure of Anglo-Irish politics but rather, relying on his support from Charles I , rode roughshod over all local interests and created a ferocious hatred of his regime and all of his doings. His famous battles with the first earl of Cork (Richard Boyle), the greatest landlord in Ireland, and with the first Baron Mountnorris were merely the most publicized of his full-dress battles with the Irish establishment. He managed by force and by not-infrequent illegalities to keep the lid on Ireland during his residence there, but the harvest of these years came in the revolt of 1641 and the subsequent collapse of English influence in Ireland for the better part of a decade.

As the crisis in England drifted toward civil war in 1639, Charles I recalled Wentworth to England. He was raised from deputy to lord lieutenant of Ireland and was also raised to the peerage as earl of Strafford. He left Ireland for the king’s side in September, 1639, in order to take charge of a situation that, he quickly realized, had been badly mismanaged. For the next fifteen months, Strafford was the most powerful man in England after the king. He now possessed the supreme authority that he had always wanted, but he needed to act defensively, to try to salvage a situation that he had watched developing for years from his vantage point in Ireland. When he arrived at court, the English armies had already been driven ignominiously from the field by the Covenanting Scots, royal authority had virtually disappeared in Scotland, disaffection was spreading rapidly throughout England, and the royal government, which had few people of any real ability in it, was beginning to disintegrate.

At the beleaguered court, Strafford was the loudest in resisting any compromise or concession and in advocating the fullest use of the king’s prerogative power, even if it meant suspending parliamentary statutes. He adamantly opposed all concessions to the Scots, bolstered the king’s inclination to resolve his problems by force rather than by negotiation and concession, and undertook to provide the means by which the king might overcome his enemies. Strafford returned to Ireland and summoned a thoroughly cowed Irish Parliament to Dublin, where it voted the king taxes, promised him an army of eight thousand infantry and one thousand cavalry, and, for good measure, thanked the king for sending Strafford to govern them. That done, Strafford left Ireland for good on April 3, 1640. As soon as it became clear that he was embroiled in English affairs, Strafford’s influence in Ireland rapidly waned and his numerous enemies undermined his regime.

By the time Strafford arrived in London in April of 1640, the Short Parliament was in session and the radical faction had already demonstrated its control over the House of Commons. A crisis soon arose over the king’s revenue demands, demands that even Strafford thought unrealistic, and Parliament was peremptorily dissolved. Strafford reluctantly agreed with the king’s decision. The afternoon of the dissolution, May 5, the king’s closest advisers met to discuss the crisis in affairs and especially the continuing threat of Scottish intervention in northern England. Strafford took a prominent part in the debate and resisted all concessions to the Scots. He urged the king to seek a military solution and alluded to the army that the Irish Parliament had recently promised him. Precisely what Strafford said on this occasion was later the subject of heated debate and was instrumental in destroying his reputation.

Strafford and his policy of force were adopted by King Charles. In August, 1640, Strafford replaced the duke of Northumberland as general commander in the north, and he spent the remainder of that summer and the following autumn attempting to fashion some sort of an army with which to resist the Scots; at the same time, he urged the king to enact strong and authoritarian measures to control the populace. By October, 1640, however, it was clear that no successful resistance could be offered the Scots and a compromise was patched together at Berwick. Charles I agreed to call another parliament, which met on November 3.

When King Charles returned to London, he asked Strafford to join him. Strafford did so, though he must have realized that he was walking into the greatest crisis of his life. He was the most hated man in three kingdoms. Although he was not really responsible for the policies of the era of personal rule during the 1630’s (except for those in Ireland), Strafford now became the focus of every complaint. He was also, and more accurately, seen as the most capable man in the royal service by the radical elements in the House of Commons and as the one man who was capable of effecting a dramatic restoration of royal authority by policy or by force. He was marked for destruction by John Pym and his supporters.

Strafford arrived in London on November 10, and the trap was instantly sprung. The attack on him began in the House of Commons the following morning, and by afternoon charges of high treason were lodged against him in the House of Lords. Strafford was in conference with Charles I when word of these proceedings was brought to him and he immediately left to defend himself before the House of Lords. The Lords, however, refused to hear him and had him arrested. In late November, articles of impeachment were presented to the Commons, and Strafford was taken to the Tower.

