on 10 May the royal assent was given by commission to the bill. Strafford is said to have been surprised by the news, and to have exclaimed, ‘Put not your trust in princes!’ If he used the expression, he must have received an assurance from Charles that the advice given in the earl's paper of the 8th would be followed out.
On the 11th, knowing that his execution was to take place on the following morning, Strafford sent a message to Laud, also imprisoned in the Tower, to be at his window as he passed. When he went forth on 12 May 1641, Laud raised his hands in blessing, and then fainted away when his friend passed. On the scaffold on Tower Hill Strafford told the vast crowd assembled to see him die that he had always believed ‘parliaments in England to be the happy constitution of the kingdom and nation, and the best means under God to make the king and his people happy,’ asking further whether it was well that the ‘beginning of the people's happiness should be written in letters of blood.’ Refusing to bind his eyes he, after prayer, spread forth his hands as a sign to the executioner, and the axe ended his life. He was buried at Wentworth-Woodhouse.
Van Dyck seems to have painted Strafford at least four times. The best known portrait is that of Strafford and his secretary, Sir Philip Mainwaring [q. v.], now in the possession of Sir Philip Tatton Mainwaring, bart. It was engraved by Vertue and prefixed to the ‘Strafford Letters,’ 1739; four other engravings of this portrait are mentioned by Bromley. Another portrait of Strafford by Van Dyck is at Wentworth-Woodhouse, the seat of Earl Fitzwilliam, and a third belonged in 1866 to the Earl of Home (Cat. First Loan Exhib. Nos. 579, 624). A fourth, belonging to the Duke of Portland, is at Welbeck, and is reproduced in Mr C. Fairfax Murray's ‘Catalogue of Pictures at Welbeck’ (p. 25). There are also engravings by Hollar, Houbraken, R. Houston, G. Glover, and R. White, and an engraving of Strafford and his three surviving children by Vertue (Bromley, p. 76).
Strafford's aims as a statesman are easy to discern. A reformer by nature, he sought to retain the kingship in the position it had acquired under the Tudors—to be assisted but not controlled by parliaments. To maintain this position was impossible with Charles, and Strafford was therefore forced into a reaction from which the Tudor sovereigns had kept themselves free. Personally he was most lovable by all who submitted to his influence, with an imperious temper towards all who thwarted him.
By his second wife, Arabella Holles, Strafford had four children, three of whom outlived him: William (see below); Anne, born in October 1627; and Arabella, born in October 1630 (Strafford Letters, ii. 430). By his third wife, Elizabeth Rodes, he had a daughter Margaret.
Strafford's honours were forfeited by his attainder, but his only son, William, who was born on 8 June 1626, received them all by a fresh grant from Charles I on 1 Dec. 1641. In 1662 parliament reversed his father's attainder, and William, already first Earl of Strafford of the second creation, became also second earl of the first creation in succession to his father. He was elected K.G. on 1 April 1661 and F.R.S. on 6 Feb. 1668. He married, first, on 27 Feb. 1654–5, Anne (d. 1685), daughter of James Stanley, seventh earl of Derby [q. v.]; and secondly, in 1694, Henrietta (d. 1732), daughter of Charles de la Roye de Rochefoucauld, count of Roye and Rouci. He died, without issue by either wife, on 16 Oct. 1695, when all the peerage honours conferred on himself or his father became extinct, except the barony of Raby, which descended to his nephew Thomas, who was on 4 Sept. 1711 created Earl of Strafford [see Wentworth, Thomas, (1672–1739)]. His estates descended to his daughter Anne, who married Edward Watson, second lord Rockingham, from whom was descended the Marquis of Rockingham, the patron of Burke [see Watson-Wentworth, Charles, (1730–1782)].
[The main source of information on Strafford's life is the Earl of Strafford's Letters and Despatches, London, 1739, 2 vols. fol., in the appendix to which are some biographical notes by Strafford's friend Sir G. Radcliffe; this work was edited by William Knowler [q. v.] from the papers of Thomas Watson, lord Malton and afterwards first marquis of Rockingham, great-grandson of Strafford. References, beyond those mentioned above, are given in Gardiner's Hist. of Engl. 1603–42. There is a modern life by Elizabeth Cooper, 1866, and another by John Forster [q. v.], published in vol. i. of his ‘Lives of the Statesmen of the Commonwealth,’ 1836. Robert Browning's ‘Strafford: an Historical Tragedy’ was produced at Covent Garden on 23 April 1837 with Macready in the title-rôle, and was published in the same year. It is believed that a large number of volumes containing Strafford's unpublished correspondence are in the possession of Earl Fitzwilliam at Wentworth-Woodhouse.]
WENTWORTH, Sir THOMAS, Baron Wentworth (1613–1665), eldest son, by his first wife, of Thomas Wentworth, fourth baron Wentworth of Nettlestead and first earl of Cleveland [q. v.], was born at Todding-
