been torn from the minds
of the Irishry, and the seed had been sown of that fatal harvest of
distrust and disaffection which was to be reaped through tyranny and
massacre in the age to come.

[Sidenote: Wentworth in Ireland.]

But the bitter memories of conquest and spoliation only pointed out
Ireland to Wentworth as the best field for his experiment. The balance
of Catholic against Protestant might be used to make both parties
dependent on the royal authority; the rights of conquest which in
Wentworth's theory vested the whole land in the absolute possession of
the Crown gave him scope for his administrative ability; and for the
rest he trusted, and trusted justly, to the force of his genius and of
his will. In the summer of 1633 he sailed as Lord Deputy to Ireland, and
five years later his aim seemed almost realized. "The king," he wrote to
Laud, "is as absolute here as any prince in the world can be." The
government of the new deputy indeed was a rule of terror. Archbishop
Usher, with almost every name which we can respect in the island, was
the object of his insult and oppression. His tyranny strode over all
legal bounds. Wentworth is the one English statesman of all time who may
be said to have had no sense of law; and his scorn of it showed itself
in his coercion of juries as of parliaments. The highest of the Irish
nobles learned to tremble when a few insolent words, construed as
mutiny, were enough to bring Lord Mountnorris before a council of war,
and to inflict on him a sentence of death. But his tyranny aimed at
public ends, and in Ireland the heavy hand of a single despot delivered
the mass of the people at any rate from the local despotism of a hundred
masters. The Irish landowners were for the first time made to feel
themselves amenable to the law. Justice was enforced, outrage was
repressed, the condition of the clergy was to some extent raised, the
sea was cleared of the pirates who infested it. The foundation of the
linen manufacture which was to bring wealth to Ulster, and the first
developement of Irish commerce, date from the Lieutenancy of Wentworth.
Good government however was only a means with him for further ends. The
noblest work to be done in Ireland was the bringing about a
reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant, and an obliteration of
the anger and thirst for vengeance which had been raised by the Ulster
Plantation. Wentworth, on the other hand, angered the Protestants by a
tolerat