God's Playthings 5

God's Playthings 5

In 1633 Wentworth was made Lord Deputy of Ireland, and endeavoured to

reduce order into that vexed and discontented country by measures which

were abused as despotic, but which were necessary to a man occupied

with great schemes. England could never be a great empire while Ireland

was an independent kingdom; his claim of Connaught only anticipated the

inevitable, and if the army he was so abused for raising could have

been kept together under his direction, the crown of England might have

been saved. As far as time permitted, he introduced social benefits

into the wretched land and encouraged the linen industry by planting

flax.

 

But he was too late, perhaps too impetuous, blinded by his own genius

for command into overlooking the steady rise of the democracy; he

himself described his policy as “thorough.” Had he been allowed the

time, he would have made a notable thing of this policy; but the tide

was against him, and bore him sharply out to ruin.

 

Private malice, not his own faults, brought about his downfall, and he

was thrown by a misuse of the law as wanton as any tyranny that could

be brought against him. In 1639 John Pym carried out his threat and

impeached him of high treason; Wentworth, newly created Lord Strafford,

was committed to the Tower, and the outward disgrace and real glory of

the man began.

 

It was one of the most memorable of all state trials, and lacked no

element of the tragic, the strange, the terrible, or the dramatic.

 

The prisoner was he who for over ten years had been the greatest man

in the three kingdoms; the principal accuser was one who had been the

closest friend of the man he accused; the judges were eighty peers of

the realm, the witnesses the two Houses. A King who loved and a Queen

who hated the accused were present. The prisoner conducted his own

defence, and outside beyond the doors of Westminster Hall the first

murmurs of the growing civil war were beginning to rise and swell.

 

Sir Anthony Van Dyck painted Lord Strafford as a dark, handsome man

of a robust type dictating to his secretary; the picture shows a

personality such as is in accordance with what we know of the man, and

when looking at the proud, half-frowning face it is easy to imagine how

he stood during his trial, pale, composed, erect, scornful of them,

seeing very surely the axe ahead, having no trust save in the sad-eyed

King at whose ear the Bourbon Queen whispered hatred of him, yet

using all his magnificence of eloquence to save himself as one who is

conscious that his life is worth defending.

 

Thirteen accusers, who relieved each other, plied him with questions

for seventeen days, and he answered them all with unshaken judgment,

calm and grace, unaided, unpitied. John Pym’s hatred spurred his

enemies on, and Lord Strafford must have tasted the bitterest of all

humiliation when he looked to where sat his friend Charles Stewart, not

daring to lift a hand to save him–and he had hoped to make his King

great indeed.

 

The man on trial for his life and honours and the King in his regal

seat exchanged many a deep look across the commoners who were the

masters of both–“he trusts me, and I am helpless” was like a dagger in

the heart of Charles.

 

By his side always sat the Queen, Mary of France, black-eyed, small, in

satin and pearls, ready with her hand on his wrist, her voice in his

ear: “Do not rouse the people–let Strafford go—”

 

She had always hated him; she hated any who endeavoured to share her

dominion over her husband; she began, too, to be afraid of the people,

and as she was of the blood royal of France, a breed that could not

understand concession, she and her priests urged the King into further

tyrannical measures; first, let Strafford go: he had devised the

unpopular laws; if his death would appease the people, let them glut in

his blood and keep their complaints from the ear of his Majesty.

 

So the Queen; but the King loved Strafford, who had served him to this

end of ruin, and when he looked across at the dauntless figure pleading

his cause to ears deaf with prejudice, he vowed in his heart that his

minister should not die, and cursed the barking commoners who forced

him there to witness the humiliation of this his faithful servant.

 

The genius of one man was triumphant over the malice of many. Strafford

argued away every charge raised against him. A bill of attainder was

then brought forward, hurried on, and passed on April 26th, a week

after he had closed his splendid defence.

 

The King, desperate and seeing his own throne shaking, yet had the

resolution to refuse his assent; he had promised his protection to

Strafford and would not give way.

 

The whole nation rose to demand the blood of Thomas Wentworth; Laud was

already in the Tower, the Puritan party dominant; the fallen minister

had no friend save the King.

 

His ambitious, lofty, and reserved spirit tasted great agony while he

waited through the long days of early spring, tramping his chamber in

the Tower–he who had hoped to make England great–and here was England

howling for his life and honours … here was John Pym and his fanatic

followers triumphant.

 

“What is left? Can the great spirit rise to the great crisis? Having

proudly lived, can I proudly die? Can I still serve England–now?”

