7 October 1573 A.D. Arch-goat Billy Laudobate Born—76th of 105 Archbishops of Canterbury
7
October 1573 A.D. Arch-goat
Billy Laudobate Born—76th of 105 Archbishops of Canterbury
Lord Brougham. Old
England’s Worthies. London: James
Sangster and Company, c. 1880. http://www.amazon.com/Englands-Worthies-original-bographies-statesmen/dp/B00BNVBR34/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1401473810&sr=8-2&keywords=Lord+Brougham+Old+England%27s+Worthies
No author. “Biography of William
Laud (1573-1645), Archbishop of Canterbury.” Britannia.com. N.d. http://www.britannia.com/bios/wmlaud/reflect.html.
Accessed 30 May 2014.
Biography of William
Laud (1573-1645), Archbishop of Canterbury
W I L L I A M
L A U D
Part 1: Introduction
W I L L I A M
L A U D
Part 1: Introduction
The history of William Laud is in
a manner the history both of church and state in England for some twenty or
more most memorable years. If it were to be written with a copiousness
corresponding to the quantity of the materials, volumes on volumes might be
filled with it. Indeed it does actually stand recorded in several folios,
besides State Trials and Parliamentary History, and Strafford Letters and other
collections of State Papers, in which he fills much space. There is the history
of his 'Life and Death' in one folio volume by Dr. Peter Heylin and that of his
'Troubles and Trial' in another, considerably larger, edited from his own
papers by the learned Henry Wharton. We have his own Diary besides many of his
letters and a mass of other authentic documents. The facts of the greater part
of his history therefore are before us in extraordinary distinctness. Whatever
we may think of him, there he is, the man and his acts, still, if we choose,
almost as plainly to be seen by us as by his contemporaries. Some things
respecting him, indeed, we know better than they did. His life was more than
most lives passed in the light, and few have had the light so unsparingly let
in upon them as he has had even in his deepest privacies. We have his written
words intended only for the eye of the most intimate friendship or for no eye
but his own. We ought not to forget, in judging him, this trying ordeal through
which it has been his fate to be made to pass.
Part 2: Family Background
Curiously enough, Laud, in his own
Diary, has not included details of his parentage, though it is well known from
other records. The Diary begins by telling us merely that he was born on the
7th October 1573, at Reading in Berkshire, as if he had been literally an autochthon, terrae filius, or
"gum of the earth," as one of his brother bishops, Field of Llandaff,
calls himself in a begging letter to the universal patron, the Duke of
Buckingham. This is preserved in the Cabala and is one of the greatest
curiosities which have come down to us from that age. "Myself, a gum of
the earth," says Field insinuatingly, "whom some eight years ago you
raised out of the dust for raising but a thought so high as to serve your
highness." But Laud was not of this self-abasing temper. He had no
pleasure in looking back from his elevated fortunes upon the comparative
humility of his origin. His biographer Heylin tells us that the libellers, who
no doubt knew what would sting him, used frequently to upbraid him in the days
of his greatness with his mean birth. Once Heylin found him walking in his
garden at Lambeth "with more than ordinary trouble in his
countenance," "of which," continues our author, "not having
confidence enough to inquire the reason, he showed me a paper in his hand, and
told me it was a printed sheet of a scandalous libel which had been stopped at
the press, in which he found himself reproached with so base a parentage as if
he had been raked out of the dunghill. Adding withal, that though he had not
the good fortune to be born a gentleman, yet he thanked God he had been born of
honest parents who lived in a plentiful condition, employed many poor people in
their way and left a good report behind them." After some little time,
seeing his countenance beginning to clear up, ready Heylin told him the story
of Pope Sixtus the Fifth who used to say that he was domo natus illustri,
"because the sunbeams, passing through the broken walls and ragged roof,
illustrated every corner of that homely cottage in which he was born." The
Latin words, which would be naturally translated born of an illustrious house
or family, will also bear this other interpretation, however strange it may
sound to the English reader. And the facetious anecdote, thus aptly applied,
quite succeeded, we are assured, in restoring the equanimity of the ruffled
prelate.
Laud's father, William Laud Senior, was
a master cloth-worker and is described as having been well to do in the World.
