CHAP. V - Strafford and the Short Parliament

Summary

About this time the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Thomas Viscount Wentworth, was summoned to England to take a seat in the Council of the King: the affairs of Scotland were the immediate cause of his return.

The statesmen of England have always been distinguished from those of other countries by the combination of their activity in the Council and in the Cabinet with an activity in Parliament, without which they cannot win their way into the other sphere. Wentworth, like others, had first made himself a name in Parliament as a resolute and dangerous opponent of Buckingham. But there was as yet no clear consciousness of the rule, infinitely important for the moral and political development of remarkable men, that the activity of a minister must be harmonious and consistent with his activity as a member of Parliament. In the case of Wentworth especially it is clear that he opposed the government of that day, by which he was kept down, only in order to make himself necessary to it. His natural inclination was, as he once avowed, to live, not under the frown, but under the smile of his sovereign. The words of opposition to the government had hardly died away from his lips, when, at the invitation of that government, he joined it, although no change had been introduced into its policy. He accepted the position of Lord President in the North, although the powers of this office, which transgressed the ordinary limits of jurisdiction, were repugnant to those conceptions of English law of which he had just before been the champion.