to be commenced against him in the castle chamber, and compelled him to disgorge his prey. The same nobleman had built a gorgeous tomb for his deceased wife in St. Patrick's Cathedral, in the place on which the high altar had once stood. Wentworth compelled him to remove it to another part of the church. Some kind of decency he enforced in the ceremonial of the church, though far short of that which Laud was enforcing in England. In November 1634 he forced the Irish convocation to substitute the articles of the church of England for the Calvinistic ones drawn up by Ussher which they had previously adopted. He also set himself to suppress the puritan practices of the Ulster settlers, most of whom were Scots. But his main effort was kept for the recovery of the property of the church as an inducement to men of zeal and ability in England to accept preferment in Ireland.
To secure a supply of money which would enable him to carry out his objects till the growth of prosperity should give him a constant revenue, Wentworth recommended Charles to allow him to summon parliament. An Irish parliament did not, like an English parliament, represent a tolerably united nation. It had been so manipulated as to contain a large minority of representatives of English and Scottish immigrants, another large minority representing the Roman catholics for the most part of Anglo-Norman descent, besides a small number of officials who could form a majority by throwing their weight to one side or the other. Such a body easily lent itself to management, and Wentworth intended it to be managed. Parliament met on 14 July 1634. In his opening speech the lord deputy frankly declared that the king looked to the members to pay off his debts, and to fill up the deficit of 20,000l. a year. It was beneath his master's dignity, he said, to ‘come at every year's end, with his hat in his hand, to entreat that you would be pleased to preserve yourselves.’ If they would trust the king by voting supplies in this session, there should be another session for redress of grievances. Let them not run into factions dividing between catholic and protestant, English and Irish; above all, let them make no division between king and people. ‘Most certain is it that their well-being is individually one and the same, their interests woven up together with so tender and close threads as cannot be pulled asunder without a rent in the commonwealth’ (Strafford Letters, i. 286). A test division showed that the protestant members, reinforced by the officials, were in a majority of eight. On 18 July six subsidies were voted, and on 2 Aug. parliament was prorogued. On 20 Sept. Wentworth asked the king for an earldom as a sign of his support in the struggle on which he was embarked, but met with a denial from Charles, who liked to be the originator of his own favours (ib. i. 301, 331).
The second session of parliament commenced on 4 Nov. What the catholic members expected was that Wentworth would introduce bills to confirm the ‘graces’ to which Charles had given his word. On his announcing that he did not intend to submit all of these to legislation, they being, through the absence of some of the protestant members, in a majority, broke out into what Wentworth held to be a mutiny, and, under the leadership of Sir Piers Crosby, a privy councillor, urged the rejection of those bills that had been laid before them. In a despatch to the secretary of state, Wentworth treated their conduct as arising not from a natural anger at seeing the king's promise to them broken, but from a desire to prevent the cause of good government prospering in English hands; for he wrote, ‘The friars and jesuits fear that these laws would conform them here to the manners of England, and in time be a means to lead them on to a conformity in religion and faith also; they catholicly oppose and fence up every path leading to so good a purpose; and indeed I plainly see that so long as this kingdom continues popish, they are not a people for the crown of England to be confident of; whereas if they were not still distempered by the infusion of these friars and jesuits, I am of belief they would be as good and loyal to their king as any other subjects’ (ib. i. 345). In these words lay the strength and weakness of Wentworth's Irish policy. He would strive his best to raise Ireland to the highest standard of English well-being, but his reforms must be emphatically English. The customs, the feelings, the very religion of Irishmen, might of necessity meet with contemptuous toleration for a time, but it was the business of governments ultimately to sweep them away in order that Irishmen might at last be happy in conforming to the English model. Wentworth through the return of the protestant absentees recovered his majority. He struck Crosby's name off the privy council book, and in this and in two other short sessions in 1635, he obtained the passage of a body of legislation carrying into effect the greater number of the ‘graces.’ He would gladly have kept this parliament in existence, but Charles insisted on a dissolution.
