Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 60.djvu/276

 are under the rod, and we cannot with credit or safety yield. Since we sat here, the subjects have lost a subsidy at sea.’ In November 1625, when a new parliament was contemplated, he was made sheriff of Yorkshire to prevent his sitting in the house. Yet Charles could not but be aware that his conduct had differed from that of the other members of the late parliament, who were treated in the same way. ‘Wentworth,’ he remarked, ‘is an honest gentleman’ (ib. i. 29). The difference between Wentworth and the other opponents of the court was no less strongly shown by his own words written not long after he had been marked for exclusion from the House of Commons. ‘My rule,’ he wrote, ‘which I will never transgress, is never to contend with the prerogative out of parliament, nor yet to contest with a king but when I am constrained thereunto, or else make shipwreck of my peace of conscience, which I trust God will ever bless me with, and with courage, too, to preserve it’ (ib. i. 32).

It was the misfortune of Charles and Buckingham that they knew not how to convert a half-hearted opponent into a friend. So far from associating himself with the attack on Buckingham, Wentworth, on a rumour that the presidency of the council of the north was vacant, wrote to ask for the appointment (State Papers, Dom. xviii. 110). There was no vacancy, but in Easter term he came to London, was introduced to the duke, and was favourably received (Strafford Letters, i. 35). Yet on 8 July his name appears on a list of the opponents of the court to be dismissed from the justiceship of the peace (Harl. MS. 286, f. 297), and Wentworth accordingly lost this office, together with that of custos rotulorum, which was given back to Sir John Savile, from whom he had previously wrested it. The blow was the more keenly felt as the letter of dismissal was handed to him as he was sitting as high sheriff in his court at York. From the language used by him in announcing his loss of place, it would appear that he had refused to perform some service required of him, probably to support Charles's demand of a free gift from his subjects. Subsequently, when the free gift reappeared in the shape of a forced loan, Wentworth refusing to pay his quota, was placed in confinement in the Marshalsea in May 1627, though after six weeks' imprisonment he was allowed to retire to Dartford, under the obligation not to stir more than two miles from the place (Strafford Letters, ii. 430). At this time he seems to have held that as parliament had no right to encroach on the king by usurping executive functions, so the king had no right to levy taxes without the consent of parliament. It is not unlikely that his support of the latter proposition was strengthened partly by his sense of personal wrong, partly by his dislike of Buckingham's rash foreign policy, which had involved the country in a war with France in addition to that with Spain.

In this spirit, when Charles's third parliament met on 17 March 1628, Wentworth came to an agreement with the parliamentary leaders to drop the attack on Buckingham and to vindicate the violated rights of the subject. On the 22nd he spoke strongly on the illegality of ‘the raising of loans strengthened by commissions with unheard-of instructions and oaths, the billeting of soldiers by the lieutenants and deputy-lieutenants.’ At the same time he urged that the fault was in the king's instruments, not in the king himself. A privy council—that is to say a secret council, apart from the constitutional council of the king—had been introduced, ‘ravishing at once the spheres of all ancient government,’ an expression which shows Wentworth to have been a diligent reader of Bacon's essays (Essay on Superstition), ‘imprisoning us without banks or bounds.’ A third complaint against imprisonment without cause shown was thus added to the two against forced loans and martial law mentioned in the earlier part of the speech. The course Wentworth recommended was no less clearly indicated. The house was to vindicate the ‘ancient, sober, and vital liberties by reinforcing of the ancient laws of our ancestors, by setting such a stamp upon them as no licentious spirit shall dare hereafter to enter upon them.’ It was for the interest as much of the king as of the parliament that this should be done, otherwise it would ‘be impossible to relieve him.’

A fourth demand, that of the abolition of martial law, was afterwards added. With this exception Wentworth's speech contained the substance of the future petition of right, yet with this difference, that whereas the petition declared the law to have been broken, Wentworth merely asked that the law as it had long existed should be clearly explained. In the following weeks the discussion turned mainly upon imprisonment without cause shown, on which Charles was particularly obdurate. On 2 April, when there was a debate on the supply needed for the war, Wentworth refused even to discuss foreign complications. ‘Unless we be secured in our liberties, we cannot give,’ was still his simple ground of inaction. To see whether the king was