On 22 July following Wentworth was created Baron Wentworth, and on 10 Dec. he exchanged his baronage for a viscountcy, with the same title. On 25 Dec. he was appointed president of the council of the north. What is usually styled his apostasy was thus accomplished before the end of the year. That there was no real or pretended change of principle is obvious. Wentworth had sought to limit the powers of royalty, as had been done in the petition of right, for the sake of the king as well as of his subjects, but he had never shown any desire to transfer the control of the executive from the king to parliament, or to favour the growth of puritanism in the church. It was, however, precisely these two points on which the House of Commons had put forward claims at the close of the session of 1628, and were likely to put forward claims in the coming session of 1629. Yet there could be no doubt that a change of position would bring with it a change of view. Few men, and least of all men of Wentworth's strength of will, could be expected to see things in the same way after ceasing to be critics and becoming actors. As wielding the executive powers of the crown in the north, Wentworth would soon come to regard the crown as the sole upholder of the rights of the state, and all who opposed it as engaged in the destructive work of weakening the authority without which the state would dissolve into atoms. In the speech which he delivered on 30 Dec. to the council of the north, he set forth his conception of the unity of interest which ought to prevail between king and people in terms which would have satisfied Bacon: ‘To the joint individual well-being of sovereignty and subjection,’ he said, ‘do I here vow all my cares and diligences through the whole course of my ministry. I confess I am not ignorant how some distempered minds have of late very often endeavoured to divide the considerations of the two, as if their end were distinct, not the same—nay, in opposition; a monstrous, a prodigious birth of a licentious conception, for so we would become all head or all members. … Princes are to be the indulgent nursing fathers to their people; their modest liberties, their sober rights ought to be precious in their eyes, the branches of their government to be for shadow, for habitation, the comfort of life. [The people] repose safe and still under the protection of their sceptres. Subjects, on the other side, ought, with solicitous eyes of jealousy, to watch over the prerogatives of a crown. The authority of a king is the keystone which closeth up the arch of order and government, which contains each part in due relation to the whole, and which once shaken, infirm'd, all the frame falls together into a confused heap of foundation and battlement of strength and beauty’ (printed from Tanner MSS. lxxii. 300 in Academy, 5 June 1875). Wentworth's conception of parliaments, in short, was rather that which prevails in Germany at the present day than that which was already growing in England in the minds of the parliamentary leaders.
Whether Wentworth took any part in the debates of the House of Lords in the short session of 1629 we have no means of knowing. But it may be safely conjectured that he regarded the House of Commons as wholly in the wrong in the events which led to the dissolution. Early in September he obtained knowledge of a paper written by Sir Robert Dudley in 1614 recommending James to erect a military despotism in England. He at once took it to Charles, who on 10 Nov. 1629 made him a privy councillor as a reward for his loyalty, as it was suspected that the paper was being circulated by the leaders of the opposition as indicating Charles's true intentions. In November 1630 he spoke strongly in the Star-chamber against Alexander Leighton (1568–1649) [q. v.], and it is said that a common feeling against aggressive puritanism drew him on that occasion to contract an intimate friendship with Laud, which continued to his death (Leighton, Epitome, 1646). On Wentworth's action in the privy council in these years we have no evidence, and it is certain that he had not, at this time, the predominant influence which has been subsequently attributed to him.
In October 1631 Wentworth lost his second wife, the mother of his children. At York there was a strong feeling of sympathy with the lord president in his trouble. ‘The whole city’ had ‘a face of mourning; never any woman so magnified and lamented even of those who never saw her face’ (Fairfax Correspondence, ii. 237). In October 1632 Wentworth married his third wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Godfrey and granddaughter of Francis Rodes [q. v.]
In governing the north, Wentworth's main difficulties arose from the spirit of independence shown by the gentry and nobility in a district in which the idea of the predominance of the state had made less progress than in the more thickly populated and wealthier south. His first conflict was with Henry Bellasys, the son of Lord Fauconberg, who, coming into the hall in which Wentworth was sitting with the council, neglected to make the customary reverence, and kept his head covered when the lord
