Archbishop William Laud
Laud, William (1573–1645), archbishop of Canterbury, was born in Reading on 7 October 1573, the only son of William Laud (d. 1594), a prosperous clothier, and his wife, Lucy, née Webb (d. 1600), the widow of John Robinson, another Reading clothier
Laud matriculated in October 1589 at St John's College, Oxford—an institution which provided his home for the best part of the next thirty years. St John's was a Marian foundation which had not therefore experienced the rigours of the Edwardian Reformation, and Laud joined the college only sixteen years after five fellows, including Edmund Campion, had defected to Rome. Catholic tendencies had not entirely left the college. Another influence was his tutor, John Buckeridge. Buckeridge was the source of many of Laud's early ‘high-church’ views: his surviving published works reveal an exalted view of the sacraments and of episcopacy and a taste for Greek patristic literature.
Laud found himself almost constantly at the centre of controversy. A sermon preached by Laud in St Mary's in October 1606 was condemned by the vice-chancellor Henry Airay, provost of Queen's, ‘as containing in it sundry scandalous and Popish passages’ . Two years later Laud was creating controversy yet again in his DD thesis, when he maintained that only a bishop can confer orders, and that episcopacy is a separate order from presbyters, and superior to them by divine right. As a result Laud was accused of unchurching the foreign Reformed churches.
However, given the frequency with which the charge of popery was made against him, and the defection of some of his own Oxford acquaintances to Rome, that Laud would in later life have a troubling dream that he was reconciled to Rome. Despite the fact that the charge of popery pursued him from his Oxford days right until his death, there is no evidence whatsoever that Laud ever seriously contemplated conversion to the Roman church, which he always seems to have regarded with distaste. Therefore, it would be unwise to assume that he was simply hostile towards all manifestations of foreign Reformed divinity at this point.
It was not long before Laud's continuing clashes with Abbot brought him before James again. According to Heylyn, Laud in a sermon on Shrove Sunday 1615 at the university church ‘insisted on some points which might indifferently be imputed either to Popery or Arminianism (as about that time they began to call it)’ The sermon contained Laud's by now characteristic attack on presbyterians as being as bad as papists.
In 1616 James 1 appointed Laud to the deanery of Gloucester, and he soon proved to be a predictably controversial appointment. Having been, as he claimed, charged by James to sort out irregularities in the diocese, he began early in 1617 by placing the communion table in the cathedral altarwise at the east end of the church, and commanded people to bow towards the altar on their approach. This prompted an enraged response. However, it was his close association with the king's favourite, Buckingham, which put Laud on the path to success over the following years. He became chaplain, or confessor, to Buckingham three weeks later, and for the next six years his dedication to the favourite was absolute. While he enjoyed the approval of James, and later Charles, he was perceived most of all as Buckingham's man.
The accession of Charles to the throne at the end of March 1625 was to be a turning point in Laud's life, but it was not initially marked by any close relationship with the king. Nevertheless, much of his contact with the king took place via Buckingham. Just a week after James's death Laud presented to the duke ‘a schedule, in which were wrote the names of many Churchmen, marked with the letters O. and P.’ (Works, 3.159)—presumably meaning ‘orthodox’ and ‘puritan’—which Buckingham had requested in order to deliver it to Charles. Tt was only with Charles' favoured clergyman, Andrewes's death that Laud received the crucial post of dean of the Chapel Royal and the longer-term promise of the archbishopric of Canterbury.
As Laud's position at court grew more powerful, however, so it also came to seem more vulnerable. His enemies at court were constantly intriguing against him, and the Devonshire marriage was still being dredged up to poison the king and Buckingham against him. Archbishop Abbot was his inveterate enemy but it was John Williams whose intrigues were giving Laud sleepless nights. His obsessive fears of Williams coloured his interpretation of political crises for the rest of his life: he was convinced that his enemy was behind the activities of Henry Burton, John Bastwick, and William Prynne, and even the Scottish rebellion over the prayer-book.
