The Lost Archangel: A New View of Strafford

Great Strafford! worthy of thy name though all
Of thee could be forgotten but thy fall.

With these words Sir John Denham, not the most inspired of poets, apostrophized the great minister of King Charles I, remembering how, day after day in Westminster Hall under the eyes of several thousand spectators, he had fought the long duel for his life with his Parliamentary accusers.

So did he move our passion, some were known
To wish, for the defence, the crime their own.
Now private pity strove with public hate,
Reason with rage and eloquence with fate ...

The solitary figure of Strafford, foredoomed to death by Parliamentary policy and popular hatred seemed at the time and long after a fit subject for tragedy. He inspired much contemporary and some later verse; he was the subject of crude popular prints in his own time and of much-reproduced Victorian historical paintings; he became the hero of at least two poetic dramas, one in French by Lally Tollendal one in English by Browning, and he has up to the present day provoked even quite placid historians into bursts of fine writing.

He was truly a dramatic figure but there was as much difference between the reality of his drama and the legend which grew up round him as there is between the man himself and the figure depicted on Victorian canvasses. A once famous engraving of The Trial of Strafford, still to be found in the coffee-rooms of country hotels, shows him dauntlessly upright in the midst of his accusers. This figure is carefully based on a portrait by Van Dyck. But Van Dyck had painted Strafford five years before the trial, at the height of his power, before ill-health had bowed his carriage and pain ravaged his face. An etching done by Wenceslas Hollar who was probably present at the trial itself shows a stooping, prematurely aged man, the head sunk down between the shoulders and covered, against the draughts of Westminster Hall, by a close-fitting, furred bonnet.

This true and far more tragic picture lacks the theatrical dignity of the romanticized version. Yet great majesty that bowed and shrunken figure must have had, for Strafford at his trial, dominated the scene, inspiring wonder in his friends and. unwilling respect in his enemies.

Opinions have always differed on the merits of his case but there is only one opinion of his greatness. If he was bad there was nothing small in his badness, if good nothing commonplace in his goodness. His enemies found Satanic comparisons; and friend and foe alike saw him larger than life.

From his first appearance on the political scene he commanded attention. Thomas Wentworth (he did not become Strafford until the close of his career) was born in 1593, the eldest son of a wealthy Yorkshire landowner. At the age of twenty-one he succeeded his father as the owner of a fine estate and the head of a respected family. He gained early the reputation of an able administrator of his own fortune and a conscientious public servant in such local responsibilities as came his way. His first marriage to Lady Margaret Clifford, daughter of the impoverished Earl of Cumberland, allied him with the ancient aristocracy of the kingdom. She died young and his second marriage to Lady Arabella Holies, daughter of the rich Earl of Clare, brought him into touch with the rising new nobility of wealth among whom were found the leading opponents of the Court. He first attracted public notice when he suffered imprisonment for refusing the Forced Loan imposed by King Charles I in 1626. Soon after he led the House of Commons when they forced the Petition of Right on an unwilling King. His career and future seemed naturally to lie with the Parliamentary opposition to the Crown, for he belonged by birth, alliance and character to that powerful section of the ruling class who were bent on curbing the prerogative of the Crown.

Great, therefore, was the dismay among them when Sir Thomas Wentworth, once leader of the House of Commons, became Lord Wentworth and a member of the Royal Council. This was his position in 1629 when King Charles dissolved Parliament and launched his long experiment in personal government.

For the next ten years, as Lord President of the North and as Lord Deputy of Ireland, Wentworth exercised his formidable administrative talents. In Ireland, in particular, he set on foot far-reaching reforms, re-organized the Church and the Army, revived and developed trade, introduced new arts and manufactures, contemplated and partly carried out far-reaching land settlement. His activities covered every sphere of national life from starting a theatre in Dublin—in the teeth of Puritan disapproval—to bringing in craftsmen for glass and brick-making and establishing the linen trade in Ulster. His letters and reports show him equally at home with the financial intricacies of tax-farming, as with practical methods for reclaiming waste land, with Vitruvian principles of architecture as applied to public buildings or the training of an army and the equipment of a fleet. They also show him fighting on every front—in the administration of justice, the army, the redistribution of land, the gathering of taxes—against the unscrupulous and the privileged. The speculators in land, the monopolists, the petty officials or the great lords who sold their favours, the courtiers who clamoured for grants of land—against these he fought unceasingly. His multitudinous and unrelaxing energy caused his admirers to compare him to Atlas supporting the world on his shoulders, but the task to which he was called in 1639 proved too much even for his massive strength.

