James's declaration that the privileges of parliament were not the ‘ancient and undoubted right’ of the house, Wentworth on 15 Dec. avowed his own opinion to be opposite to that of the sovereign, but recommended that it should be embodied in a protestation which need not be communicated to the king, and would therefore maintain the ground taken by the house without necessarily leading to a collision with the king. Wentworth's suggestion was adopted, and it was James's own want of wisdom which found in the protestation an occasion for dissolving parliament. Young as he was—he was only in his twenty-ninth year—Wentworth had displayed during this session a mingled firmness and moderation which marked him out as a statesman who might do good service to his country if the personages in authority had been such as to allow of a prudent and moderating policy.
While Wentworth regretted the dissolution as putting a stop to domestic legislation, he was as hopeful as James himself of seeing the palatinate restored through the mediation of Spain, on the ground that it was to the interest of Philip IV to keep himself out of war, being inclined in this matter, as in many others in the course of his career, to think of men as led by their interests rather than by their feelings and passions (Strafford Letters, i. 15).
In the spring of 1622 Wentworth had a serious fever, and on his recovery removed to Bow, where his wife died, leaving no children. After her death he returned to Wentworth-Woodhouse, and was again seriously ill in 1623.
In the parliament of 1624 Wentworth sat for Pontefract. From scattered hints in his letters it appears that he had no sympathy with the eagerness of Buckingham and parliament to rush into a war with Spain. ‘I judge further,’ he wrote before the session opened, ‘the path we are like to walk in is now more narrow and slippery than formerly, yet not so difficult but may be passed with circumspection, patience, and silence’ (ib. p. 19). In another letter written after the prorogation he shows sympathy with Bristol, the negotiator of the Spanish marriage [see Digby, John, first Earl of Bristol], and jestingly dwells on the folly of the House of Commons in a reference to a statue of Samson killing a Philistine with the jawbone of an ass, ‘the moral and meaning whereof may be yourself standing at the bar, and there with all your weighty curiously-spun arguments beaten down by some such silly instrument as that, and so the bill in conclusion passed, sir, in spite of your nose’ (ib. p. 21). In the same spirit he mocks at ‘the cobblers and other bigots and zealous brethren’ who rejoiced in the departure of the Spanish ambassador, and laments the injury done by the Dutch to English commerce. The whole tone of this letter, written by Wentworth to his lifelong friend (Sir) Christopher Wandesford [q. v.], is that of a man who has ranged himself on the anti-puritan side, but who has no great respect for the conduct of the government as managed by Buckingham.
On 24 Feb. 1625 Wentworth was again a married man. His second wife was Arabella, second daughter of John Holles, first earl of Clare [q. v.], and sister of Denzil Holles [q. v.] In the first parliament of Charles I, which met on 18 June, he again sat for Yorkshire, but was unseated on petition, on the ground that the sheriff had prematurely closed the poll against the supporters of Wentworth's old rival, Savile. In the proceedings which followed in the house (Forster, Life of Eliot, i. 153; Gardiner, Hist. of Engl. v. 349) Wentworth, in defiance of the rules, attempted to address the house in his own defence when the case was under investigation, and brought down on himself a fierce attack from Eliot, who compared him to Catiline, who had come into the senate in order to destroy it. There was an impatience of contradiction in Wentworth which exposed him to attack, but Eliot would hardly have been so severe unless it had been generally understood that Wentworth's views were at that time regarded as contrary to those of the popular party.
Wentworth was re-elected on 1 Aug. in time to take his place after the adjournment to Oxford. To an offer of favour conveyed to him from Buckingham, he replied that ‘he was ready to serve him as an honest man and a gentleman’ (Strafford Letters, i. 34). It is, however, evident that he was not in favour of the war with Spain, whether it was promoted by Buckingham or his opponents. ‘Let us first,’ he said in the house, ‘do the business of the commonwealth, appoint a committee for petitions, and afterwards, for my part, I will consent to do as much for the king as any other.’ The avoidance of external complications with a view to the pursuance of internal reforms was, to the end, the main principle of Wentworth's political conduct, putting him out of sympathy alike with the popular sentiment and with the aims of the powerful favourite. At the close of the session his sense of independence was roused by the threat of a penal dissolution. To a proposal that the house should withdraw from the position it had taken up in opposition to the duke, he replied, ‘We
