It must be added that Juxon redeemed the scandal of his appointment by an unblemished probity, and gave so little offence in this invidious greatness, that the long parliament never attacked him, and he remained in his palace at Fulham without molestation till 1647.
[76] _Strafford's Letters_, i. 33, etc. The letters of Wentworth in this period of his life show a good deal of ambition and resentment, but no great portion of public spirit. This collection of the Strafford letters forms a very important portion of our historical documents. Hume had looked at them very superficially, and quotes them but twice. They furnished materials to Harris and Macaulay; but the first is little read at present, and the second not at all. In a recent and deservedly popular publication, Macdiarmid's _Lives of British Statesmen_, the work of a young man of letters, who did not live to struggle through the distresses of that profession, the character of Strafford is drawn from the best authorities, and with abundant, perhaps excessive candour. Mr. Brodie has well pointed out that he has obtained more credit for the early period of his parliamentary life than he deserves, by being confounded with Mr. Wentworth, member for Oxford. Vol. ii. p. 249. Rushworth has even ascribed to Sir Thomas Wentworth the speeches of this Mr. Wentworth in the second parliament of Charles, from which it is notorious that the former had been excluded.
[77] Hacket tells us, in his elegant style, that "Sir John Eliot of the west, and Sir Thomas Wentworth of the north, both in the prime of their age and wits, both conspicuous for able speakers, clashed so often in the house, and cudgelled one another with such strong contradictions, that it grew from an emulation between them to an enmity. The lord-treasurer Weston picked out the northern cock, Sir Thomas, to make him the king's creature, and set him upon the first step of his rising; which was wormwood in the taste of Eliot, who revenged himself upon the king in the Bill of Tonnage, and then fell upon the treasurer, and declaimed against him, that he was the author of all the evils under which the kingdom was oppressed." He proceeds to inform us, that Bishop Williams offered to bring Eliot over, for which Wentworth never forgave him. _Life of Williams_, p. 82. The magnanimous fortitude of Eliot forbids us to give credit to any surmise unfavourable to his glory, upon such indifferent authority; but several passages in Wentworth's letters to Laud show his malice towards one who had perished in the great cause which he had so basely forsaken.