King Charles had provoked revolt in Scotland and found too late that he had no money to sustain a war against the rebels and no support from his English subjects. Wentworth was recalled from Ireland to solve a problem he had not created and which would not have arisen had his advice been sought before, rather than after, the disaster. In belated recognition of his services the King made him Earl of Strafford. For ten months, under this name which was to become the worst hated in the kingdom, he battled heroically to redeem his master’s errors, with a mutinous army, a country on the verge of rebellion and a Court whose denizens regarded the King’s deplenished Exchequer as something from which they were privileged “to take out by handfuls and scatter abroad at their pleasure”.

Strafford himself was worn out by illness, racked at repeated intervals by gout and the stone. “Pity me, for never came man to so lost a business,” he wrote to a friend in Ireland as King Charles’ government tottered to ruin. The cry echoes unanswered down the years. He was too harsh, too capable, too great. No one pitied Strafford.

The only solution to the King’s financial problem was to call Parliament. It was evident before it met, in November, 1640, that Strafford would be the object of immediate attack. He was the only able, and therefore the only dangerous, minister the King had. And he had not been forgiven the betrayal of eleven years before.

Strafford, who knew the danger, asked leave to go back to Ireland or to remain at his home in Yorkshire. But Charles clung to his only strong man, insisted on his coming to London and pledged his royal word that he should not suffer in life, fortune or estate. Charles was in no position to keep his word as Strafford well knew. But he obeyed, came to London and was immediately impeached and sent to the Tower.

The charge against him, that of High Treason, was not convincing. He had acted throughout within the rights of the two highly authoritative—quasi vice-regal—positions which the King had bestowed on him. Too much of the evidence against him came from tainted sources, from men whose pretensions he had curbed, in the public interest, either in Ireland or the North. Under his cross-examination the case began to break down and the House of Commons, led by his one time colleague John Pym, altered their tactics and resorted to the unusual proceeding of a Bill of Attainder. Strafford was in effect to be condemned to death not by the ordinary process of trial but by an Act of Parliament framed specially for the purpose.

It was by now spring time, a season favourable to mob disorders, and the London rabble, roused to frenzy by rumours of a plot to destroy the House of Commons, to rescue Strafford and to overawe them all with troops, besieged Parliament. In these conditions the Bill passed both Houses. Strafford in the Tower saw that the time had come to release the King from his futile promise of safety. “To set Your Majesty’s conscience at liberty,” he wrote,

“I do most humbly beseech Your Majesty, for prevention of evils which may happen by your refusal,to pass this Bill, and by this means to remove, I cannot say this accursed, but I confess, this unfortunate thing forth of the way towards that blessed agreement which God I trust shall ever establish between you and your subjects.”

Charles gave in, though not perhaps so much to Strafford’s advice as to the specious arguments of some of his other councillors who assured him that his conscience as a man and his conscience as a King were two quite different things. The Bill became law and Strafford went to his death on Tower Hill on 12th May, 1641, before an immense crowd of gratified onlookers. They watched in respectful silence but cheered themselves hoarse as soon as the axe had fallen.

The tragedy and drama of such a career is evident. But the dispute about Strafford’s character and motives has gone on from that day to this. Royalists see him as an example of unswerving loyalty. To them he remains the proto-martyr of the Stuart cause, loyal even unto death, seeking by the sacrifice of his own life to draw on himself the vindictive but ephemeral wrath of the people so that, the storm once passed, his master might reign in their hearts once more.

To others, and those not necessarily the most hostile, Strafford’s tragedy begins at an earlier date and has a more nobly Shakespearean line. It is essentially a tragedy of ambition and pride. Strafford is the Coriolanus of the English scene, the man who would not stoop to please the multitude or to canvass the favours of lesser men, and so fell a victim to the popular passions he had so loftily despised.

Yet others see him as one overtaken by Nemesis. He is the Apostate, felled by those whom he himself had once led. Lured by a title and the hope of power he abandoned the cause of Parliament and became the instrument of despotism. And so with terrible poetic justice he was brought down by these very hands which had once sustained and applauded him. This is perhaps the most popular version of his story and it received early countenance from Clarendon who is the first to repeat the almost certainly apocryphal words spoken by John Pym in 1629 when he heard of Wentworth’s defection—“You may leave us. but we will never leave you while your head is on your shoulders.” Macaulay fixed this opinion in a phrase that cracks like a thunderbolt: “the lost Archangel, the Satan of the Apostacy”. Strafford is no longer a Shakespearan human figure; he has become Miltonic, superhuman: not Coriolanus but Lucifer.