"He kept," says Heylin, "not only many looms in his house,"
a building in Broad Street, Reading, long pulled down, "but many weavers,
spinners and fullers at continual work; living in good esteem and reputation
amongst his neighbours to the very last." He was active in public life and
held every office in the prosperous Berkshire town except that of mayor. Laud
Senior's son, named William after him, was his only child; but his wife had
been married before to another Reading clothier, John Robinson, by whom she had
had a family. She was one Lucy Webb, sister to Sir William Webb, who was Lord
Mayor of London in 1591. Of her children by Robinson, half-brothers and
half-sisters of the Archbishop, his biographer mentions a William, the youngest
son, who became a doctor of divinity, prebend of Westminster and Archdeacon of
Nottingham; and two daughters, married, the one to a Dr. Cotsford, the other to
a Dr. Layfield. It is possible that these relations of Laud's may have
prospered the better in the World for their connection with him; but his uncle,
at least, the Lord Mayor, had made his way to eminence long before the great
churchman had got upon the ladder of preferment. It is more likely that he may
have been of service to some later Webbs and Robinsons: Heylin speaks of a
grandson of the Lord Mayor, also a Sir William Webb, as having died not long
before he wrote, that is to say, perhaps, about the time of the Restoration;
and his book, published posthumously, in 1671, is dedicated by his son to a Sir
John Robinson, Bart., his Majesty's Lieutenant of the Tower of London, who is
addressed as nearly related to the subject of it and who may therefore be
presumed to have been a descendant of Laud's mother's first husband.
Part 3: Popish Notoriety
Laud, who appears to have been designed
for the church from his boyhood, was sent first to Reading School, the free
grammar-school of his native town. Whence, in July 1589, before he was sixteen,
"which," Heylin remarks, "was very early for those times,"
he was sent to Oxford, and entered as a commoner of St. John's. Here his tutor
was Mr. Buckeridge, one of the fellows and a zealous opponent of Puritanism.
The seed of this popular following had been sown in the Church almost at the
beginning of the Queen Elizabeth's reign and, for all that could be done to
keep it down, was evidently enough growing stronger every day. Buckeridge's
teaching was not thrown away upon Land.
The events noted in Laud's Diary for
the next ten or twelve years are: that he was chosen a scholar of his college
in June 1590 and admitted a fellow in June 1593; that his father died on
Wednesday 11th April 1594; that he proceeded bachelor of arts in June of that
year; that, in 1596, he had a great sickness and, in 1597, another (he had also
been brought to death's door by an illness in his infancy); that, in July 1598,
he took his degree of master of arts and the same year was grammar reader;
that, at the end of that year, he fell into another great sickness; that his
mother died on 24th November 1600; that, on 4th January 1601, he was ordained
deacon, and priest on the 5th of April thereafter.
He had already obtained a considerable
academic reputation and, having been admitted in 1602 to read a divinity
lecture then maintained in his college in which he acquitted himself to general
satisfaction, he became, next year, a candidate for the proctorship of the
university, and obtained it. In this year, 1603, Heylin says he publicly
maintained, either in his divinity lecture or in some other chapel exercise,
"his famous doctrine of the perpetual visibility of the church, as derived
from the Apostles to the Church of Rome, and continued in that church till the
Reformation." The proclamation of these opinions brought him at once into
open collision with the dominant Calvinistic party in the University, headed by
Dr. George Abbot, Master of University College (afterwards Archbishop of
Canterbury), who was then Vice-Chancellor. Abbot did not profess to deny the
constant visibility of the church, or the apostolical succession, but he held a
different theory of it, "tracing it," says Heylin contemptuously,
"as well as he could from the Berengarians to the Albigenses, from the
Albigenses to the Wycliffists, from the Wycliffists unto the Hussies, and from
the Hussites unto Luther and Calvin." From the two systems sprung what
were called High Church and Low Church principles and parties at a later date.
Heylin affirms, on the authority of Laud himself, that he was so violently
persecuted by Abbot. He was so openly branded by him for a papist, or at least
one very popishly inclined, "that it was almost made a heresy for anyone
to be seen in his company, and a misprision of heresy for anyone to give him a
civil salutation as he walked the streets." Laud had followed up his
lecture or sermon of 1603 by maintaining, the next year, in his exercise for
bachelor of divinity, the necessity both of baptism and of bishops. Again, by a
sermon preached in St. Mary's Church, Oxford on 21st October 1606, he was called
to account by Dr. Airy, then Vice-Chancellor, for making, in some passages, a
declaration of downright popery. "The good man," says Helyin, took
"all things to be a matter of popery which were not held forth unto him in
Calvin's Institutes."
