Strafford, THOMAS WENTWORTH, EARL OF, English statesman, was born on Good Friday, 13th April 1593, in Chancery Lane, London, at the house of his mother's father, Robert Atkinson, a bencher of Lincoln's Inn. The eldest of the twelve children of Sir William Wentworth, he represented a great Yorkshire family, which from before the Conquest had been seated at Wentworth-Woodhouse near Rotherham, and was allied to royalty itself. He grew up a keen sportsman, an apt and diligent scholar, and was sent at an early age to St John's College, Cambridge. In 1611 he was knighted and married; and having thereafter travelled for fourteen months in France and Italy, in 1614 he was returned to parliament for the county of York, and succeeded his father in the baronetcy and an estate of £6000 a year. In 1615 he became custos rotulorum for the West Riding—a post from which Buckingham sought two years later to oust him; else we know little about him during James I.'s reign save as a generally silent member in three brief parliaments, a strenuous student, and a frequent attendant at the Court of Star-chamber. His first wife, Lady Margaret Clifford, eldest daughter of the Earl of Cumberland, died childless in 1622, and in 1625 he married Lady Arabella Holles, the younger daughter of Lord Clare.
Conscious of his own splendid abilities, and with no great belief in parliamentary wisdom, loyal in his devotion to crown and church, an eager advocate of domestic reforms, and therefore opposed to all wars of aggression, Wentworth in Charles's first parliament (1625) acted with, yet was not of, the opposition; from the second he was purposely excluded by his appointment to be sheriff of Yorkshire. In the July of that same year (1626), after a vain application to Buckingham for the presidency of the Council of the North, he was curtly dismissed from the keepership of the rolls, and for refusing to pay the forced loan he was committed first to the Marshalsea and then to an easy captivity at Dartford. So in the famous third parliament (1628) he impetuously headed the onslaught, not on the king, but on his evil ministers, and pledged himself 'to vindicate—what? New things? No! our ancient, sober, and vital liberties! by reinforcing of the ancient laws made by our ancestors; by setting such a stamp upon them as no licentious spirit shall dare hereafter to enter upon them.' From its meeting on 17th March until 5th May he was the leader of the Lower House; on 7th July the Petition of Right (q.v.), superseding a similar measure of his own, became law; and on the 22d he was created Baron Wentworth, on 10th December Viscount Wentworth, and on the 15th President of the North. As such at York he set himself to govern, to strengthen government with an efficient militia and ample revenue, and to 'comply with that public and common protection which good kings afford their good people.' Towards these ends he used on occasion high-handed methods, which embroiled him, however, chiefly with the gentry. His second wife died in October 1631, leaving a son William, second Earl of Strafford (1626-93, died s.p.), and two daughters; and within a twelvemonth he married privately Elizabeth, daughter of Sir George Rhodes, knight.
In January 1632 he was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland, but it was not till the July of the following year that he landed at Dublin. His plans had, however, been meanwhile carefully matured; and with the subtlety of a Machiavel and the strength of an Englishman he straightway proceeded to coerce Ireland into a state of obedience and well-being unknown alike before and afterwards. He raised the revenue from an annual deficit of £14,000 to a surplus of £60,000, and the customs from £12,000 to £40,000; transformed the army from a rabble of 1300 to an orderly force of 8000; swept the seas of the corsairs infesting them; introduced the cultivation of flax, still Ireland's one flourishing industry; called into existence a docile parliament; did his utmost to cleanse the Augean stable of the Protestant Church; and, whilst seeking 'to draw Ireland into conformity of religion with England,' could yet boast truly that since he had 'the honour to be employed there, no hair of any man's head was touched for the free exercise of his conscience.' The aim of his policy (he and Land called it 'Thorough') was to make his master, 'the most absolute prince in Christendom;' and 'the choice for Ireland in the 17th century did not lie between absolutism and parliamentary control, but between absolutism and anarchy.' The words are Professor Gardiner's, and he adds that 'if Wentworth be taken at his worst, it is hardly possible to doubt that Ireland would have been better off if his sway had been prolonged for twenty years longer than it was.' Wentworth taken at his worst should be Macaulay's Wentworth—the killer of his first wife, the debauchee of women, the 'wicked earl,' the 'first Englishman to whom a peerage was a sacrament of infamy,' the 'lost Archangel, the Satan of the apostasy,' who from the time of that apostasy received, like fallen Lucifer, a fresh name, Strafford. By this last amazing blunder—the schoolboy might detect it, and yet it has lived for upwards of sixty years—Macaulay's ignorance may be fairly gauged, the falsity of his first two charges estimated. None the less, by Macaulay's verdict has Wentworth been widely condemned. One turns from it to Wentworth's own correspondence, and there stand revealed his tenderness for his family, his love of harmless amusements, his hatred of gaming and drunkenness, his contempt of courtiers, and the maladies which constantly beset him—fever, ague, gout, and the stone—and to which his choleric temper is largely ascribable. He was not otherwise faultless, though many of his errors—e.g. in the matter of monopolies and of the proposed plantation of Connacht—were errors of the age. He was too masterful and self-reliant, too heedless of the means towards his end, intolerant of opposition to his will. One instance of his methods must suffice. Lord Mountnorris, vice-treasurer of Ireland, was for words rashly spoken court-martialed, and sentenced to death. The sentence was never meant to be carried out; in fact, Wentworth added, 'I would rather lose my hand than you should lose your head,' and Mountnorris was simply stripped of his offices. He deserved to be stripped of them; still, this was not the way to get rid of an opponent.
