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Wentworth Calls Parliaments for Fast Fundraising
 | By Michael Greaney, World Coin News
September 29, 2009 |
At the same time (and for the same reasons) that Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, called an English parliament, he called one for Ireland. There was, as far as he or anyone else could tell, no other way to raise money fast enough to meet the projected costs of the king's proposed expedition into Scotland to teach the Covenanters a lesson they would never forget (nor would they - but not for the reasons Charles expected).
Consequently, Wentworth issued writs for the Irish parliament in February 1639 (1640 New Style), and elections were held almost immediately, apparently without a hitch. These were carried out under the supervision of Sir George Radcliffe, a close friend of the Lord Lieutenant, Wentworth having remained in England to supervise the calling of the English parliament.
Nevertheless, there was some evidence of impropriety, as Sir John Clotworthy, one of Wentworth's more vocal enemies, was to claim when the earl of Strafford was impeached and put on trial for treason during the Long Parliament. Clotworthy charged that Wentworth had manipulated the elections, giving as his prime evidence the fact that due to the manner in which the warrants were issued, seven boroughs that had previously elected Catholic members to parliament lost their right - temporarily - to representation.
There was also the fact that various lords and others whom Wentworth had previously alienated but whose support he now needed suddenly found themselves in favor, being granted exemptions from having their lands confiscated. Chief among these, as we might expect (although not the first), was the earl of Cork, but there were numerous others, all of which had a certain and definite grudge against the Lord Lieutenant in the matter of the plantation of Connaught. As Cork wrote in a letter to Strafford, he requested that "the like respect be given to me as unto other noblemen of my quality whose Connacht lands are fallen within the compass of plantation, as mine there are."1 Documentary evidence apparently exists showing that such concessions were made to a large number of landowners.2 It thus appears certain that the government - in the person of Thomas Wentworth, Lord Lieutenant - was engaged in buying votes with concessions even before the parliament met.
Not that this sort of thing was unusual, or even unexpected. The same thing goes on today, although we call it lobbying instead of vote buying, and pork is involved instead of land.
Wentworth may not even have considered that he was doing anything wrong. The English parliament seems to have agreed, for when Wentworth was indicted during the Long Parliament the evidence of vote manipulation was largely ignored.
What was really going on was much more convoluted than mere vote manipulation. Wentworth's goal, as usual, was to get as much money as possible at the lowest possible cost to the king or to himself. An exemption from plantation was a very inexpensive way to get the members to vote the king money. Such exemptions could very easily be ignored later when convenient to do so, and no doubt those receiving them were very well aware that they were probably only getting a stay of execution instead of a pardon.
The landowners could, however, count on the king's increasing need for more and more money, not to mention Wentworth's increasing greed. At such time as the king needed more funds from parliament, they could bargain once again for an exemption from plantation. Such things could be drawn out for decades, and neither Wentworth nor the king could be expected to live forever.
No, the more important goal, at least in Wentworth's eyes, was to decrease Catholic representation in parliament, and increase that of the Protestants (except for the Puritans and Covenanters, considered by Wentworth to be much worse than even the Catholics). Granting an exemption from plantation on a case-by-case basis was not only a single, easily-resolved issue, it could be revoked any time the government (the Lord Lieutenant) saw fit, as the landowners were doubtless well aware. An exemption from a law is not quite the same thing as a law, and must continuously be justified.
A law, however, does not have to be justified once it is on the books; what must be justified is (as we just saw) is an exemption from the law. Wentworth knew full well that the only way he was going to get money out of the Catholics was to get the Graces finally enacted into law. If the Catholics and their sympathizers, to say nothing of their uneasy allies among the various Protestant groups, had enough representation to insist that the Graces become law before the king got his money, Charles would have no choice but to sign the entire package into law, and no nonsense this time.
Not only that, but Charles would also not have any reliable military force available to him. The only one that had the potential to save the king was Wentworth's proposed "New Army," which so far only existed on paper. The Lord Lieutenant would almost certainly be able to raise the required number of men if Catholic representation in parliament was insufficient to make any conditions for the grant of money, for then providing the men would be construed as a means of persuading Charles finally to keep his word.
