758 



STRAFFOHD 



STRAIN 



(he and Laud called it 'Thorough') was to make 

 hia master 'the most absolute prince in Christen- 

 dom; 'and ' the choice for Ireland in tin- ITtli <<<> 

 tury did not lie between alMtolutisin and parlin- 

 ment&ry 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 ln-en prolonged 

 for twenty years longer than it was.' \\ cut worth 

 taken at his worst should be Macaulay's Went- 

 worth the killer of his first wife, the debaucher 

 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 imme, 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 gaining 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 other- 

 wise faultless, though many of his errors e.g. in 

 the matter of monopolies and of the proposed 

 plantation of Connaught were errors of the age. 

 He was too masterful and self-reliant, too heedless 

 of the means towards his end, intolerant of opposi- 

 tion to his will. One instance of his methods must 

 suffice. Lord Mountnorris, vice-treasurer of Ire- 

 land, 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 Weutworth 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 Straf- 

 ford 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 Fym 

 and his fellows judged rightly that Strafford was 

 the one obstacle to their triumph. His Irish par- 

 liament was all subserviency, 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 Wwtomwtar 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 alarm- 

 ing tliem. The twenty-eight charges, covering 

 200 folios, at most amounted to 'cumulative 

 treason;' the gravest of them, his having coun- 

 Belled the king that 'he hail an army in Ireland 

 which he could employ to reduce tki* kingdom' 

 (query England or Scotland), was supported by 

 only one witness, his personal enemy, V ane. 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 Com- 

 mons his condemnation ; their spirit was shown in 

 Bt John's declaration the 'we give law to hares 



and deer, as lieasts of chase, but knock foxes and 

 \vnl\i-nn the head as they can ! found, IM -cause 

 they lie beasts of prey.' Accordingly, on Kith 

 April the ' inllexihles ' Pym and Hampdcu were 

 not of their number dropped the impeachment for 

 a bill of attainder, declaring that treason which 

 could not In- proved to be treason. The hill 

 passed a third reading by 204 votes to 69 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. Stratford 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 Laud ; 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, 

 hut ' No,' was his answer, ' I dare look death in 

 the face, and I hope the people too.' And so he 

 died valiantly. Cliristianly, on Tower Hill. 12th 

 May 1641, and was buried at Wentworth-Wood- 

 liouse. His death was followed by the abolition 

 of Episcopacy, monarchy, parliament itself. 



We knew Strafford better now than his contemporaries 

 coold possibly know liiiu, through his Lrttert and Cor- 

 retpondence, edited by Knowler (2 Tola. 1739), and 

 Whitaker's Life and Corrtti>ondrnce of Kir <!rrtir 

 Sadcli/e (1810). Radcliffe (1608-16B7) fot years wa 

 Strafford's confidant ; and hia brief ' Easy towards the 

 Life of my Lord Strafforde,' appended to Knowler' 8 work, 

 is one of our chief authorities. Modern laves are by 

 John Forster (Kmiii. Brit. Ktatetmen, vol. ii. 1H3B : I)r 

 Furnivall in Berdoe's Browning Cycl. asserted that this 

 was completed 'on hia own linen ' by Koliert Hi-owning, 

 and as Browning's it was edited for the Browning Soc. 

 by Mr C. H. Firth in 1892), J. B. Moiley (Euayt Hat. 

 and Theoloffuxil, 2d cd. 1884), Elizabeth Cooper (2 vols. 

 1874), and H. D. Traill ( 1889). See also the articles 

 CHARLES L and LAUD, with works there cited ; Brown- 

 ing's strangely unhistorical Strafford : a Tragedy ( 18H7 i ; 

 ed. by Miss Hickey and Prof. 8. R. Gardiner, 1884); 

 and John Smith's Catalogue Raitonnf of Ike Workt 

 of Dutch Paintert (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 Kocking- 

 ham and first Earl of Kockingham, the ancestor of Earl 

 Fitzwilliam; his second daughter Arabella married the 

 Hon. Justin M'Cartliy, 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. 



Strain and Stress. A strain is any change of 

 form or bulk of a portion of matter either solid or 

 fluid. The system of forces which sustains the 

 strain is called the stress. When a body is so 

 strained that parallel lines remain parallel lines 

 and parallel planes remain parallel planes, the 

 strain is said to lie homogeneous. Any cubical 

 portion becomes a parallelepiped with angles, in 

 general, other than right angles ; and any spheri- 

 cal portion becomes an ellipsoid. The principal 

 axes of this ellipsoid were originally mutually 

 perpendicular diameters of the sphere. Clearly 

 one of them must be the direction of great. -t 

 elongation (or least contraction), and another must 

 be the direction of least elongation (or greatest 

 contraction). These directions are the principal 

 axes of the strain. A special case of the homo- 

 geneous strain is the isotropic strain, in which nil 

 lines suffer equal elongations i.e. unit-length in 

 any direction changes by the same amount. Here 

 there is simple change, of volume without any dis- 

 tortion ; and the associated stress is of the type of 

 a hydrostatic pressure. Now the most general 

 hom'ogeneous strain involves distortion as well as 

 change of volume. If the strain is small we may 



