Note 264 — Chapter XVIII · TRIAL AND DEATH OF STRAFFORD

Strafford’s trial occupies Rushworth’s eighth volume. The report in Howell’s State Trials is founded upon A Brief and Perfect Relation of the answers and replies of Thomas Earl of Strafford, London, 1647. A third contemporary account is in Baillie’s Letters, i. 313-353. These three are the reports of eye-witnesses. The historian May was probably also present; his book was licensed May 7, 1647, and has some touches not found elsewhere. Nalson was an infant when Strafford died, and his account, which was published after Rushworth’s, has no independent value. Madame de Motteville (Mémoires, chap. ix.), reporting Henrietta Maria’s conversation, says Strafford ‘était laid, mais assez agréable de sa personne; et la Reine, me contant toutes ces choses, s’arrêta pour me dire qu’il avait les plus belles mains du monde.’ May says many thought of Ovid’s lines: ‘Non formosus erat, sed erat facundus Ulysses, et tamen æquoreas torsit amore deas’—Earl of Cork’s Diary in Lismore Papers, v. 164, 170, 176. ‘The natural pity and consideration of women, sympathising with his afflictions, with sadness of his aspect, their facility with his complacences, their lenity with his pathetical oratory’—Earl of Strafford characterised, 1641, Somers Tracts, iv. 231.