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During the years 1639 and 1640 the work of training the army, many of the officers of which and most of the soldiers, were Catholics, was pushed forward, but the triumph of the Scots and the execution of the Earl of Strafford in April 1641 made it impossible to use it for the purpose for which it was designed.
Of all the demands of the parliament, Charles refused only two. Though he relinquished almost every power of the crown, he would neither give up his friends to punishment, nor desert what he esteemed his religious duty. The severe repentance which he had undergone for abandoning Strafford, had no doubt confirmed him in the resolution never again to be guilty of a like error.
Thomas Wentworth, successively created Lord Wentworth and Earl of Strafford, a man of great abilities, eloquence, and courage, but of a cruel and imperious nature, was the counsellor most trusted in political and military affairs.
But miserable was my disappointment: I was assailed by one cry of reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation; English, Scotch, and Irish, whig and tory, churchman and sectary, freethinker and religionist, patriot and courtier, united in their rage against the man who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I. and the Earl of Strafford; and after the first ebullitions of their fury were over, what was still more mortifying, the book seemed to sink into oblivion.
"So great a defection in the kingdom," wrote Lord Northumberland, "hath not been known in the memory of man." Strafford alone stood undaunted.
The whole country, it must be remembered, was in a state of the wildest and most irrepressible excitement. The fall of such a ruler as Strafford one under whose iron will it had for years lain as in a vice would alone have produced a considerable amount of upheaval and confusion.
The Earl of Strafford went for a few days to The Hague, to inform the States of Her Majesty's express commands to his colleague and himself, for signing the peace as soon as possible; and to desire they would be ready at the same time: which the pensionary promised; and that their plenipotentiaries should be empowered accordingly, to the great contentment of Mons.
We saw, too, a rich marble monument of one of the Strafford family, and the tombstone of the famous Earl himself, a flat tombstone in the pavement of the aisle, covering the vault where he was buried, and with four iron rings fastened into the four corners of the stone whereby to lift it.
The unanimous votes of the two houses of parliament, and the names, as well as the number of those who pronounced Lord Strafford to be guilty, seem to put this beyond a doubt. Dryden, writing soon after the time, says, in his "Absalom and Achitophel," that the plot was "Bad in itself, but represented wore:" that "Some truth there was, but dash'd and brew'd with lies:" and that
And *he perished at last, overwhelmed, and still unsubdued, by the open violence of his fierce and unrelenting antagonists. The articles of impeachment against Strafford are twenty-eight in number; and regard his conduct, as president of the council of York, as deputy or lieutenant of Ireland, and as counsellor or commander in England.
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