Till February 1637 Charles seems never to have applied to Wentworth on questions of general policy, and then, when he sought his approval of a foreign war, he was met with dissuasion. Nor till September 1639 did Wentworth become the king's principal adviser, the mark of the royal favour being his elevation to the earldom of Strafford and the dignity of Lord-lieutenant of Ireland (January 1640). It was all too late then. The rebellion, provoked in Scotland by Charles's unwisdom, was spreading to England; and Pym and his fellows judged rightly that Strafford was the one obstacle to their triumph. His Irish parliament was all subservient, but he a week after the meeting of the Long Parliament in November was impeached of high-treason and lodged in the Tower. In the great trial by his peers, which opened in Westminster Hall on 22d March 1641, Strafford, broken though he was by sickness, defended himself with a fortitude, patience, and ability that moved even his accusers, whilst alarming them. The twenty-eight charges, covering 200 folios, at most amounted to 'cumulative treason;' the gravest of them, his having counselled the king that 'he had an army in Ireland which he could employ to reduce this kingdom' (query England or Scotland), was supported by only one witness, his personal enemy, Vane. Four others who should have heard the words declared that they had not heard them. To the Lords the question was his guilt or innocence, to the Commons his condemnation; their spirit was shown in St John's declaration the 'we give law to hares and deer, as beasts of chase, but knock foxes and wolves on the head as they can be found, because they be beasts of prey.' Accordingly, on 10th April the 'inflexibles'—Pym and Hampden were not of their number—dropped the impeachment for a bill of attainder, declaring that treason which could not be proved to be treason. The bill passed a third reading by 204 votes to 59 in the Lower House, by 26 to 19 in the Upper ('Stone dead hath no fellow,' said Essex); and on 10th May it received the royal assent. Strafford had written to Charles releasing him from his reiterated pledge that he should not suffer in life or honour or fortune; and Charles at last accepted the release. 'Put not your trust in princes'—the cry was wrung from Strafford; then he prepared himself quietly for death. They would not let him see his old friend Land; but he knelt for his blessing under the prison window as he passed to the scaffold. The lieutenant of the Tower would have had him take coach lest the mob should tear him to pieces, but 'No,' was his answer, 'I dare look death in the face, and I hope the people too.' And so he died valiantly, Christianly, on Tower Hill, 12th May 1641, and was buried at Wentworth-Woodhouse. His death was followed by the abolition of Episcopacy, monarchy, parliament itself.
We know Strafford better now than his contemporaries could possibly know him, through his Letters and Correspondence, edited by Knowler (2 vols. 1739), and Whitaker's Life and Correspondence of Sir George Radcliffe (1810). Radcliffe (1593-1657) for years was Strafford's confidant; and his brief 'Essay towards the Life of my Lord Strafford,' appended to Knowler's work, is one of our chief authorities. Modern Lives are by John Forster (Emm. Brit. Statesmen, vol. ii. 1836: Dr Furnivall in Berdoe's Browning Cycl. asserted that this was completed 'on his own lines' by Robert Browning, and as Browning's it was edited for the Browning Soc. by Mr C. H. Firth in 1892), J. B. Mozley (Essays Hist. and Theological, 2d ed. 1884), Elizabeth Cooper (2 vols. 1874), and H. D. Traill (1889). See also the articles CHARLES I. and LEAD, with works there cited; Browning's strangely unhistorical Strafford: a Tragedy (1837); ed. by Miss Hickey and Prof. S. R. Gardiner, 1884; and John Smith's Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Dutch Painters (vol. iii. 1831) for a list of the half-dozen portraits by Van Dyck, in which the 'lion-faced' earl still lives for us. Strafford's eldest daughter Anne married Edward Watson, second Baron Rockingham and first Earl of Rockingham, the ancestor of Earl Fitzwilliam; his second daughter Arabella married the Hon. Justin McCarthy, the Earl of Clancarty's third son, whom James II. created Viscount Mountcashell. A son and a daughter by his third wife both died unmarried.