noble policy placed the sovereign naturally at the
head of the people, and where Parliaments sank into mere aids to the
Crown. But before this could be, Buckingham and the system of blundering
misrule that he embodied must be cleared away. It was with this end that
Wentworth sprang to the front of the Commons in urging the Petition of
Right. Whether in that crisis of his life some nobler impulse, some true
passion for the freedom he was to trample under foot, mingled with his
thirst for revenge, it is hard to tell. But his words were words of
fire. "If he did not faithfully insist for the common liberty of the
subject to be preserved whole and entire," it was thus he closed one of
his speeches on the Petition, "it was his desire that he might be set as
a beacon on a hill for all men else to wonder at."

[Sidenote: Wentworth as minister.]

It is as such a beacon that his name has stood from that time to this.
He had shown his powers to good purpose; and at the prorogation of the
Parliament he passed into the service of the Crown. He became President
of the Council of the North, a court set up in limitation of the common
law, and which wielded almost unbounded authority beyond the Humber. In
1629 the death of Buckingham removed the obstacle that stood between his
ambition and the end at which it had aimed throughout. All pretence to
patriotism was set aside; Wentworth was admitted to the royal Council;
and as he took his seat at the board he promised to "vindicate the
Monarchy for ever from the conditions and restraints of subjects." So
great was the faith in his zeal and power which he knew how to breathe
into his royal master that he was at once raised to the peerage, and
placed with Laud in the first rank of the king's councillors. Charles
had good ground for this rapid confidence in his new minister. In
Wentworth the very genius of tyranny was embodied. He soon passed beyond
the mere aim of restoring the system of the Tudors. He was far too
clear-sighted to share his master's belief that the arbitrary power
which Charles was wielding formed any part of the old constitution of
the country, or to dream that the mere lapse of time would so change the
temper of Englishmen as to reconcile them to despotism. He knew that
absolute rule was a new thing in England, and that the only way of
permanently establishing it was not by reasoning, or by the force of
custom, but by the force of fear. His system was the expression of his