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LAUD BECOMES PREMIER.

mouth, by a debauched maniac named Felton, out of private enmity, threw another great chance into his hands he became First Minister of the Crown. He had been Bishop of Bath and Wells for nearly two years, and now he became Bishop of London. Charles already, by a fatal instinct, had begun to select men for his advisers and ministers who were uncompromising advocates of the autocracy of the Crown. Laud was one of these, Strafford another. It is necessary to remember that the common unjudging estimate of Charles as a man with elements of weakness and sentimentality in his composition is utterly unfounded. He was tenacious and stubborn, intensely irritated at the smallest show of disobedience, profoundly indifferent to public opinion, and entirely under the domination of one idea-the prerogative of monarchy. Such a character was sure to attract to itself characters working on similar lines -and politics and religion shared the field of life in those days. There did not then exist that large and growing class who are indifferent to both. So Laud and Strafford, with their magnificent indifference to opinion, their absolute determination to be obeyed, their strong illogical minds, accepting and never questioning facts, taking the Royal Supremacy for granted, and Episcopacy as an institution dear to God, necessarily became his

THE TRIUMVIRATE.

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chosen ministers. It was a triumvirate working single-handed against the whole force of a nation -a triumvirate, it is true, with certain mechanical and traditional advantages. But in the face of the great explosion of democracy the triumvirate was blown away.

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PORTRAITS OF STRAFFORD.

CHAPTER V.

ANY one who visited the Vandyck exhibition at the end of 1886, could not have failed, I believe, to be struck with the two portraits of Strafford. In the first place, by reason of their extreme dissimilarity. Without the catalogue none but a very critical eye would have divined that they were portraits of the same person. One was painted in his earlier days, when he was nothing more than an energetic, publicspirited Yorkshire squire; the other, on which consequently the interest centres, was after public and private troubles, passionate loyalty, and a despotic authority had set their mark upon the face. The least imaginative could not have passed the latter portrait by with indifference, even if ignorant of the subject. There is a violence and a vehemence in the face, a sullen directness which arrests the attention. No engraving has ever done justice to this. The iron cuirass out of which the stalwart head springs seems to be a natural adjunct for such a

FRIENDSHIP WITH LAUD.

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face; the great lowering lines on the brow, the converging eyes, the heavy jaw, all speak of a temper born to rule and encouraged by fortune to do so. It has not often fallen to the lot of an English citizen to wield so despotic a power as Strafford was enabled to exercise.

Of all the figures of the Caroline court, this man was Laud's chosen friend. "It is in sadness," writes Strafford to the Archbishop, " that I have wondered many times to observe how universally you and I agree in our judgment of persons, as most commonly we have done ever since I had the honour to be known to you." They were both of them absolutely possessed by devotion to the cause of royal prerogative. It was the unconscious action of this blind triumvirate, Charles and his two uncompromising servants, that broke open the clouds of rebellion and drew the tempest down which engulfed them first.

Let us have a little picture of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, in our minds, to give us the idea of the qualities which Laud worshipped, his ideal of the public servant, to which his cold nature came spontaneously out in friendship— making them into that pair who were, as Hamilton said, the one too great to fear, and the other too bold to fly.

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STRAFFORD'S EARLY LIFE.

He was a Yorkshire man. He succeeded to a baronetcy and a very plentiful estate when quite a young man; he had one of the best incomes in the kingdom. When he first came up to London, after a thorough quiet self-education at St. John's, Cambridge, and abroad, he attracted much attention by a kind of undefinable atmosphere of power that hung about him, and a magnificent insolence in his demeanour. "Dammy," Lord Powis said when it was pointed out that he was of blood royal, "if he ever comes to be king of England, I will turn rebel." He married a daughter of the Earl of Cumberland, and then sat down apparently to do nothing. He watched life; he made some peaceful friends, such as Sir H. Wotton, Provost of Eton, whose gentle cloistered letters read very peacefully in his agitated correspondence; he attended the Star Chamber; he read and wrote; and down at Wentworth-Wodehouse, his waste park, he contracted the passionate love for sport and country life that comes out in such natural sighs in the letters he wrote when worn with disease and state troubles, as lord of that unruly isle. His taste in reading was curious. Donne was his favourite author, an uneasy metaphysical poet. Laud laughs at this in one of his letters; he hints that if Strafford wishes to learn the secret of life,

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