 

The King was firm, and public feeling rose to a panic of excitement.

Revolution was on the point of shaking the very palace. The Queen, with

a baseness doubly vile in a woman, used her arts to wrest death from

Strafford for her husband, vowed with tears to flee to France. The

Bishop of Lincoln urged that the needs and desires of the nation were

more than a mere private promise.

 

But the King was firm; he would not sign the death warrant of Strafford.

 

Then the Queen, potent for mischief, wrought on the King, since he was

obstinate on that point, to save his servant by violent means. The

distracted Charles took her fatal advice and endeavoured to seize the

Tower of London by force by means of the troops lately raised by the

Queen.

 

This attempt on the keys of the kingdom threw the nation, already in a

ferment, into a tumult of wrath and fear, and Lord Strafford was lost.

 

The wildfire of party zeal inflamed men into believing anything

desperate of the King; thrice the members of the House of Commons fled

on a cracking of the floor, thinking they had trod again over gunpowder

as in the former reign. There was nothing too monstrous to be stated,

nor too extravagant to be believed.

 

But the King would not sign the death warrant of his friend and

servant; he was supported by the Bishop of London, who bade him listen

to his conscience rather than to the fierce demands of party. Amid all

the press of turning strife one man was calm–the prisoner in the Tower

who saw every day how he had failed in his scheme of government and how

he had been the means of embroiling the King with the people instead

of establishing a great man over a great nation and making a light in

Europe of Charles Stewart.

 

Of all bitter failures, what can be more bitter than that of a great

statesman who hugely stakes and hugely loses beyond redemption, beyond

hope? The proud dark-faced man who had stood so high and dreamt so

daringly had his vigils of anguish during those long May days and

nights in the old Tower already darkened with noble blood and the

memory of splendid sufferers. He had lost everything but his life, and

that hung on the promise of the King. My lord did not doubt that his

master would keep that promise; but what was mere life to a man who

only valued existence as it meant use, power, achievement?

 

He who had given the King and England his best now gave all left to

him. On one of those awakening days of spring, when even in the Tower

there were trees bursting into leaf, glimpses of cloud-flecked blue,

bars of sunshine across the cold walls and sounds from the wide river

of music and merry-making, Lord Strafford wrote to the King, asking,

for the sake of the peace of England, to be left to his fate.

 

In these words he concluded his noble letter: “My consent will more

acquit you to God than all the world can do besides. To you I can

resign the life of this world with all imaginable cheerfulness.” The

King gave way, but with no abatement of his anguish, since he justly

felt that such a request was but another reason for him to keep his

word.

 

He could not, when he had consented, sign the warrant himself, so this

was done by four lords, and he sent a message entreating mercy of the

peers, or at least a delay; but there was no pity in England for Lord

Strafford, nor for the King.

 

The worst half of the tragedy was his; he never forgot nor shook his

conscience free of what he had done. When he came to his own agony and

bent his sad head to the block he looked at Juxon, that same bishop

who had been advocate for Strafford, and said, “Remember,” and it was

believed that the terrible whisper referred to the forsaken friend who

had died the same death eight years before.

 

At the moment he fell into a kind of apathy in the midst of the

rejoicing faction who had their way at last.

 

Lord Strafford prepared for death; he was in the full vigour of life,

of a worldly temper, proud and ambitious; the warm days were full of

the keen joy of life. He tasted to the utmost the sharpness of the

struggle between flesh and spirit. When he heard from the written

paper the actual words of the King formally condemning him he was for

a moment broken with emotion and overcome at thought of the friendship

that had failed so miserably; he, beloved of the King, was to die an

attainted man, a death humiliating and shameful, branded as a traitor.

 

He struggled to control his haughty spirit, to subdue the flesh that

clung to lovely life, but always before his eyes were the ripening

green, the sweet early weather, the sounds from the river, and it was

not easy.

 

The execution was hurried on; on the 12th of May he went to his death

in black satins like the great gentleman he was; as he left the gate

Archbishop Laud, his one-time coadjutor, now his fellow-prisoner, met

him, and he went on his knee to receive the blessing of one who was

to so quickly follow him to the scaffold, then on between his guards

silent and scornful like the leader of them all, while on his face

were the low-breathed air and the early sunshine, and in his ears the

calls of the birds and the swish of the river rippling hurriedly under

the fortress walls.

 

Many men have died for England in many ways, none under circumstances

more difficult and bitter than this proud man who sank to rest upon the

block that May day while his sick, haunted King waited in the great palace for the awful news of the irrecoverable.