3. Dublin & War: 1629-1639

Until the Duke of Buckingham – who was all-powerful as King James' favourite and then as King Charles' adviser – was assassinated in 1628 by an army officer with a grievance, Mr Wandesford and Sir Thomas Wentworth had opposed him and the King.  

Duke of Buckingham: 1625

They had stood against King Charles when he tried to get round the need to have taxation voted for in Parliament by raising Forced Loans – imprisonment without trial was the penalty for those who, like Sir Thomas, refused to obliged the King with a loan – and by using martial law to force ordinary householders to lodge his soldiers and sailors in their own homes and keep them in food and clothes.  Mr Wandesford played an active part in the opposition to the King.  But by 1629 the rift between the King and Parliament widened to a gulf and positions were hardening on both sides.  The King was already viewed with great distrust and now it was feared by some that the bishops he had appointed were working to undermine the Church of England and move it towards the Church of Rome.  

If common ground couldn't be found between King and Parliament – and it was clear that it could not – then the time had come for men to make decisions.  Which side should have the upper hand?  The increasingly Puritan House of Commons or the intransigent King?  For many it was an agonising choice – a man might be as repelled by the aims and the religious position of the Puritan faction as he was by the King's past political manoeuvres and his slippery tactics.  But a choice had to be made.  Mr Wandesford and Sir Thomas Wentworth chose the King.

Now began the period known as Charles I's Personal Rule, when he governed without a Parliament from the spring of 1629 to the spring of 1640.  But it was not the end of the two friends' public life.  With the Duke of Buckingham assassinated in 1628, the King needed a new adviser and it would soon be Sir Thomas Wentworth.  He was made Viscount Wentworth and President of the Council of the North.  So he was able to help his friend to office and Mr Wandesford became the Deputy Bailiff of Richmondshire, Deputy Constable of Richmond and Middleham Castles and Master of the King's forests.  

Wentworth was by now a formidable public figure, much in the King's favour, but his gift for making enemies only grew.  It was particularly on display as President of the Council of the North.  Among the enemies were two Cleveland landowners – Sir David Foulis of Ingleby Greenhow, an old Scottish courtier of King James, and Sir Thomas Layton of Sexhow.  They clashed with Wentworth over a cynical ploy by the King to raise money by fining gentlemen who could have attended his coronation and been knighted, but who had not done so.  Sir Thomas Layton found himself in 1633 in the frightening position of being brought before the King's Court of Star Chamber.  He escaped lightly, but Sir David Foulis ended up in the Fleet Prison for seven years.  His sons would be no friends of Wentworth or of the King.  

To Dublin

And now Alice's life took a very different course.  When she was eight, the family moved to Dublin.  Her father had become one of the great men in the viceregal court, one of the small group of close advisers around Wentworth, now the Lord Deputy of Ireland.  

Some of Wentworth's friends had been against him going to Ireland.  They thought the post was a poisoned chalice and one he should refuse.  It was a job in which it was almost impossible to succeed and being away from Court left his enemies free to plot against him.  Perhaps Mr Wandesford thought it was a bad idea himself – he was always cautious and moderate where Wentworth was bold and dictatorial.  However, Wentworth accepted and the King agreed that he could take Mr Wandesford with him, to fill the legal and administrative post of Master of the Rolls.  

In July 1633, Wentworth, his family and advisers left for Ireland.  Mr Wandesford took with him his ten-year-old son George and his young son-in-law Thomas Danby.  Mrs Wandesford stayed behind with the younger children Alice and Christopher and they all travelled to Dublin some months later, together with baby John who had been born in London in the meantime.  The family settled into their new home in Damas Street – a very elegant house, according to a descendant, in a very wholesome Air, with a good Orchard and Garden leading down to the Water Side.  

Speed's map of Dublin in 1610

The small walled city of Dublin was a fraction of the size of London, though it had grown in size and prosperity since this map was drawn by Speed in 1610.  It had its own university, Trinity College, founded in 1592 under the encouragement of Queen Elizabeth to bring Ireland into the world of European learning and to strengthen Protestantism on the island.  It soon had a theatre – Wentworth dearly loved going to a play and he encouraged his children's tutor John Ogilby to set up Ireland's first custom-built theatre in Werburgh Street.  He had great plans for Ireland.

