poverty, sickness and hostile neighbours, and, hardest of all, dissensions among their own number, but the sturdy Puritan resolution which had braved the terrors of emigration in the seventeenth century, was sufficient for the task, and the Plantation at Plymouth, in New England, was established. We must not follow the pilgrims further, though their story is one of ever fresh fascination; it is with the Puritans in the Old Country we have to deal. But when we study the lives which were freely laid down in England in the service of Puritanism, on the fields of Naseby and Marston Moor, let us not forget those others of our own race and kindred, whose sacrifice was perhaps as great, who went out from their homes in simple faith in God, to seek a resting-place where His Name could be honoured in the way they thought most fit, and who have helped to build up a mighty nation, upon the surest of all foundations, trust in God and honest hard work. CHAPTER V STRAFFORD AND PYM IN Thomas Wentworth, afterwards Earl of Strafford, we see the one man whom the Parliamentary party had really reason to fear; for while he lived he supplied to the royal cause that which, without him, they lacked: ability to conceive a consistent form of policy, and indomitable will to carry it out. In the years that were coming, when Charles in conscientious indecision promised one thing and performed another, and Rupert spilled the blood of England's knighthood in gallant charges that led to nothing, the Royalists might well long to hear again the silent voice, and to see the tall, stooping figure and stern dark face of him who had quelled-by whatever means-anarchy and rebellion in Ireland, and had been the real strength of the King's power in England, until sacrificed by the culpable weakness of the King himself. Thomas Wentworth was born of a good old Yorkshire family on Good Friday, April 13th, 1593. He had the ordinary education of the time, and after leaving St. John's College, Cambridge, he spent the usual year in foreign travel, under the care of a tutor. From his youth he loved public life, and was always anxious to take part in it; the first public office he held was that of Keeper of the Yorkshire Records, the duties of which he discharged for two years from the age of twenty-two. At first, in the early disputes between the King and the Parliament, Strafford sided against Charles, and it was not until the session of 1628 that he joined with Archbishop Laud, and became the ablest adviser the King ever had. He was created Baron Wentworth, and was made President of the Council of the North, and in Yorkshire he worked with untiring energy, as he did afterwards in Ireland, to subdue all opposition to his royal master. He was a man of great ability, clear-sighted, loyal, and sincere, and he saw that the only possible way in which Charles could keep his royal power under the existing state of affairs, was by making himself such an absolute king as Louis XIII. had become with Richelieu's aid. He saw that half measures were no longer possible, but he believed that by military despotism England might be brought again |