Having been allowed to hold a Parliament and to do it in his own way, Wentworth at once set to work to make it a success. He summoned his Council, who thought supply should be accompanied by some assurance from the King that grievances would be remedied. They also wished to limit the levies to the actual expenses, having a well-founded fear that surplus money would be squandered in England, and not applied to the liquidation of the Irish debt. Wentworth at once told them that the King called a Parliament because he preferred standing on the ancient ways, that he had absolute right and power to collect all the revenue he required without the consent of anybody, and that their business as councillors was to trust their sovereign without asking questions. 'I told them plainly,' he said, 'I feared they began at the wrong end, thus consulting what might please the people in a Parliament, when it would better become a Privy Councillor to consider what might please the King, and induce him to call one.' He would not take less than three subsidies of 30,000_l._ each, but would get as much more as possible without conditions, and they were not to propose any. The State could not be too well provided. 'What,' he asked prophetically, 'if the natives should rebel? There was no great wisdom to be over-confident in them, being of a contrary religion and so great in number.' And he concluded by asking them to take warning by the troubles which the Commons' distrust of their King had brought upon the late Parliaments in England. When this was read at the English Council Cottington could not refrain from the obvious comment 'et quorum pars magna fui.' Wentworth owed his own political position to his exertions in favour of the Petition of Right, and now he said that everything the subject had was, and ought to be, at the disposition of the Crown. That Laud should have joked with his friend on this subject and that the latter should have taken it as a joke, is not the least extraordinary thing in Wentworth's career. 'As for that hydra,' said Charles of the House of Commons, 'take good heed; for you know that here I have found it as well cunning as malicious. Your grounds are well laid and I have great trust in your care and judgment; yet my opinion is, that it will not be the worse for my service, though their obstinacy make you break them'.[190] [Sidenote: Wentworth and the Irish nobility,] [Sidenote: whom he treats with contempt.]