He was increasingly taking an anti-parliamentarian approach. He argued that the king could revoke the Magna Carta. In June 1628 a Commons remonstrance named Laud and Neile as Arminians. When prospects were raised for a further calling of parliament, Laud heard reports that a resummoned parliament would mean that some would need to be dismissed. Charles told him not to believe these reports until he saw the king forsake his other friends—an ironic presage of his desertion of Laud after the execution of Strafford. The continuing need for parliamentary support for war with Spain after Buckingham's death may have led Laud towards a tactical retreat on the Arminian issue. In February 1629 it was being reported that he had preached against Arminianism at court. The hasty dissolution of parliament in 1629 effectively removed the matter from further debate.
The dissolution of parliament left Laud free to pursue his objectives in the church more wholeheartedly, even though Abbot remained archbishop of Canterbury until his death on 4 August 1633. The first place where Laud's reforming zeal was evident was in fact in his alma mater. in 1633 he was Archbishop of Canterbury upon Abbot's death
Parliament, imprisonment, trial, and execution, 1640–1645
While Laud reluctantly supported his friend Wentworth's call for the summoning of the Short Parliament, recognizing the need to raise funds to defeat the Scots, he cannot have been surprised that his religious policies soon came under attack: over a year earlier he had warned that a new parliament would cripple the church. In the event, a series of speakers condemned what they regarded as the introduction of popish ceremonies, and Laud's phrase ‘Hoc est corpus meum’ (‘this is my body’) and his encouragement of bowing towards the altar were singled out for particular attack in debates. He was not the only councillor who advised the dissolution of the deadlocked parliament, and he was certainly not behind the fateful decision to continue the sitting of convocation after the dismissal of parliament (he only agreed to the policy after being provided with a guarantee of legality subscribed by the judges, although once the decision had been taken by Charles he soon set about drafting royal instructions to convocation). In the popular mind, however, Laud was regarded as solely responsible for both policies, and became the target of increasingly frenzied popular hostility, culminating in a siege of Lambeth Palace by a mob of apprentices hunting ‘William the Fox’ (although Laud had taken shelter at Whitehall on the king's orders). Laud had little say in the conduct of the so-called second bishops' war which followed, but he was again seen as a prime mover in it, and by late August libels in Covent Garden were calling on the apprentices to fall upon Laud during the king's absence.
Laud had no illusions of what the calling of the Long Parliament would mean for him. He declined to nominate an MP for Reading, fearing that this would merely generate further hostility, and commented a week before it opened that ‘I am almost every day threatened with my ruin in parliament’ (Works, 3.237). Unlike Strafford he seems to have nurtured no plans for a defensive strike: during the first month of parliament's sitting he busied himself with sorting out the arrangements for his charitable bequests in Reading and his gifts of manuscripts to Oxford, apparently reconciled to an impending demotion. On 18 December 1640 he was impeached for high treason by the Commons. In the debate Harbottle Grimston called him ‘the roote and ground of all our miseries and calamities … the sty of all pestilential filth that hath infected the State and Government’ (Journal of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, 169). The particular charges against Laud covered both secular and religious matters (in roughly equal proportion): he was accused of endeavouring to subvert the fundamental laws to bring in arbitrary government, of hindering justice, of altering the true religion and usurping papal powers, of labouring to reconcile England and Rome, of persecuting godly preachers, of sowing division with other Reformed churches, of stirring a war with Scotland, and of alienating the king from his subjects. It was the theme of popery that ran through both secular and religious charges and provided the rationale that lay behind Laud's treacherous actions. When the case against Laud was brought forward again in February 1641, with fourteen articles of impeachment voted against him in the Commons on the 24th, it seems to have been intended simply to please the Scots. On 1 March 1641 Laud was committed to the Tower, pursued by jeering apprentices.
Laud's enemies were not in any hurry, however. He was not regarded as dangerous, and he was not proceeded against. He was much moved by Strafford's execution, fainting when attempting to give the earl a final blessing on his way to the scaffold, and his bitter complaint that Strafford had fallen because he had served a king ‘who knew not how to be, or be made, great’ (Works, 3.443) may have reflected not only his dismay at the king's betrayal of his promise to Strafford, but also perhaps his recognition that he had himself been deserted. Certainly, the swift promotion of Laud's old enemy Williams implied that the king had turned his back on his archbishop. Laud's account book indicates that from November 1640 gifts to him from Charles abruptly ceased, something that he can hardly have failed to notice. Later it was only at Edward Hyde's prompting that the king had a royal pardon under the great seal sent to Laud in April 1644 but despite his rather half-hearted production of it at the end of his trial, Laud can have had few illusions, having seen Strafford's fate, that the pardon would be effective. For the next two years he languished in gaol.
