Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford

Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford (13 April 1593 – 12 May 1641) was an English statesman and a major figure in the period leading up to the English Civil War.

Quotes

Divide not between Protestant and Papist. Divide not nationally, betwixt English and Irish. The King makes no distinction betwixt you.
- 15 July 1634, To the Irish Parliament, also quoted in Dictionary of Quotations, p. 826

A Prince that loseth the Force and Example of his Punishments, loseth withal the greatest Part of his Dominion.
- Letter to William Laud on the trial of William Prynne (18 October 1637), quoted in William Knowles, The Earl of Strafforde's Letters and Dispatches, With An Essay towards his Life, by Sir George Radcliffe. From the Originals in the Possession of his Great Grandson The Right Honourable Thomas, Earl of Malton, Knight of the Bath, Vol. II (1740), p. 119

I would desire that every man would lay his hand on his heart, and consider seriously whether the beginning of the people's happiness should be written in letters of blood.
- 12 May 1641, At his execution on Tower Hill, also quoted in Dictionary of Quotations, p. 826

[T]he earl of Strafford was party in a conspiracy to subvert the fundamental laws and liberties of his country... And if we reflect upon this man's cool-blooded apostasy on the first lure to his ambition, and on his splendid abilities that enhanced the guilt of that desertion, we must feel some indignation at those who have palliated all his iniquities, and even ennobled his memory with the attributes of patriot heroism. Great he surely was, since that epithet can never be denied without paradox to so much comprehension of mind, such ardour and energy, such courage and eloquence; those commanding qualities of soul, which, impressed upon his dark and stern countenance, struck his contemporaries with mingled awe and hate, and still live in the unfading colours of Vandyke. But it may be reckoned as a sufficient ground for distrusting any one's attachment to the English constitution, that he reveres the name of the earl of Strafford.
- Henry Hallam, The Constitutional History of England from the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of George II, Vol. I (1827), p. 511

I have often thought that Strafford was an ideal type, both for governor of Ireland in the 17th century, and governor of India in the 20th century.
- John Morley to Lord Minto (19 September 1907), quoted in D. A. Hamer, Lord Morley: Liberal Intellectual in Politics (1968), p. 56

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Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford