This is an essay in British and to a lesser extent in European history. By exploring Anglo-Irish politics during the late 1620s and early 1630s it seeks to be doubly topical, shedding light on the British problem as well as on the background to the Irish rebellion of 1641. We have a growing awareness of the importance of British events, of the interplay of developments in the three kingdoms, in the coming of the crisis of the 1640s. The Irish rebellion, for example, helped set the English political stage for civil war by preventing the dissolution of the Long Parliament. Indeed the theory has recently been advanced that Ireland was the critical element in the British problem.4 Moreover, amongst Irish historians, how far back to trace the causes of the 1641 rebellion is still a controversial question.

These two dimensions, the British and the more particularly Irish, will be illuminated here by an investigation of a hitherto missing link in Irish political history.

The lords justices, Cork and Loftus, governed Ireland between 1629 and 1633. These years in Irish politics, between the departure of Falkland and the coming of Wentworth, have not received as much attention as they deserve. It is tempting to focus on the commencement of Wentworth's deputyship as a pivotal point. But the government of the lords justices had its own character and a wider historical significance. We can better understand both the character and the significance when we learn of a secret political player in London – an English and a European figure – and of his role in facilitating the aims of an ideological regime in Ireland.