There is some truth in all these versions. Strafford was loyal, proud, ambitious, and he abandoned the Parliamentary cause although he himself never saw his action as a betrayal. Here, indeed, contemporary and later opinion has been less than fair to him though his most devoted admirer can hardly fail to see how the misjudgment arose. His conduct obeyed the logic not of the political theorist but of the administrator. He was interested neither in the privileges of Parliament nor the prerogative of the Crown as such. He was interested—and almost exclusively interested—in efficient and just government. When the King’s government was inefficient, as it had been in the sixteen twenties, he was to be found among its most eloquent critics. But a man bent on reforming government is better placed to do so in power than out. When he was offered a seat at the Council table he would have been untrue to his genius and himself to refuse. His action seen from this point of view, which was his own, was honest and logical. It did not seem so to others, and it was his typical weakness that he could not see any position except his own and so could not understand and would not mollify the bitterness of his critics.

There was a time when it was difficult if, not impossible, to judge Strafford without reference to the constitutional quarrel in which his fate was involved. But as his attitude of mind and the quality of his genius become more clear the difficulty grows less. The central theme of seventeenth century politics is the struggle between Parliament and the Crown. Was England to become a centralized despotism on the contemporary European model, or was the medieval representative institution of Parliament to develop into a body capable of guiding policy and controlling the Crown? Since the issue between government by decree and government by argument is still a live one, this is a question on which the historian is bound to take sides. Strafford therefore has been judged good or bad, right or wrong, according to the historian’s point of view.

It was, however, merely an accident of time which made Strafford the proto-martyr of Divine Right. He was, it is true, the principal and the most determined minister during King Charles’ personal rule and he was the first to die in King Charles’ cause! But he was essentially an administrator, not a theorist, a practical man with a passion for order and justice who would have acted very much as he did within the framework of whatever state he happened to serve. Nothing that he did or said suggests that he felt the least call to be a constitutional innovator or a political reformer. Like all great administrators he was a practical man whose aim was to make the laws work, not to turn them inside out. It was his misfortune to be born in an age when both parties in the State, King and Parliament, were—whether they knew it or not—set upon turning everything inside out.

Certainly, Strafford uttered quotable maxims of political theory from time to time. It was a fashion of the age which he could hardly have escaped; moreover, few intelligent men can work without some theoretical framework to support their endeavours. The framework need not be very original or very important; it was not so with Strafford, although the forcible eloquence with which he sometimes spoke of his ideas made a greater impression on contemporaries and on later historians than their intrinsic value deserved.

“I have ever admired the wisdom of our ancestors,” he said at his trial, “who have so fixed the pillars of the monarchy that each of them keeps due measure and proportion with the other, and have so handsomely tied up the nerves and sinews of the State that the straining of one may bring damage and sorrow to the whole economy.”

This, and much more like it, is very simple traditional political theory without very much practical bearing on what was happening in England when he said it. He is not to be judged by the theoretical phrases scattered through his sayings and writings; if he is so judged he appears as an essentially uncreative, unoriginal thinker, a simple-hearted conservative who would prefer to see nothing altered in the constitution ever. Stare super vias antiquas was his favourite Latin tag when political theory was in question. In practice, not in theory, he showed his genius; as an organizer and an administrator he was transcendant. As a thinker he was nothing very remarkable.

By the irony of fate this brilliant, honest, practical man worked for a King who was not practical and a government which was neither brilliant nor honest. King Charles, although pleased enough when Strafford’s good management increased his revenue, persistently undervalued his ablest minister, went against his advice on matters of crucial importance—for instance, over Ship money and the fatal introduction of the Prayer Book in Scotland—and gave him full powers only when it was too late.

Meanwhile, King Charles gave countenance and trust to men who regarded his service principally as a means of enriching themselves. Adventurers gambling in Irish land, speculators clamouring for monopolies (since monopolies had been made illegal they were called patents instead), courtiers squabbling over the profits of tax-farming and quarrelling for the appointments which were richest in perquisites—all these Charles countenanced or encouraged. Thus for the greater part of his career Strafford was carrying out his reforms in the teeth of criticism from the self-interested at Court or on the Royal council itself.

Hated by Parliament as the instrument and upholder of the King’s government, he was hated at Court and resented by most of his colleagues as the constant obstructor of their personal plans.