Life in Ireland

Six happy years followed for Alice.  She had the company of Wentworth's daughters as she learned her lessons – Anne was younger than she was by eighteen months and Arabella by four and half years – and her education was of the best.  On her father's orders she learned to speak and write French, to sing, dance, and play on the lute and theorboe, a 14-string lute with a long neck.  She was taught the arts of huswifery that her mother thought suitable for a young lady of her birth – such skills as silk embroidery, making sweetmeats, and making decorative leaves and flowers by gumming together layers of silk and cutting them into shapes.  

Wentworth's daughters, Anne & Arabella

Genteel indoor physical exercise was included, on a swing – she and the Wentworth girls used to "swing by the arms" as the ladies did for recreation and exercise, and Alice found it did her good.  Until, that is, one day at the house of Sir Robert Meredyth, when the girls wearied of the game and a page boy was instructed to push Alice.  Alice did not like this idea but could not get off the swing in time before he came over and gave it a violent shove – which resulted in her losing her grip and falling forward onto the floor onto her chin and being knocked quite silly for a while.  Sir Robert Meredyth was a member of the Privy Council; Alice's life – and that of her mother and brothers – was spent in government circles among the Protestant English rulers of a Catholic island.  

Beyond those circles lay people that Alice hardly knew or never encountered.  There were the Old English, descendants of the Norman lords who had conquered the island centuries earlier – they were still mostly Catholic.  And there were the Irish that they had defeated, also Catholic, excluded from their ancient lands and from civic life.  And there were Protestant incomers.  King James, to subjugate Ireland, had begun the Plantation of the province of Ulster, importing Protestant, English-speaking colonists from England and especially Scotland to settle there.  Wentworth, Mr Wandesford and the other close advisers believed that planting Protestants in other areas of Ireland – on land claimed by quibbles and legal loopholes to be the King's – was the way forward to a productive, modern country.  It would civilise the Irish.  Discontent simmered.

Wentworth's aim was to ensure the King had absolute power over Ireland, to bring order and prosperity to the country, to bring its Calvinist Protestant church in line with the King's High Church Anglicanism, and for Catholicism to dwindle away.  His goal was for Ireland was to be as like England as possible – but dependent on England.  He was ruthlessly efficient – everyone was glad when he put an end to piracy – but he and his policies were far from popular.  He was high-handed and his short temper was made much worse whenever he was in pain with that excruciating complaint, the gout. 

Alice's time was not only passed in the city.  In 1635 Mr Wandesford bought the manor and castle of Kildare, some twenty miles from Dublin, and for a couple of years it was the family's country house.  Perhaps it was here that Alice learned to ride.  It was while living here in 1636 that Mr Wandesford wrote a book of advice for his son and heir George, for the "regulating of his whole life", with instructions on such vital points as what to study and how to choose a wife, clearly setting out the universal understanding that marriage for the gentry was a very practical matter.  The greater a wife's fortune, the greater would be George's own comfort and the gratitude of his descendants.

On one terrifying occasion which Alice remembered vividly – it was on 6 October 1636 – they had driven out of Dublin to go to Kildare.  Mrs Wandesford, Alice and the three boys were inside the coach and Mr Wandesford and his men rode alongside.  They came to a narrow place where the riders had to fall back.  On one side of their road was a deep river – the Liffey? – and on the other a dry bank.  Was there no space for the coach?  Did the ground begin to give way?  The riders watched with horror as the coach began to slip – but the coachman, with great presence of mind, forced it to overturn against the bank.  Some of the family inside were hurt, but they escaped plunging into the river.  