Of course, once he had his army, Charles could (as ever) simply put off enacting the Graces, but that could be construed as falling under the heading of "business as usual." The most important thing was to get the money without having to make any concessions, and the second most important thing was to get an army without having to keep any promises.
Part of the money Charles hoped to get was supplied by his mints, all of which were working overtime, with a number of new ones established, such as the mint at Aberystwyth in Wales, examined in the last article. The mint at York, however, was long-established, having had the mint right for several centuries, as we might expect from a city that served as the northern capital before the Tudors consolidated formerly autonomous regions directly under royal control. Richard II, in fact, wanted to make York the capital of all England, but was unable to carry out this plan before being deposed and murdered by Henry IV.
York, originally known as Eboracum, was one of the two capitals of Roman Britain, the other (of course) being Londinium. At one point the Emperor Septimus Severus ruled the entire empire from Eboracum. When the Angles moved in, the name was corrupted to Eoferwic, which became Jórvik under the Norsemen, and finally, in the tenth century, York.3 York is the second ecclesiastical capital of England after Canterbury.
Issues of the York mint, which operated for Charles from 1643 to 1644, are fairly straightforward, consisting of threepences, sixpences, shillings and halfcrowns. There is only one mintmark, a lion, appropriately enough, as York bore the brunt of attacks from the Scottish Lion - "The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown."
The threepence shows the usual left-facing bust of the king and the denomination in Roman numerals, with a shield on the reverse. There is only one major variety listed in Seaby's, which begins at around $30 in Very Good, and goes up to $350 in Extremely Fine.
The sixpence is larger but has virtually the same design. The two major varieties are a little highly priced for the product of an important mint, beginning at around $65 in Very Good, and going up to about $725 in Extremely Fine.
The shilling has almost the same obverse design and a somewhat more ornate shield on the reverse, and five major varieties. Prices begin at around $45 in Very Good to around $775 in Extremely Fine.
As we might expect, the halfcrown shows the king on horseback, facing left, and a reverse almost identical to the shilling. There are seven major varieties, with prices beginning at around $115 in Very Good, and going up to around $1,900 in Extremely Fine.
Regardless of where the actual money was manufactured, it was clearly a matter of government policy to ensure that Catholics and native Irish (preferably both) lacked effective representation in parliament. This had been the case in 1613 when James I called his Irish parliament, to say nothing of Charles' Irish parliament of 1634. The number of Catholic members of parliament in 1634 was (in a country in which the majority were native Irish Catholic) was 100 out of a total of 238. In the parliament of 1640 this dropped to 76 - of which only nine were native Irish.4
This wasn't quite as bad as it might seem, however. The fact remains that very few people actually had political rights at all until fairly recently in history. Even in the United States until 1820 "democracy" meant a voting franchise exercised by white males over the age of twenty-one who owned a minimum amount of income-generating property. Astute statesmen like Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Benjamin Watkins Leigh of Virginia were very well aware that political democracy (equal access to the ballot) without economic democracy (equal access to the means of acquiring and possessing private, income-generating property) is a farce. As Webster declared in the debates in the Massachusetts Convention of 1820 over the issue of extending the franchise to white males who did not own property, "power naturally and necessarily follows property."
Leigh echoed this in the Virginia Convention that same year: "Power and Property can be separated for a time by force or fraud but divorced, never. For as soon as the pang of separation is felt ... Property will purchase Power, or Power will take over Property." This wasn't quite as elitist as it sounds, however. Leigh believed that government would be unable to protect life, liberty and property if it was made more democratic. This is because, in his opinion, policy, even laws would change with the whims of the non-owning populace - just as Aristotle predicted.
Leigh defended property qualifications for voting, declaring that the vote was not a right (please remember that reporting someone's opinion does not signify agreement). Property gives citizens a "manly independence." Because only 50 acres of land was needed to qualify to vote, however, Leigh stated, "If this be an aristocracy, it is the most open and most unguarded that ever existed: every man is free to acquire the patent of nobility."
I do not agree that every man - or woman - is free to acquire a "patent of nobility" if there are barriers to his or her access to the means of acquiring and possessing private property. In our day, this translates into democratic access to capital credit, which can be achieved by instituting a few moderate reforms in the banking system along the lines suggested by the "capital homesteading" proposal developed by the Center for Economic and Social Justice.