Part 4: The Earl of Devonshire's Marriage
Shortly before this Laud had got into a
scrape of another kind. Under the year 1605, we find him noting in his Diary:
"My cross about the Earl of Devon's marriage," with a very particular
specification of the day, as 26th December, a Thursday. He had, in September
1603, been made chaplain to Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, recently created
Earl of Devon; and had been persuaded on that St. Stephen's Day, two years
after, to solemnize a marriage between his noble patron and the beautiful Lady
Rich, divorced from the Lord Rich for adultery with the Earl. It is quite
clear, whatever Heylin may endeavour to make out, that herein Laud acted
against his principles, or convictions of what was right. He confesses as much
in the penitential prayer which his apologist quotes: "Behold," he
there says, "I am become a reproach to thy holy name, by serving any
ambition and the sins of others; which though I did by the persuasion of other
men, yet my own conscience did cheek and upbraid me in it." There can be
no reasonable doubt that, in consistency with the rest of his theological
system, he held the doctrine of the absolute indissolubility of the sacrament
of marriage, and he must therefore be considered to have performed that
solemnity between Lord Devon and Lady Rich, and so sanctioned their living
together, while he believed her to be the wife of another man. He was
afterwards accustomed to observe the festival of St. Stephen as a day of
fasting and humiliation; but even from the account of his eulogistic biographer
it would rather appear that he did not arrive at this clear sense of his fault
till after all his expectations from his noble patron had been brought to an
end by the Earl's death, which took place before the end of the following year.
Notwithstanding his repentance, the affair was long a standing reproach against
him and, his biographer intimates, materially retarded his preferment.
Part 5: Rise through the Church
Despite his controversial involvement
in the Earl of Devon's marriage, Laud cannot be said to have been entirely neglected.
In November 1607, he was inducted into the vicarage of Stanford in
Northamptonshire. The advowson of North Kilworth in Leicestershire was given to
him, as he records, in April 1608, in which year he proceeded as Doctor of
Divinity and became chaplain to Bishop Neile of Rochester. In 1609, he
exchanged North Kilworth for West Tilbury in Essex, to be near his new patron,
and, in September of the same year, he made his debut as a courtier, by
preaching before the King at Theobalds. In May 1610, his friend, the Bishop of
Rochester, preferred him to the rectory of Cuckstone in Kent which he
exchanged, in November, for Norton in the same county, as a healthier
residence. Meanwhile, Neile had, in September, been translated to Lichfield
and, in October, Laud resigned his fellowship, "that so," says his
biographer, " he might more fully apply himself to the service of his lord
and patron, whose fortunes he was resolved to follow toll God should please to
provide otherwise for him." Neile had held the Deanery of Westminster in
commendam with his late bishopric. Before resigning it he obtained for his
friend, from the king, the reversion of a prebend in that church;
"which," says Heylin " though it fell not to him till fell years
after, yet it fell at last, and thereby neighboured him to the court." But
Neile's translation proved also immediately beneficial to Laud. For the new
Bishop of Rochester was his old tutor and steady friend, Buckeridge who was
able to influence Laud's election as his successor in the presidentship of St.
John's. Despite the opposition of Abbot (now Bishop of London and within a few
months to be elevated to the primacy), he obtained this office in May 1611 and
in November of the same year he was sworn in as one of his Majesty's chaplains in
ordinary. It is true that he appears also to have met with some crosses and
disappointments in the course of these years. We read in his Diary of his
"unfortunateness with T" and of his "next unfortunateness with
EM" and of a third "unfortunateness by SB" with sundry other
notices of stays and troubles, and fits of sickness. The first entry, under
date of' 1612, is of another "unfortunateness by SB" and the second,
of another with AD. In January 1613, began his "great business with GR"
which "settled as it could in March" and April 1614 was signalized by
the beginning of his "great misfortune by MG" and also by "a
most fierce salt rheum" in his left eye, "like to have endangered
it." But on the other side of the account, we find him noting that in the
same month his friend, Neile, now Bishop of Lincoln, gave him the prebend of
Bugden in that church. Heylin informs us that the Bishop did this "to keep
him up in heart and spirit," when he was sinking under the disappointment
of his hopes of court preferment. For, it seems, "whenever any opportunity
was offered for his advancement, Archbishop Abbot would be sure to cast
somewhat in his dish: sometimes inculpating to him (that is, objecting against
him to the King) all his actings at Oxford and sometimes rubbing up the old
sore of his unfortunate business with the Earl of Devonshire." In his
despair, Laud was upon the point of returning to his college, but Neile
prevailed with him to try one year longer and, for further encouragement, in
December 1615, conferred upon him the Archdeaconry of Huntingdon. At last,
"before the year of expectation was fully ended," to adopt Heylin's
words, "his Majesty began to take him into his better thoughts and, for a
testimony thereof, bestowed upon him the Deanery of Gloucester." The King
gave him this in November 1616, and he now resigned his parsonage of Tilbury.
