The unhappy Ananias naturally submitted at once to the terrible deputy, and, although Archbishop Ussher and most of the bishops defended the attacked canons, Wentworth carried his point by a sheer exercise of power.  Throwing the list of canons already drawn out aside, he drew up another of his own composition, and forced the Convocation to accept it.  “There were some hot spirits, sons of thunder, amongst them,” he tells Laud boastfully, “who moved that they should petition me for a free synod, but, in fine, they could not agree among themselves who should put the bell about the cat’s neck, and so this likewise vanished[11].”  The cat, in truth, was a terrible one to bell!

[11] Ibid.

But the career of the master of Ireland was nearing its end.  By the beginning of 1640 the Scotch were up in arms, and about to descend in force upon England.  The English Puritans, too, were assuming a hostile attitude.  Civil war was upon the point of breaking out.  Charles summoned Wentworth over in hot haste from Ireland, and it was decided between them that the newly-organized Irish forces were to be promptly employed against the Scotch rebels.  With this purpose Wentworth—­now with the long-desired titles of Earl of Strafford and Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland—­hurried back to make the final arrangements.  Fresh subsidies were obtained from the ever-subservient Irish parliament; more recruits were hastily summoned, and came in readily; the army was put under the command of the young Earl of Ormond, and Stratford once more returned to England.  He did so only to find all his calculations upset.  A treaty had been made in his absence with the Scots; the Long Parliament had assembled, and the fast-gathering storm was about to break in thunder over his own head.  He was impeached.  Witness after witness poured over from Ireland, all eager to give their evidence.  Representatives even of the much-aggrieved Connaught landlords—­though their wrongs did not perhaps count for much in the great total—­were there to swell the tide.  He was tried for high treason, condemned and executed.  In England the collapse of so great and so menacing a figure was a momentous event.  In Ireland it must have seemed as the very fall of Lucifer himself!

[Illustration:  SHRINE OF ST. PATRICK’S BELL.]

XXXV.

’FORTY-ONE.

Stafford’s fall and death would alone have rendered this year, 1641, a memorable one in Irish history.  Unhappily it was destined to be made yet more so; few years, indeed, in that long, dark bead-roll are perhaps as memorable, both from what it brought forth at the time, and, still more, from what was afterwards to follow from it.