“Ye affaires of ye Island” had been going from bad to worse. Wentworth’s tragic end was almost an old story in May 1642, so quickly had events been hurrying on. He had got his earldom at last, in January 1640. For one little year he was indeed Earl of Strafford and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; he had headed the loan to King Charles for the expenses of the second “Bishops’” War. Strafford was in the King’s Cabinet, and the Earl of Cork had been made a Privy Councillor. On April 13, 1640, the “Short Parliament” had met, and it had been dissolved on May 5—“the doleful Tuesday, when the Parliament was dissolved before any Act was passed.”[94] The Earl and his family were back at Stalbridge in July; and now it was Broghill’s turn to raise “a Hundred Horse for Scotland,” and Kynalmeaky and Barrymore and George Goring were all bound for the North in the second “Bishops’ War”. But by November the war was over, and the Parliament (that was to be the Long Parliament) had met. On November 11, Strafford was impeached and called to the Bar of the House on his knees (“I sitting in my place covered,” wrote the Earl of Cork in his diary); and on November 25 Strafford was in the Tower. All through the London winter of 1640, and right on into the spring of 1641, Strafford and Strafford’s trial filled the minds of all men, not in London only, but throughout England, Scotland and Ireland. During those fateful months, the diary gives one or two vivid glimpses of the Earl’s old enemy. There is no description of the scenes in the Houses, or the trial itself in Westminster Hall; the grim pageant of Lords and Commons; the plates of meat and bottles of drink being handed from mouth to mouth; the royalties in their little trellissed rooms; the King apart, “anxiously taking notes”; the ladies also, moved by pity, with paper, pens and ink before them, “discoursing upon the grounds of law and state”[95]. None of these things finds a place in the diary. The Earl’s old eyes were fixed upon Strafford, and Strafford only: Strafford on his knees before the Bar, with his six attendant lawyers; Strafford bringing his answer—his “18 skins of parchment, close-written”—into the House of Peers; Strafford attempting, in his own defence, to “blemish” the Earl of Cork with “accusations....”[96] It was a grim time. And yet, such is human life, while Strafford was in the Tower and the Committee of the Commons preparing his indictment, all London was talking of my Lord Broghill’s brilliant marriage with the Lady Margaret Howard, daughter of the late Earl of Suffolk, in “the Lord Daubigne’s house in Queenes street covent garden.”[97] “At Charing Cross hard by the way Where we (thou knowst) do sell our hay, There is a house with stairs....” There is no description of Broghill’s wedding from the Earl of Cork’s pen; but Sir John Suckling has left a very graphic account of it in his “Ballad upon a Wedding,” which, it is said, was hawked about the London streets at the time.[98]