ABSTRACT
At the age of thirty-nine, Sir Thomas Wentworth was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland on 12 January 1632. This promotion followed a period of three years as President of the Council of the North, an office from which he compelled respect for the authority of the Crown by imprisoning recalcitrant gentry such as Henry Bellasys and Sir David Foulis. Yet this picture of Wentworth as a loyal servant of the Crown apparently contrasts with his actions in the 1620s, not least his refusal in 1627 to pay the Forced Loan (for which he was imprisoned) and his insistence in the Parliament of 1628 that ‘unless we [i.e. members of the political nation] be secured in our liberties, we cannot give’. 1 Some historians have therefore argued that by becoming an agent of the Crown Wentworth was guilty of gross apostasy. However, this Whig interpretation has been criticised by those who see England’s political order in the early seventeenth century as an organically united commonwealth – in other words, they argue that ‘sides’ did not exist – and by research which suggests that Wentworth did not fundamentally change his principles in 1629.
