In one particular he did benefit Ireland. At his own risk he imported and sowed a quantity of superior flaxseed. The first crop having succeeded, he next year laid out 10007. on the undertaking, set up a number of looms, procuring workmen from France and Flanders, and sent a ship to Spain freighted with linen at his own risk. Thus began the linen manufacture of Ireland, which in some measure verified Wentworth's prediction that it would greatly benefit that country. (Strafford, 'Letters and Dispatches,' vol. i. p. 473.)

Wentworth appears to have been of very infirm health, which, taken with the general course of his education and his position in society, will in part account for the acerbity and irritability of temper, and the im patience of any opposition to his will, which throughout his career involved him in so many personal quarrels. The number of powerful personal enemies which Wentworth thus arrayed against himself appears to us to be a proof of the want of real political talent of a high order. A really wise politician, such as Oliver Cromwell for example, does not raise up such a host of powerful personal enemies. Laud gives a good hint about this in one of his letters. "And yet, my lord," he says, "if you could find way do all these great services and decline these storms, I think it would be excellent well thought on. (Strafford, Letters and Dispatches,' vol. i. p. 479.)

In 1639 Charles raised Wentworth to the dignity of an earl, which he had in vain solicited formerly. He was created Earl of Strafford and Baron of Raby, and invested with the title of lord-lieutenant, or lieutenantgeneral of Ireland-a title which had not been borne since the time of Essex.

In 1640 the earl of Northumberland being attacked by severe illness, the king appointed Strafford in his place, to the command of the army against the Scots. He does not appear to have performed anything here to make good either his own high pretensions or the character for valour given him by some writers. Of his impeachment at the opening of the Long Parliament,

Clarendon gives the following account :-" It was about three of the clock in the afternoon [of November 11, 1640] when the Earl of Strafford (being infirm, and not well-disposed in health, and so not having stirred out of his house that morning), hearing that both houses still sate, thought fit to go thither. It was believed by some (upon what ground was never clear enough) that he made that haste there to accuse the Lord Say, and some others, of having induced the Scots to invade the kingdom; but he was scarce entered into the House of Peers, when the message from the House of Commons was called in, and when Mr. Pym at the bar, and in the name of all the Commons of England, impeached Thomas, earl of Strafford (with the addition of all his other titles), of high treason.'

On the 25th of November (1640), at a conference between the two houses in reference to the subject of this impeachment, Mr. Pym made a speech, in which he attempted, with considerable though unsuccessful ingenuity, to prove that the earl of Strafford was guilty of treason, on the ground that "other treasons are against the rule of the law, but this is against the being of the law." The laws against treason in England having been made to protect the king, not the subject, it would be in vain to look in the Statute of Treasons, the 25th Edward III. st. 5, c. 2, which at that time constituted the English law of treason (the statutes of Henry VIII., making so many new treasons, having been repealed by 1 Mary, c. 1), for any definition or description, or even any mention of that of which Strafford was accused, viz., an attempt to increase the power of the king, and to depress that of a subject. Pym was partly aware of this, and he endeavoured to meet it by saying that this treason, of which he speaks, "is enlarged beyond the limits of any description or definition." But though it was not to be supposed or expected that the Statute of Treasons of Edward III. (25 Edward III. st. 5, c. 2), being made to protect the king, not the subject, would provide specially for the punishment of such attempts as those of Strafford; it does nevertheless appear that Strafford was

punishable for having become the instrument for administering the government of the Council of the North, carried on in direct violation of the Petition of Right, which during the time of Strafford's being president of that council was the law of the land. However the Commons changed their course and introduced a bill of attainder, which was passed on the 21st of April, in the Commons, and soon after in the Lords. The king with tears in his eyes, and other demonstrations of weakness characteristic of him, signed a commission for giving the royal assent to the bill, and then made some feeble and unavailing efforts to save the life of his obnoxious minister. "The resort to the bill of attainder," observes Mr. Forster ('Life of Strafford,' p. 404), arose from no failure of the impeachment, as has been frequently alleged, but because in the course of that impeachment circumstances arose which suggested to the great leader of the popular cause the greater safety of fixing this case upon wider grounds. Without stretching to the slightest extent the boundaries of any statute, they thought it better at once to bring Strafford's treason to the condemnation of the sources of all law."

Strafford was beheaded on Tower-hill on the 12th of May, 1641. In his walk from the Tower to the place of execution his step and manner are described by Rushworth as being those of "a general marching at the head of an army, to breathe victory, rather than those of a condemned man, to undergo the sentence of death." Within a few weeks after his death, the parliament mitigated the penalties of their sentence to his children. In the succeeding reign, the attainder was reversed, and his son was restored to the earldom.

JOHN HAMPDEN, one of the most distinguished of the patriots of England, was the head and representative of an ancient and opulent family, which had received the lands of Hampden, in Buckinghamshire, from Edward the Confessor, and boasted to have transmitted its wealth, honours, and influence, unimpaired and increasing, in direct male succession, down to this the most illustrious name of the house. He was the eldest son of William Hampden, of Hampden, and of his wife Elizabeth, second daughter of Sir Henry Cromwell, of Hinchinbrooke, in Huntingdonshire, and aunt of the Protector, Cromwell. John Hampden was born in London in 1594, and at the age of three years came, by the death of his father, into possession of the family estates, which, besides the ancient seat and extensive domain in Buckinghamshire, comprehended large possessions in Essex, Oxfordshire, and Berkshire. He was brought up at the free grammar-school of Thame, in Oxfordshire;