In March 1617, James set out on a visit
to his native kingdom. His main object being to bring the Scots to conformity
with the English model in regard to religion. "A matter," observes
Heylin, "of consequence and weight, and therefore to be managed by able
ministers such as knew how to wind and turn the Presbyterians of that kingdom,
if matters should proceed to a disputation." Laud, esteemed as a person of
eminent theological learning and polemical ability, was one of those selected
to accompany his majesty. However, when James came to Edinburgh, "he soon
found," says Heylin, "that he might have saved himself a great part
of his care, and taken such of his chaplains with him as came next to hand; the
Presbyterian Scots not being to be gained by reason, as he had supposed. For he
was scarce settled in that city when the Presbyters, conceiving that his coming
was upon design to work a uniformity between the churches of both kingdoms, set
up one Struthers to preach against it, who laid so lustily about him in the
chief church of Edinburgh, that he not only condemned the rites and ceremonies
of the Church of England, but prayed God to save Scotland from the same. Laud,
and the rest of the chaplains who had heard the sermon, acquainted his Majesty
with those passages: but there was no remedy. The Scots were Scots and resolved
to go their own way, whatsoever came of it." Laud returned in the autumn
and, on his way home, was inducted into the Rectory of Ibstock in the county of
Leicester, a living in the patronage of his friend, Bishop Buckeridge, who let
him have it in exchange for Norton.
Part 6: Bishop of St. David's
He then rested as he was, for some
time. At last, in January 1621, he came into the enjoyment of the prebendal
stall in Westminster, of which he had secured the reversion ten years before.
And greater things followed fast. His own statement is that, on 3rd June, his
Majesty made a gracious speech to him concerning his long service, being
pleased to say that he had given him nothing but Gloucester, which he well knew
was a shell without a kernel. The sequel was his receiving a grant of the
Bishopric of St. David's on 29th of the same month. But the most particular and
curious account of the way in which the affair was managed is given in Bishop
Hacket's 'Life of Archbishop Williams'. Williams, who was Dean of Westminster,
had recentIy been made Lord Keeper of the Great Seal and had soon after been
raised to the Bishopric of Lincoln. He held the deanery in commendam and also retained his other
preferments of a prebend and residentiary canonship in the Cathedral of Lincoln
and the Rectory of Walgrave in Northamptonshire. "So that," as Heylin
puts it, "he was a perfect diocese within himself; as being Bishop, Dean,
Prebend residentiary and Parson, and all these at once. Williams, in this the
height of his court favour (for it was the King himself who had selected him
for the great seal), was earnestly applied to by the Marquis of Buckingham, to
whom Laud, like everybody else, had paid court, to commend the latter to his
Majesty. Buckingham's instructions to Williams were that he should not fear
giving offence by urging this suit and not desist despite a stormy reception.
Having watched his opportunity, "when the King's affections," says
Hacker, "were most still and pacificous," Williams besought his
majesty to think considerately of his chaplain, the doctor, whose merits he
urged with much earnestness. "Well," said the King, "I perceive
whose attorney you are. Stenie [Buckingham] hath set you on. You have pleaded
the man a good Protestant and I believe it. Neither did that stick in my breast
when I stopped his promotion. But was there not a certain lady that forsook her
husband and married a Lord that was her paramour? Who tied that knot? Shall I
make a man a prelate, one of the angels of my church, who hath a flagrant crime
upon him?"" Williams declared that the doctor was heartily penitent
for his share in this transaction. Besides, he asked James, who would dare to
serve him, good master as he was, if he would not pardon one fault, even if it
should be of a scandalous magnitude? "You press well," replied his
Majesty, "and I hear you with patience. Neither will I revive a trespass
anymore which repentance hath mortified and buried; and because I see I shall
not be rid of you unless I tell you my unpublished cogitations, the plain truth
is, that I keep Laud back from all place of rule and authority because I find
he hath a restless spirit, and cannot see when matters are well, but loves to
toss and change, and to bring things to a pitch of reformation floating in his
own brain, which may endanger the steadfastness of that which is in a good
pass, God be praised. I speak not at random. He hath made himself known to me
to be such a one. For three years since, I had obtained of the Assembly of
Perth to consent to five articles of order and decency in correspondence with
this Church of England. I gave them promise, by attestation of faith made, that
I would try their obedience no farther in ecclesiastic affairs nor put them out
of their own way, which custom has made pleasing unto them, with any new
encroachments. Yet this man hath pressed me to invite them to a nearer
conjunction with the liturgy and canons of this nation; but I sent him back
again with the frivolous draught he had drawn....For all this, he feared not
mine anger, but assaulted me again with another ill-fangled platform to make
that stubborn kirk stoop more to the English pattern. But I durst not play fast
and loose with my word. He knows not the stomach of that people; but I ken the
story of my grandmother, the Queen-Regent, that, after she was inveigled to
break her promise made to some mutineers at a Perth meeting, she never saw a
good day. But, from thence, being much beloved before, was despised of all the
people. And now your importunity hath compelled me to shrive myself thus unto
you. I think you are at your farthest and have no more to say for your
client." Williams, however, as he had been instructed, did not allow this
characteristic oration to put him down. He still urged that Laud,
notwithstanding "the very audacious and very unbecoming attempt"
mentioned by his Majesty, was "of a great and tractable wit" and, if
he fell into an error, would, at least as soon as any man, find a way to get
out of it. And his pertinacity was successful. James, impatiently asking if
there was nothing he could say that was not to have its answer, exclaimed,
"Here, take him to you, but on my soul you will repent it." "And
so," concludes Hacket, "went away in anger, using other fierce and
ominous words, which were divulged in the court and are too tart to be
repeated."
