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 Charles I and Domestic Affairs, 1625-42
  1629-1640

1629-1640

The next eleven years saw no Parliament—the longest interval England has known in her history since Parliament began. They are usually called " The Eleven Years' Tyranny". We must, however, beware of regarding a year without a Parliament as anything exceptional; in Elizabeth's reign, for instance, Parliament on the average met only every third year. Nor must we regard Charles as a wicked despot, destroying the rights, the goods, and the lives of his people. The period, on the contrary, was one of prosperity for the nation at large; with the exception of Eliot, no political martyr lost his life; and the king, on the whole, kept within the letter of the law as it was interpreted for him by judges, who might, however, with reason be deemed somewhat accommodating (The Judges also would be likely to be on the side of the Crown, for lawyers go by the latest precedent, and would maintain that the Stuarts might well do as the Tudors had done). Yet none the less they were dangerous and critical years for England; and when they were over, the people of England showed that they were determined that a repetition of such absolute rule should not occur. We must say something about the advisers of Charles during this period. No one succeeded to Buckingham's commanding position in Charles's councils. Yet amongst the king's advisers two figures stand out pre-eminent Thomas Wentworth, eventually created Earl of Strafford, and William Laud. Wentworth, a member of an old family with large estates in Yorkshire, had supported the Crown when he first entered the House of Commons; but in the early Parliaments of Charles I he was one of the leading critics of the king’s policy, and the Petition of Right in particular was largely due to his initiative. Then between the two sessions of the third Parliament he joined the king's side, and was made a peer (1628). For this change Wentworth has been unsparingly attacked, called a political apostate, the First of the Rats, and compared to Lucifer (See Lord Macaulay's Essay on Hallams History). And, indeed, it is impossible to deny that Wentworth was inconsistent, that he did things when in authority which he would have been the first to condemn when in opposition, or that self-interest was probably one of the motives which influenced him.

Wentworth, however, was one of those strong, masterful, able people who have an unlimited confidence in their own capacity, and very little, in that of anyone else. He had been with the Opposition because he distrusted Buckingham and specially disliked his foreign enterprises, and because of the arbitrary acts which the Government had committed. But he was never really of the Opposition; he had no sympathy with the Puritan leanings of the majority, and felt contempt for many of his fellow members. Moreover, he was no believer in Parliamentary government—government, in his view, was to be for the people, but not by them. To him princes were, to use his own expression, the "indulgent nursing-fathers to their people", and the authority of a king "the keystone which closeth up the arch of order and government". And only by allying himself with the king could he show, it must be remembered, his capacity for administration. Wentworth therefore joined the king, and was made President of the North in 1628, which gave him the control of the northern counties. In 1632 he became Lord Deputy of Ireland, and it was in Ireland that he was to exhibit the strength and weakness of his statesmanship. Then in the summer of 1639 he became Charles I's principal adviser, and quickly made himself the most hated man in England.

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