The following year, Mr Wandesford gave up the estate to his great friend Wentworth, who had taken a liking to it.  Splendour and ceremonial were part of his plans for imposing royal authority on Ireland and he began to build a viceregal residence there, at Jigginstown near Naas.  Mr Wandesford had already begun to plan his own plantation – a new town in County Kilkenny, nearly sixty miles from Dublin.  He bought the estate of Castlecomer on which he began, with his usual efficiency and energy, to build a model market town with a new church, manufacturies and collieries, using the labour and expertise of artisans who came over from Yorkshire with their families.  For his own family he built a house and enclosed a deer park.  Besides all this work and his other financial plans in Ireland, he was busy in Parliament and as Master of the Rolls, and he deputised when Wentworth went to England.  His family can't have seen much of him.

1639:  shipwreck & war

The year 1639, when Alice was thirteen, was marked for her forever by escape from shipwreck and drowning.  She had travelled to England with her mother, who was suffering from the stone – bladder or kidney stones – and had decided to take the waters at St Vincent's Well, just outside Bristol.  In late August they set off back to Ireland, bringing with them Alice's nephews from Yorkshire, eight-year-old Thomas and seven-year-old Christopher.  They were the eldest sons of Alice's sister Catherine, now Lady Danby – during Thomas Danby's short stay in Dublin in 1633 he had been knighted by the Lord Deputy – and the boys were coming to Ireland for their education.  When the party reached the quay at Neston on the River Dee estuary, ten miles from Chester, they found they were kept ashore for a week by contrary winds and a great storm during which five ships were cast upon the shore.  One ship was so close to the house in which they were staying that its mainmast nearly touched the window.  

At last, on 22 August, they were able to go aboard one of the King's new ships, only to find that, within an hour of sailing, they were driven by a storm miles beyond Dublin to Skerries.  The anchor was lowered but for ten hours they were in peril until a Mr Hubert sent out a fishing boat to help.  And now Alice was nearly drowned.  She was somehow caught by the cable stretched between the boat and the ship and was half overboard when a seaman, coming up onto deck, saw her and pulled her back just in time.  At last, at eight o'clock in the evening, they were all brought safely ashore to Skerries where Mr Hubert and his family made them most comfortable until the next day when Mr Wandesford and some friends came out by coach from Dublin to bring them home.

Charles I by Van Dyck: 1635 or 1636

Mrs Wandesford's illness and the shipwreck were just a part of Mr Wandesford's troubles.  In 1638, King Charles' attempts to force his own brand of religion upon Scotland had ended in crisis.  The Scots created a National Covenant, an agreement signed by the people across the country, opposing the King's new prayer book and the existence of bishops.  So the King had begun the year 1639 by announcing his intention of raising an army against his Scottish kingdom.  

At this time, there was no standing army – just the Trained Bands, local militias made up of householders and their sons, who were obliged to turn out when summoned for training and action.  Their effectiveness was improved by the many men who had served in the religious wars in Europe.  The cavalry were the shock troops.  The foot – the infantry – was made up of pikemen, each with his ash pole, which could be up to 18 feet long and was tipped with a 2 foot long iron spear, and musketeers.  Dragoons rode light ponies and dismounted to fight on foot.  The ordnance – artillery – was of a range of sizes, from the large siege guns to the lighter and more easily transportable field guns.  

Battle was a fearsome, bloody business of hand-to-hand fighting.  The musketeers would stand doggedly firing at each other at point blank range.  The pikemen would advance, their weapons at shoulder height, until the opposing sides were jabbing at each other.  Then they would lock in the Push of Pike, two solidly massed bodies of men each attempting to force the other to give way.  The cavalry would come in with their pistols, short muskets and swords, firing, hacking, slashing.

Pikemen by John Beardsworth

By the end of March 1639, Charles and his troops had reached York.  On 30 May he was at Berwick with an army mostly made up of raw conscripts and the Trained Bands of the northern border counties.  When it became clear that he wouldn't be able to defeat the Covenanter army, he decided to negotiate.  But he was still determined to succeed by force and he summoned Wentworth to England.  

Notes:

The story of Sir Thomas Layton's clash with Sir Thomas Wentworth is told at Sir Thomas Layton finds himself before the Star Chamber 1633    

Damas Street is now Dame Street – it also appears as Damask Street and Dames Street [Wikipedia entry] 

 4. War in the Three Kingdoms: 1640