[Sidenote: Wentworth's opinion of his Council.] [Sidenote: A Parliament proposed to provide money.] [Sidenote: Speech of Wentworth, who finds Parsons 'dry.'] [Sidenote: First appearance of Ormonde.] 'I find them in this place'--so runs Wentworth's first published letter from Dublin--'a company of men the most intent upon their own hands that ever I met with, and so as those speed, they consider other things at a very great distance.' Three weeks later he found the officials very sharp about their own interests, but 'with no edge at all for the public,' and all in league to keep the Deputy as much in the dark as possible. He determined from the first to trust no one but his friend Wandesford, who had just been made Master of the Rolls, and his secretary Radcliffe, who had been in Ireland since January, and who was made a Privy Councillor within a few weeks of his chief's arrival. To these was afterwards added Sir Philip Mainwaring, who owed his appointment to Wentworth and Laud jointly. On the day week after taking the reins of office Wentworth summoned the Council to consider how money might be raised for the payment of the army. The members of the Board were slow to begin the discussion, but Sir Adam Loftus of Rathfarnham at last proposed to continue the voluntary contribution for another year, and thus to provide the necessary funds until the end of 1634. At the same time he suggested a Parliament, not only for supply but for the settlement of disputed titles. Then there was another silence, and at last Wentworth called upon Parsons to give his opinion. The result was an expression of doubt as to the power of the Council to bind others, and a hint that the army might be provided for out of the King's ordinary revenue, which Wentworth found 'reduced to fee-farms' and therefore quite unelastic. 'I was then,' he said, 'put to my last refuge, which was plainly to declare that there was no necessity which induced me to take them to counsel in this business, for rather than fail in so necessary a duty to my master, I would undertake upon the peril of my head to make the King's army able to subsist, and to provide for itself amongst them without their help.' He had been but a week in Ireland, and was already talking about risking his head, which tends to show that Pym had really uttered the threat attributed to him, and that his old ally remembered it. The Chancellor, Cork, and Mountnorris thereupon agreed to the proposal of Loftus, and all, especially Cork, were eager for a Parliament. Wentworth, who had championed the Petition of Right, had so completely given himself to prerogative that he seems hardly to have realised that men might be very willing to pay a parliamentary tax, while shrinking from arbitrary exactions and from troops at free quarters. 'As for Sir William Parsons,' he said, 'first and last I found him the driest of all the company.' It was not Parsons, however, but Loftus, Cork,