Thus was Laud at last made a bishop. He
was formally elected by the Chapter on 10th October 1621, a few days after
entering his forty-ninth year. The King had given him leave to hold the
Presidentship of St. John's in
commendam with his bishopric.
"But by reason," he writes in his Diary, "of the strictness of
that statute, which I will not violate, nor my oath to it under any colour, I
am resolved before my consecration to leave it." And he did resign it accordingly.
It is worth noticing that Laud's great enemy, Prynne, in the edition of the
Diary which he very unhandsomely published in September 1644 while the
archbishop yet lived, had the dishonesty to omit all notice of this
resignation. So that even Laud's biographer, Heylin, who wrote before the Diary
was published in its integrity by Wharton, in 1695, represents him as retaining
his college office with his bishopric. Laud himself, with all his passion,
precipitation and short-sightedness, never committed anything so thoroughly
base as this suppression of the truth by the great Puritan lawyer and patriot.
Part 7: Associations with Buckingham
In the next year, 1622, Laud obtained
much reputation by a conference or disputation which he maintained on 24th May
in the presence of his Majesty and other distinguished personages, with Fisher
the Jesuit. Fisher had been, for some time, attempting to make a Roman Catholic
of the Countess of Buckingham, mother of the Duke (or rather Marquis only, as
yet). It was generally thought that, if he should succeed, her son also would
be very likely to go over to the old religion. However, both at this public
conference at which the Countess and the Marquis were present, and in private
discourse with the lady, Laud acquitted himself so ably as to satisfy her upon
every point of religious question. Thus, he averted what was looked upon by
many as a serious national danger. Buckingham also, from this time, took him
into his most intimate confidence. "Being Whit-Monday," he records,
under the date of June 9th, "My Lord Marquis of Buckingham was pleased to
enter upon a near respect to me. The particulars are not for paper." And under
June 15th, he enters, "I became C. to my Lord of Buckingham"
(meaning, it is supposed, confessor). All the notices in the Diary of this
affair are carefully suppressed by Prynne, one of whose objects was to
represent the later Archbishop as having been, all his life, a thorough papist.
Laud himself published, in 1624, an account of his argument with Fisher. He
notes that he had not previously appeared in print.
In January 1623, Laud was inducted into
the parsonage of Creeke in the Diocese of Peterborough which he was permitted
to hold in commendam with his not very well endowed Welsh
bishopric. But the new reign, which began in March 1625, when he was in his
fifty-second year, was the beginning for him of new fortunes.
Yet his own account informs us that
attempts were, at first, made to prejudice the Royal mind against him. Under
date of Saturday 9th April, he writes, "The Duke of Buckingham, whom, upon
all accounts, I am bound forever to honour, signified to me that a certain
person, moved through I know not what envy, had blackened my name with his
Majesty King Charles. They laid hold, for that purpose, of the error into
which, by I know not what fate, I had formerly fallen in the business of
Charles, Earl of Devonshire, 26th December 1605". He was too strong,
however, in the favour of the Royal favourite and most powerful man in the
Kingdom to be injured now by this stale story. At the Coronation, on 2nd
February 1626, he officiated as Dean of Westminster, in place of Bishop
Williams who had, for the present, passed into the shade and whom Charles would
not have to take part in the ceremony. So he was obliged to make Laud, whom he
cordially hated, his deputy. On 6th March thereafter, he resigned his parsonage
of Ibstock. On 20th June, he was nominated to the Bishopric of Bath and Wells.
At the beginning of October, he was appointed to the office of Dean of the
Chapel Royal vacant by the death of Bishop Andrews. By the end of April 1627,
he was sworn in as a privy counsellor which, in those days, implied that he was
to take an actual share in the government of the Kingdom. In July 1628, King
Charles succeeded in having him placed in the See of London, though not till
after some months had been spent in getting room made for him by the removal of
Bishop Mountain. This proved almost as difficult as if he had been a real
mountain that had to be removed from his path. The scheme was that Mountain
should go to Durham, from which Neile, Laud's friend, was transferred to
succeed Andrews at Winchester. However, having spent a great part of his life,
as Heylin expresses it, "in the air of the court," he looked upon
such a relegation to the cold regions of the North as "the worst kind of
banishment, next neighbour to a civil death". Before he became Bishop of
Durham more than in form, the death of Dr. Toby Matthews, Archbishop of York,
made another opening for him, with which he was better satisfied. So that he
presided over three sees in succession in that year and he died before the end
of it.
