ion of Catholic worship and a suspension of the persecution which
had feebly begun against the priesthood, while he fed the irritation of
the Catholics by urging in 1635 a new Plantation of Connaught. His
purpose was to encourage a disunion which left both parties dependent
for support and protection on the Crown. It was a policy which was to
end in bringing about the horrors of the Irish revolt, the vengeance of
Cromwell, and the long series of atrocities on both sides which make the
story of the country he ruined so terrible to tell. But for the hour it
left Ireland helpless in his hands. He doubled the revenue. He raised an
army. To provide for its support he ventured, in spite of the panic with
which Charles heard of his project, to summon in 1634 an Irish
Parliament. His aim was to read a lesson to England and the king by
showing how completely that dreaded thing, a Parliament, could be made
an organ of the royal will; and his success was complete. The task of
overawing an Irish Parliament indeed was no very difficult one.
Two-thirds of its House of Commons consisted of the representatives of
wretched villages which were pocket-boroughs of the Crown, while absent
peers were forced to entrust their proxies to the Council to be used at
its pleasure. But precautions were hardly needed. The two Houses
trembled at the stern master who bade their members not let the king
"find them muttering, or to speak it more truly, mutinying in corners,"
and voted with a perfect docility the means of maintaining an army of
five thousand foot and five hundred horse. Had the subsidy been refused,
the result would have been the same. "I would undertake," wrote
Wentworth, "upon the peril of my head, to make the king's army able to
subsist and provide for itself among them without their help."

[Sidenote: Laud.]

While Strafford was thus working out his system of "Thorough" on one
side of St. George's Channel, it was being carried out on the other by a
mind inferior indeed to his own in genius, but almost equal to it in
courage and tenacity. Cold, pedantic, superstitious as he was (he notes
in his diary the entry of a robin-redbreast into his study as a matter
of grave moment), William Laud rose out of the mass of court-prelates by
his industry, his personal unselfishness, his remarkable capacity for
administration. At a later period, when immersed in State business, he
found time to acquire so complete a knowledge of commercial affairs t