Impeachment proceedings began in late March of 1641, but Strafford discomfited his enemies by a sustained and brilliant attack on their charges. Eventually, it became clear that Parliament had failed to prove him guilty of the articles of impeachment, and Pym and his associates fell back on a bill of attainder, in which nothing needed to be proved legally and the ordinary safeguards did not apply. The bill of attainder passed easily through the Commons, then through the Lords, but the apparent sticking point was the necessity of obtaining the king’s signature. That difficulty was overcome by instigating a crisis over threats of a military plot.

The royal palace at Whitehall was besieged and nearly overrun by rioters; the safety of the royal family was in doubt for a time. Strafford wrote a letter to the king insisting that his life should not stand between possible reconciliation of Crown and people. Though there was little enough reason to expect a reconciliation, Charles I took this opportunity to sign the act of attainder, after which Strafford was promptly and publicly beheaded on Tower Hill. Strafford’s behavior throughout the protracted ordeal was nearly sufficient in many eyes to redeem his previous behavior. The king, on the other hand, never ceased to regret his approval of Strafford’s attainder. The wisdom of Parliament’s strategy was immediately apparent, for with the arrest and then death of Strafford, it became increasingly obvious that the royal cause had no one else of stature significant to sustain it, not even the king himself.

Significance

The first earl of Strafford has remained a controversial figure down to the present day. He has had the peculiar fate of being most praised and most damned for things he never did. As the most capable and ruthless of King Charles I’s servants, he was credited in his own lifetime with a degree of influence that he possessed only in the last, forlorn months of his life. Though in public a firm supporter of royal policies, in private he frequently disagreed with royal policies and deplored the king’s reliance on corrupt or incompetent administrators. He had relatively little influence on the broad course of royal policy in England during the 1630’s and none whatever on the disastrous Scottish policy of Charles I and William Laud that brought on the Civil War.

It was Strafford’s fate to be brought in at the end to try to salvage a crisis for which he was not responsible, and he fell a victim, in large part, to other’s mistakes. More recently, he has been seen as a potential man on horseback, a strong, authoritarian ruler who sought to cut through decaying political and administrative forms in order to achieve a more ordered and productive society. In fact, however, he was not a man who somehow transcended his time and anticipated modern methods of strongman rule. There is no evidence of a comprehensive concept of a change or transformation of politics or society. Strafford believed primarily in energy and force and sought to reinvigorate the English government by his own example. In particular, close investigation of his transactions in his native Yorkshire, and most especially in Ireland, reveal a man who failed to transcend contemporary standards of political morality. He was the king’s best servant and a man of immense energy and will, but he was not a modern reformer.

Bibliography

Canny, Nicholas P. Making Ireland British, 1580-1650. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Argues that Ireland’s political allegiance was reshaped by British settlement and cultural assumption, long before the military conquest. Contains a chapter about Wentworth’s policy of plantation in Ireland.

Kearney, Hugh F. Strafford in Ireland, 1633-1641: A Study in Absolutism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. A revised edition of the standard contemporary work on the subject, offering a detailed examination of a crucial era in Ireland’s history.

O’Grady, Hugh. Strafford and Ireland. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1923. An older work, largely superseded by Kearney, but still of value.

Pogson, Fiona. “Making and Maintaining Political Alliances During the Rule of Charles I: Wentworth’s Associations with Laud and Cottington.” History 84, no. 273 (January, 1999): 52. Investigates Strafford’s associations with key figures at the English court and his relations with Archbishop Laud and Francis, Lord Cottington.

Smith, David L. Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c. 1640-1649. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Examines Charles I’s relationships with Parliament in the 1640’s, providing details of Strafford’s attainder and execution.

Wedgwood, Cicely V. The King’s Peace, 1637-1641. London: William Collins Sons, 1960. Reprint. New York: Penguin Books, 1983. Combines scholarship and literary style to produce the most popular survey of the period.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford, 1593-1641: A Revaluation. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Reprint. London: Phoenix Press, 2000. The standard life of Strafford. It is, as the full title suggests, a revaluation of Strafford’s life in the light of manuscript sources that became available in the 1950’s, primarily the Strafford papers in the Sheffield Central Library. A radically different view of Strafford has emerged since the appearance of this material.