Part 8: Bishop of Bath & Wells
By the time laud became Bishop of Bath
& Wells, he had already made himself unpopular by his apparent preference
for ceremonies to spiritual religion and his severe, not to say violent
measures, against Puritanism, as well as by his intimate connections with
Buckingham. It is not surprising, therefore, that when the House of Commons
fell upon the Duke, in March 1628, and voted him to be the great cause of all
the grievances in the Kingdom, they also drew up a remonstrance to the King
against Laud. Both he and his friend, Neile, were denounced as unsound in their
theological opinions and declared the authors or principal promoters of sundry
innovations of a Romish character in the services of the Church. To this
admonition, however, he paid no heed. The parliament rose on 26th June and, on
23rd August, Buckingham was assassinated. In April 1636, Laud was chosen their
Chancellor by the University of Oxford. A few months later occurred the first
of several notorious cases of Laud's ferocity of procedure in the High
Commission Court. That of Dr. Alexander Leighton, "a Scot by birth, a
doctor of physic by profession, a fiery Puritan in faction" is Heylin's
description of him. He was brought before the court for publishing a tract
entitled 'An Appeal to the Parliament or Zion's Plea against Prelacy'; and was
sentenced to pay a fine of £10,000, to be twice set in the pillory and whipped,
to have his ears cut off and his nose slit, to be branded in the face with the
letters SS (for Sower of Sedition) and to be imprisoned in the Fleet Prison
(London) for the remainder of his life. This barbarous sentence was executed in
all its parts and Leighton (who was father of the learned, eloquent and
admirable Archbishop Leighton, who held the see of Glasgow in the next age) lay
in prison for ten years. On Sunday 16th January of the next year, 1630, took
place Laud's famous consecration of the Church of St. Catherine Cree, London,
on the north side of Leadenhall Street. Prynne's satirical, and probably
somewhat exaggerated, account of which, in his 'Canterbury's Doom ' (1646), has
been in substance incorporated by Hume in his History and is well known. As a
sample, both of Laud and of Prynne, we will quote the concluding paragraph in
the original words. "When the Bishop approached near the communion-table,
he bowed with his nose very near the ground six or seven times. Then he came to
one of the corners of the table and there bowed himself three times. Then to
the second and third, bowing at each three times. But when he came to the side
of the table where the bread and wine were, he bowed himself seven times, and
then, after the reading of many prayers by himself, and his two fat chaplains
which were with him, and all this while upon their knees by him in their
surplices, hoods and tippets, he himself came near the bread, which was laid in
a fine napkin. And then he gently lifted up one of the corners of the napkin,
like a boy that peeped into a bird's nest in a bush, and presentIy clapped it
down again and flew back a step or two, and then bowed very low three times
towards it and the table. When he beheld the bread, then he came near and
opened the napkin again, and bowed as before. Then he laid his hand upon the
gilt cup, which was full of wine, with a cover open it. So soon as he had
pulled the cup a little nearer to him, he let the cup go, flew back and bowed
again three times towards it. Then he came near again and, lifting up the cover
of the cup, peeped into it. And, seeing the wine, he let fall the cover on it
again, flew nimbly back and bowed as before. After these, and many other apish
antic gestures, he himself receded and then gave the sacrament to some
principal men only, they devoutly kneeling near the table. After which, more
prayers being said, this scene and interlude ended." Impossible as it may
be for most modern readers to enter fully into the spirit of the kind of
devotion practised on this and other occasions by Laud, and discordant with the
reigning popular feeling as it was even in his own day, so that his attempt to
revive it was a great miscalculation and blunder, it is to our taste, we
confess, at least as respectable as Prynne's wit.