There were, of course, some reasons for this general dislike of Strafford which were less creditable to him. “Nature hath not given him generally a personal affability,” said one observer and that was perhaps putting it mildly. He had a haughty and arrogant manner, a great conceit of himself, not very much consideration for the susceptibilities of other men and a very bad temper. He was ashamed of this last failing and strove to control it, but the exercise of power is not mellowing to the choleric temperament and he suffered during his last years from a painful illness which did not help.

Yet, whatever his faults of bearing and character, it remains true to say that he was hated more for his virtues than for his vices.

His fellow minister Archibishop Laud, in the enforced leisure of a long imprisonment, saw in the end most clearly the true nature of Wentworth’s tragedy. “He served a mild and gracious prince, who knew not how to be or be made great.” His talents and his devotion were alike thrown away by a master who did not know how to make use of them.

Strafford’s tragedy was thus in the end a tragedy of waste. Here, undoubtedly, was one of the most remarkable administrators this country has ever produced; but the circumstances of his career and the character of his master and his colleagues forced him to pit his talents against impossible obstacles and in the end to become a sacrifice to the incompetence, pusillanimity and corruption of perhaps the most inept group of councillors who ever laid their heads together in London.

Most of Strafford’s achievements perished in the savage wars which spread like an eruption over Ireland for the ten years following his death. But he left one remarkable monument: the bulk of his colossal correspondence—with the King, with the Archbishop, with the council in England, with friends, with enemies, with his family—was carried home from Ireland and carefully preserved at Wentworth Woodhouse, his home in Yorkshire. A small but very discriminating selection was published in 1739 and on this, for two centuries, historians have based their estimate of his character. But Lord Fitzwilliam, the present owner of Wentworth Woodhouse, has taken the generous and altogether admirable step of placing the documents in the Central Library at Sheffield where they can, for the first time, be seen in their full and massive splendour by historians.

They are very varied documents. Here, for instance, is an objective account of Wentworth’s youth from which we learn for the first time the origins of his friendship with Christopher Wandesford, his right hand man in Ireland; they had been boys at school together. Here are letters from and to his children, letters from his shy young third wife Elizabeth Rodes, written with a care which betrays her anxiety to please him in all things even to the neatness of her handwriting. Here are letters to his small group of old and true friends—Wandesford, Radcliffe, the Earl of Cumberland: letters which abound in the rather laboured humorous quirks that were characteristic of him, that light up with occasional allusions to architecture, poetry or going to the play, or descriptions of his unforced, endearingly schoolboyish pleasure in hunting, hawking and once even, camping. Here is the incomparably valuable week-by-week correspondence with Archbishop Laud in which the historian can follow, in all its complex detail, the gradual disintegration of King Charles’ government. Here are letters about the minor troubles of office—the mistakes of secretaries or the impertinence of young courtiers. What did he feel about Air. Skipwith whose ill-advised love affair is a recurrent theme in the correspondence of a whole summer? Mr. Skipwith had been highly recommended to his household for one of the numerous decorative posts in which young gentlemen in the seventeenth century were employed by the great. One imagines a personable young man discreetly well dressed hovering in the Lord Deputy’s cortege. But Mr. Skipwith forgot himself and made love to—But to whom? So far I have not come on the lady’s name: merely a hint that she was some kind of a cousin to Strafford. The Lord Deputy exploded: one of those famous bursts of choler no doubt. Mr. Skipwith was sent away, but our practical administrator did not forget to make use even of the disgraced servant. Since Mr. Skipwith was to be packed off to England he could at least carry some letters. He did, and to every one of those to whom he carried a letter he told his pathetic story, so that one after another approached the Lord Deputy—the Duchess of Buckingham, the Earl of Lindsay, the Duke of Lennox and more—all asking that the young gentleman’s fault be forgiven. How can the Lord Deputy be so harsh, pleads the old dowager Duchess of Richmond, “you that have so much wit and comeliness, and have been a lover yourself”?

So there at last is the whole picture, the little and the great, the obstructions and the achievements, the minor quarrels and the major reforms: the whole gigantic correspondence dominated by a gigantic personality. Haughty and generous, difficult and affectionate, indulgent to his children and considerate to his true friends, cautious in his judgments, accurate and witty in his observations of men and motives, with Yorkshire good nature and Yorkshire obstinacy, and a consuming passion for justice. Here at last is the man, nearer to Coriolanus than to the fallen Archangel, but inimitably and solely himself.