Dimensions
155 x 233 x 31mm
A Revaluation
As the ruthless servant of King Charles I, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford rose to the most powerful and the most hated man in the British Isles, only to be deserted by the master he had served and go to the scaffold to appease the wrath of the people.
CV Wedgwood, of the greatest historians of the twentieth century, wrote her first book 'Strafford', in 1935. Her view of him at the time was generally favourable. It was only when new letters and documents became available following the Second World War that she re-evaluated, quite substantially, her original view and wrote this book, first published in 1961.
Strafford emerges as the most dramatic figure in the great struggle between King and Parliament; the man who, after leading the House of Commons to triumph against the Crown by the passing of the Petition of Right in 1628, deserted Parliament to become the devoted agent of the King. He was the great administrator who made Ireland prosperous but who was overtaken by fate in 1641 when the King feebly sent him to his death.
But CV Wedgwood's revaluation also shows him to be a much more complex and contradictory character - an unscrupulous man of powerful intelligence, limited inspiration and enormous energy whose capacity for deluding himself was greater than his capacity for deceiving others.