George Mason of Gunston Hall, America's "Forgotten Founding Father," emphasized the importance of as many people as possible owning the means of production to the body politic when he drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights in May of 1776. The first paragraph of Mason's draft reads:
That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
If this language sounds familiar - it should. Thomas Jefferson credited Mason with giving him the language and important concepts that Jefferson embodied into the Declaration of Independence a month after the adoption of the Virginia declaration.
Incidentally, Jefferson also appears to have gotten something else from Mason: language that implicitly abolished the basis for human chattel slavery. Mason, although a slave owner, hated slavery and argued for its gradual abolition, inserting anti-slavery language in many of the legal documents he drafted. The other delegates evidently expected something along the same lines from Mason in the Declaration of Rights, and forced him to include phrasing to the effect that all men only had rights after they agreed to enter society, a subterfuge that assuaged their consciences and allowed them to condemn King George for violating their natural rights while they were busily violating the natural rights of others.
Jefferson seems to have taken this lesson to heart and may deliberately have inserted an explicit rather than implicit condemnation of slavery into the original draft of the Declaration of Independence. The violent arguments over this explicit condemnation and demands for its removal diverted attention away from the opening passage and allowed the language implicitly removing the justification for chattel slavery - "all men are created equal" - to remain unchanged and unqualified in the document.
Mason and Jefferson had something of a falling out later, during the Constitutional Convention of 1789 when Mason insisted that a bill enumerating and protecting basic rights be part of the Constitution, there be an abolition of the slave trade, and gradual abolition of slavery itself. Jefferson, possibly viewing the Declaration of Independence as sufficient guarantee of American's basic rights to life and liberty (probably omitting property because of the slavery issue), saw no need to be redundant and reiterate them in the Constitution. Jefferson also advocated immediate, not gradual abolition of slavery, but seems to have realized that his preference was completely unrealistic at the time. As Helen Hill explains the situation in her biography of Mason, describing a conversation between Jefferson and Mason and witnessed by Philip Mazzei:
"Philip Mazzei's 'Memoirs' give an intimate picture of the two arguing these contrasting aspects of the problem, taking sides, one suspects, chiefly to clarify the issues. Jefferson was advocating abolition, arguing that it was demanded as much by humanity as by justice; that to keep in slavery beings born with rights equal to ours and who did not differ from us in anything but color, was an injustice not only barbarous and cruel, but even shameful, especially when they risked everything in helping us gain our freedom.
Mason and Mazzei dissented from this view:
Mr. George Mason said much more; and he showed the necessity of educating them before taking such a step, teaching them to make good use of their freedom. 'Each one of us knows,' he said, 'that the negroes considered the work as punishment.' He also convinced us that if they were not educated before being freed, the first use they would make of their liberty would be loafing, and hence they would become thieves out of necessity.
In the course of the Richmond debates, Mason fought the Constitution clause by clause, but his most effective oratory was reserved for the slavery provision.5
Mason refused to sign the Constitution in protest, and left the Convention. Ironically, Jefferson turned out to be wrong about the ability of the Declaration of Independence to protect our natural rights. There are an increasing number of so-called "Constitutional Scholars" these days who insist with an increasing degree of hysteria that the Declaration of Independence with its basis in the natural law was intended as a mere propaganda piece and was never meant to be law or establish the basis for law in the United States. A triumph of the legal positivist school pioneered by Louis Brandeis, adherents of this position have been successful as well in calling the Constitution itself into question, changing it from a document that guarantees certain basic rights into a "living" document that means whatever a presiding judge decides it means.
The whole issue, of course, boils down to respect for dignity of the human person, his or her individual sovereignty under God. This was not something recognized by the Stuarts or their predecessors the Tudors under the prevailing doctrine of the divine right of kings. Wentworth's methods in calling the Irish parliament, his vote buying, and virtually everything else was directed toward securing to Charles his divinely-granted rights as king, not in recognizing or maintaining any presumed natural rights that any royal subject might possibly have.
