In 1633 Wentworth was made Lord Deputy of Ireland, and endeavoured to reduce order into that vexed and discontented country by measures which were abused as despotic, but which were necessary to a man occupied with great schemes. England could never be a great empire while Ireland was an independent kingdom; his claim of Connaught only anticipated the inevitable, and if the army he was so abused for raising could have been kept together under his direction, the crown of England might have been saved. As far as time permitted, he introduced social benefits into the wretched land and encouraged the linen industry by planting flax. But he was too late, perhaps too impetuous, blinded by his own genius for command into overlooking the steady rise of the democracy; he himself described his policy as “thorough.” Had he been allowed the time, he would have made a notable thing of this policy; but the tide was against him, and bore him sharply out to ruin. Private malice, not his own faults, brought about his downfall, and he was thrown by a misuse of the law as wanton as any tyranny that could be brought against him. In 1639 John Pym carried out his threat and impeached him of high treason; Wentworth, newly created Lord Strafford, was committed to the Tower, and the outward disgrace and real glory of the man began. It was one of the most memorable of all state trials, and lacked no element of the tragic, the strange, the terrible, or the dramatic. The prisoner was he who for over ten years had been the greatest man in the three kingdoms; the principal accuser was one who had been the closest friend of the man he accused; the judges were eighty peers of the realm, the witnesses the two Houses. A King who loved and a Queen who hated the accused were present. The prisoner conducted his own defence, and outside beyond the doors of Westminster Hall the first murmurs of the growing civil war were beginning to rise and swell. Sir Anthony Van Dyck painted Lord Strafford as a dark, handsome man of a robust type dictating to his secretary; the picture shows a personality such as is in accordance with what we know of the man, and when looking at the proud, half-frowning face it is easy to imagine how he stood during his trial, pale, composed, erect, scornful of them, seeing very surely the axe ahead, having no trust save in the sad-eyed King at whose ear the Bourbon Queen whispered hatred of him, yet using all his magnificence of eloquence to save himself as one who is conscious that his life is worth defending. Thirteen accusers, who relieved each other, plied him with questions for seventeen days, and he answered them all with unshaken judgment, calm and grace, unaided, unpitied. John Pym’s hatred spurred his enemies on, and Lord Strafford must have tasted the bitterest of all humiliation when he looked to where sat his friend Charles Stewart, not daring to lift a hand to save him–and he had hoped to make his King great indeed.