Part 9: friends & Enemies
Prynne, it must be confessed, had had
something to make his bitterness of Laud and those of a near-papist stance
excusable. For his famous 'Histrio-mastix,' an attack upon stage-plays in one
passage of which he was accused of having reflected upon the Queen, he was, in
1633, sentenced in the Court of Star-Chamber to pay a fine of £5,000. He was to
be expelled from the University of Oxford and the Society of Lincoln's Inn, to
be degraded and forever disabled from exercising his profession of the law, to
stand twice in the pillory, to have both his ears cut off and to suffer
perpetual imprisonment. After he had had his ears sewed on again, he was a
second time brought up before the same court, in June 1637, for a pamphlet
which he had published since his incarceration. He was sentenced to have his
ears again shorn off, to stand in the pillory as before and to be branded on
both cheeks with the letters SL (for Schismatical Libeller). He was accordingly
consigned to Caernarfon Castle, whence he was afterwards removed to Mount
Orgueil Castle in the Isle of Jersey. There he lay till he was released, with
other victims of the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, by an order
of the House of Commons in November 1640. It was at the same time that Prynne
received his second sentence that similar sentences were passed upon Dr. John
Bastwick, a physician (who had also been fined and otherwise punished for a
former book in 1633), for a publication in which he had reflected upon the
bishops. And also upon the Rev. Henry Burton, Rector of St. Matthew's Church,
Friday Street, London, for two sermons which he had preached and a pamphlet
which, after he had been thrown into prison on account of the sermons, he had
published in their vindication. Bastwick lay in one of the Scilly Isles and
Burton in the Island of Guernsey, until they were released along with Prynne.
Meanwhile, Laud had been mounting
higher and higher. In June 1632, he had got his dependant, or at least his
intimate friend, Sir Francis Windebank, made Secretary. He notes in his Diary
that he had obtained the place for him from the King. We may mention here that
Windebank was afterwards charged by the parliament with having been a confederate
of Laud's in his tyrannical and papistical system, but escaped destruction by
flying to the Continent. About three weeks after Windebank's appointment, he
obtained another firm ally in Dr. Juxon, Dean of Worcester, who was made Clerk
of the Closet. Laud had sued for this, he tells us, so that he might have
someone whom he could trust near his Majesty, if he should himself grow weak
and infirm: "as," he adds, "I must have a time." In 1633,
he attended the King on his visit to Scotland. On 15th June, he was sworn onto
the Privy Council of that country and, on 4th August, a few days after his
return to London, news came to court of the death, that morning, of Abbot,
Archbishop of' Canterbury. On which, Laud tells us, the King resolved presently
to give him the place. "That very morning," he also states, "at
Greenwich, there came one to me seriously, and that avowed ability to perform
it, and offered me to be a cardinal. I went presently to the King and
acquainted him both with the thing and the person." About a fortnight
afterwards, this offer was renewed but," says he, "my answer again
was that something dwelt within me which would not suffer that till Rome were
other than it is." On 14th September, he was chosen Chancellor of the
University of Dublin and, on 19th of the same month, he was translated to the
Archbishopric and the Primacy of the English Church.
Part 10: The Reforming Archbishop
To Laud's many ecclesiastical and
academical preferments and honours were added others of a less professional
sort. On 5th February 1635, he was made a member of the Committee of Trade and
Revenue. On 14th March, upon the death of the Lord Treasurer, the Earl of
Portland, he was named one of the Commissioners for the Exchequer and, two days
after, he was called by the King into the Foreign Committee, that is, into the
Committee of the Privy Council for Foreign Affairs. But his crowning triumph
was achieved when, on 6th March in the following year, 1636, he got his friend,
Juxon, already Bishop of London, appointed to the office of Lord High Treasurer
of England. "Churchman," he writes with manifest satisfaction, had
"had it since Henry VII's time. I pray God bless him to carry it so that
the Church may have honour and the King, and the State, service and contentment
by it. And now, if the Church will not hold up themselves, under God I can do
no more."
Laud was now all-powerful in both
Church and State. He set about using his authority to impose, on England, the
religious ceremonies and practices which he held so dear, but which were
thought "popish" by the majority of the Nation. Sir Nathaniel Brent,
his Vicar-General, was sent throughout the land, to note all deviations and irregularities.
The pulpit was to be replaced by the communion table as the chief feature of
the church. Puritan lecturers were suppressed and the reissue of the Book of
Sports supported. He insisted that English soldiers in Holland use the
prayer-book and that even merchant adventurers in Delft conform, though his
efforts with colonists in New England were less successful. He tried to force
the Dutch and French refugees in the country to unite with the Church of
England, threatening double taxation if they refused. He urged his associate,
the Earl of Strafford, to impose these same reforms in Ireland, while he
himself turned to Scotland. With the Scottish bishops, a new prayer-book and
canons were drawn up and their use enforced. This was seen as an all out attack
on Scottish independence. Laud further brought in the et cetera oath by which
whole classes of men were to be forced to swear allegiance to the
"government of this church by archbishops, bishops, deans and archdeacons,
etc". He was immediately attacked and derided and blamed for all the
troubles then current between the King and Parliament. King Charles had the
oath suspended in October 1640 and Laud's greatness was to follow soon after.