Catholic members of parliament - insofar as they were Catholic and adhered to the teachings of their church - were members of a religion that recognized the dignity of the human person and the sovereignty of the individual under God as a matter of doctrine. A Jesuit Cardinal, Robert Bellarmine of Montepulciano, had defended ancient Catholic doctrine in debates with King James and Sir Robert Filmer, James' chief theologian only a few years earlier.
Before Cardinal Bellarmine died in 1621, he succeeded in refuting every argument advanced in favor of divine right to such good effect that a number of English theologians were convinced that "Bellarmine" was actually a code word for a secret committee composed of the Vatican's top theologians and philosophers. I'm really not making this up. As John Clement Rager noted in his analysis of Bellarmine's political thought:
Some were unwilling to believe that one man could have been the author of so voluminous and powerful a work. They began to suspect that under the name "Robert Bellarmine" was concealed the whole army of Jesuit theologicans. Robert, they said, stood for "robur" - strength; Bellarmine, for "bella" - wars, "arma" - weapons, "minae" - threats.6
Oddly, John Locke in his two Treatises on Government (1690) similarly written to refute Filmer's claims in Patriarcha (Filmer's book defending divine right theory, published in 1680, although written decades earlier), distorts Bellarmine's arguments and misstates them in an obvious effort to discredit and ridicule Bellarmine. Evidence suggests that Locke wasn't exactly being dishonest so much as playing up to the prejudices of his patron, Lord Shaftsbury, a violent anti-Catholic who was also the prime mover behind the bizarre Titus Oates conspiracy that led to the judicial murder of nineteen persons, among them the saintly Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, Oliver Plunkett, whom the Protestant clergy of Ireland made valiant efforts to save.
Algernon Sidney, on the other hand, gives Bellarmine due credit in his book, Discourses Concerning Government, and states Bellarmine's arguments with a high degree of accuracy. He declares at one point that Bellarmine "seems to have laid the foundation of his discourses in such common notions as were assented to by all mankind, those who follow the same method have no more regard to Jesuitism and popery, tho he was a Jesuit and a cardinal, than they who agree with Faber and other Jesuits in the principles of geometry which no sober man did ever deny."7 In other words, Sidney made it clear he didn't agree with Bellarmine on purely religious matters, but had high regard for the Cardinal's political thought.
So too, evidently, did Pope Pius XI, who declared Bellarmine a "Beatus" (one step away from being declared a saint8), canonized him in 1930, and less than a year later named him a "Doctor of the Church," meaning that Bellarmine's teachings were in accord with what the Catholic Church teaches and that he is an outstanding guide in understanding Catholic teaching. Concurrently, Pius XI issued a number of teaching documents himself - encyclicals - reaffirming support for democracy, dignity of the human person and sovereignty of the individual under God.
The bottom line for Ireland at this time, however, is that - despite the obvious lack of respect for human dignity - this sort of thing was normal. What made it "wrong" in the indictment against the Lord Lieutenant was not that it had been done, but that he had done it. This actually made his ultimate conviction for treason harder, for if the English parliament had condemned the earl of Strafford on these grounds, they would had to have had to indict themselves. Wentworth's activities and those of his assistants were simply not unusual. The situation would not be corrected until the parliamentary reforms of the 19th century - a little late to stave off the storm looming over the three kingdoms in 1640.
ENDNOTES
1M. Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641. London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994, 70.
2Ibid.
3A similar development can be seen in "Istanbul," which is a corruption of "Constantinople."
4Ibid.
5Helen Hill, George Mason, Constitutionalist. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1938, 217-218.
6John Clement Rager, The Political Philosophy of St. Robert Bellarmine. Spokane, Washington: The Apostolate of Our Lady of Siluva, 1995, 14. Even more weirdly, a book that Bellarmine wrote detailing what Catholics believe to be Protestant theological errors stated the Protestant case so clearly before giving a refutation of it that Protestant publishers took the book, deleted the refutations and used it as a catechism of Protestant of theology!
7Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (1698), Chap. I § 5.
N Catholic Church does not claim the power to make anyone a saint. "Canonization" is a certification process, a declaration that so-and-so is in heaven. It doesn't put him or her there.
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