Part 11: Imprisonment & Execution
Increasing opposition to the King and
the Church in Scotland led to open rebellion. In a desperate bid to for money
to suppress the insurrection, Charles broke his eleven year rule without a
parliament and the summoned the body he hated so. Some of the first proceedings
of the ever-memorable Long Parliament, which assembled on 3rd November 1640,
included moves against Archbishop Laud; and on 18th December, Denzil Hollis, by
order of the House of Commons, impeached him for high treason and other high
crimes and misdemeanours, at the bar of the House of Lords. On 26th February
1641, the articles of impeachment, twenty-six in number, were brought up by Sir
Harry Vane the younger. Laud was specially charged with having advised his
Majesty that he might levy money on his subjects without consent of parliament;
with attempting to establish absolute power not only in the King, but in
himself and other bishops, above and against the laws; with perverting the
course of justice by bribes and promises to the judges; with the imposition of
divers new ecclesiastical canons, containing matters contrary both to the laws
and the Royal prerogative; with assuming a papal and tyrannical power in
matters both ecclesiastical and temporal; with endeavouring to subvert the true
religion and to introduce popish superstition; and with being the principal
adviser and author of the late war against the Scots. On 23rd October, at the
instigation of his old enemy Williams, now become a great man again, Laud's
archiepiscopal jurisdiction was sequestered by the House of Lords and made over
to his inferior officers. About a year after, all the rents and profits of his
Archbishopric, in common with those of all other archbishoprics, bishoprics,
deaneries and cathedral offices, were sequestered for the use of the
Commonwealth. By November 1642, Civil War had broken out between the King and
parliament and Laud's fate seemed to have been sealed. On 9th May 1643, all his
goods in Lambeth Palace, his books included, were seized. Soon after, his room
and person were searched by Prynne, under the authority of a warrant from the
House of Commons and his Diary and all his other papers taken from him. All
this while, with the exception of a few months at first, during which he was
left in the custody of Mr. Maxwell, Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, he had
been confined in the Tower. At last, on 12th March 1644, he was brought to
trial before the House of Lords assembled, as usual, in Westminster Hall.
Prynne says in his 'History of the Trial,' that "he made as full, as
gallant, as pithy a defence of so bad a cause and spake as much for himself as
was possible for the wit of man to invent. And that with much art, sophistry,
vivacity, oratory, audacity and confidence, without the least blush or
acknowledgement of guilt in anything." It seemed very doubtful if the
Lords, overawed as they were, would have consented to condemn him. At the end
of the trial, which lasted twenty days, they adjourned without coming to a vote
on the question of his guilt or innocence; and in this state matters remained
till the Commons, abandoning their impeachment, resorted to another method of
effecting their object. An ordinance, or bill, for his attainder was brought
into the House on 13th November and, two days after, was passed and immediately
sent up to the Lords. They too, at last, passed it, in a very thin house, on
4th January, and, on 10th, Laud was, in conformity with this law over riding
all law, beheaded on Tower Hill. He met his death with great firmness.
Part 12: Reflections
Thus fell Laud and, as Heylin observes,
the church fell with him. "Of stature," writes that sympathizing, but
not indiscriminatingly admiring biographer, towards the close of his narrative,
"he was low, but of a strong composition. So short a trunk contained so
much excellent treasure....His countenance cheerful and well bloodied: more fleshy,
as I have often heard him say, than any other part of his body; which
cheerfulness and vivacity he carried with him to the very block,
notwithstanding the afflictions of four years' imprisonment and the infelicity
of the times....A gallant spirit being for the most part like the Sun, which
shows the greater at his setting....Of apprehension he was quick and sudden, of
a very sociable wit and a pleasant humour, and one that knew as well how to put
off the gravity of his place and person when he saw occasion, as any living man
whatsoever. Accessible enough at all times, but when he was tired out with
multiplicity and vexation of business, which some who did not understand him
ascribed unto the natural ruggedness of his disposition." He was a
munificent benefactor to the University of Oxford in various ways. And, in his
native town of Reading, he gave lands to the town corporation and left money
for the apprenticeship of poor boys and the endowment of St. Laurence's Church
and Reading School. Heylin mentions that these good works exhausted all the
fortune he had made himself master of "in so long a time of power and
greatness, wherein he had the principal managing of affairs both in Church and
State."
Archbishop Laud's literary works,
besides his account of the conference with Fisher, already mentioned, are:
Seven Sermons, originally published separately and then collected and printed
together in one volume, at London, in 1651; his Diary and History of his
Troubles and Trial, together with some other pieces, published by Wharton in
1695; and his History of his Chancellorship of Oxford, forming the second
volume of that work, published in 1700.
Edited from Lord Brougham's 'Old
England's Worthies' (1857).
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