Laud would probably have continued to live neglected in the Tower were it not for complications that emerged from his continuing authority as archbishop of Canterbury, which necessitated his agreeing to new ecclesiastical appointments (he had resigned as chancellor of Oxford University in June 1641). Laud sought to comply with parliament's directions when he could, but when faced with instructions to appoint the same Edward Corbet with whom he had earlier clashed in Oxford to the rich living of Chartham in the face of counter-instructions from the king, he finally refused. This event unfortunately focused parliament's attention on their unfinished business with Laud, and the practical problems which meant that inertia was no longer an option. One of Laud's most implacable enemies, William Prynne, was unleashed, and ordered on 31 May 1643 to seize the archbishop's papers for evidence against him. A trial was convened 12 March 1644 that his trial finally began. The trial itself dragged on until 11 October.
Laud's trial was a travesty of justice. He was manifestly innocent of the charges of treason and the advancement of popery that were levelled against him, and the conduct of the trial reflected badly on his accusers: witnesses were interfered with; the question of which precise pieces of evidence were intended to provide material for a charge of cumulative treason was never clarified; and apart from the speaker not one of the lords who sat in judgment was present for the whole of the trial (often being present only to hear the prosecution), while Laud was generally only given two hours to prepare answers to the prosecution charges which would occupy the whole morning. It was not until 11 October that Laud's counsel was finally heard on the points of law. Laud was clearly innocent as charged: it is remarkable that the vindictive Prynne, with access to twenty-one bundles of Laud's private papers, including his personal diary, was not able to find evidence that would substantiate the main charges against the archbishop. Gilbert Burnet's claim that Laud had burnt incriminating material is not supported by the evidence, and partly reflects the bewilderment that more damaging material had not been located.
But this is not say that Laud was spotlessly innocent of lesser charges. The injustice of the charges against him and the vindictiveness of his accusers should not disguise the fact that he was not entirely candid in his responses. Laud's defence was ultimately astute enough to frustrate the attempt to convict him by normal means. It was a triumph both for the shrewdness of his defence and of his more long-term pursuit of ‘plausible deniability’ (Fincham and Lake, 45) that the Commons ultimately despaired of achieving a judgment against Laud in the normal way and, as with Strafford, decided to proceed instead by a bill of attainder. After a good deal of mob pressure the Lords finally gave way and passed the ordinance on 4 January 1645, with only nineteen peers present. Laud was executed on Tower Hill on 10 January. In his speech at the scaffold he denied that he had done anything deserving death. He was harried by his opponents, in the shape of Sir John Clotworthy, even in his final moments, and after some brief responses to Clotworthy's interrogation he turned to the executioner ‘as the gentler and discreeter person’ (Heylyn, Cyprianus, 537). He was buried in the chancel of All Hallows Barking. After the Restoration his body was finally and fittingly removed on 24 July 1663 to the chapel of St John's College, Oxford, where he was buried in a vault under the altar between the college's founder and his ally Juxon, who had been interred a few weeks previously. Later reputation and assessment.
Laud proved as controversial a figure in death as he was in life. Even his speech at the scaffold prompted outraged attacks upon it by Henry Burton and Joshua Hoyle, He was condemned by Burnet and Hacket, and whig historians kept up the critical barrage in the following century, culminating in the famous polemic of Lord Macaulay, who commented in lofty tones that for Laud ‘the ridiculous old bigot’ ‘we entertain a more unmitigated contempt than for any other character in our history’. He had to admit that some in the Church of England revered Laud, although he compared this to ‘the perversity of affection which sometimes leads a mother to select the monster or idiot of the family as the object of her special favour’ (Edinburgh Review, 95, Sept 1828, 134). Macaulay's ‘ridiculous old bigot’ had indeed enjoyed his high tory supporters in the eighteenth century, but it was in the Victorian period that he reached the height of his popularity among such circles.
Extraordinary scenes attended the ceremonies that were arranged to observe the 250th anniversary of Laud's execution in 1895. An exhibition of ‘Laudian relics’ was displayed in the schoolroom adjoining the church of All Hallows Barking, and was visited by more than 2000 people. . He has continued to stir up extraordinarily vehement responses among historians, being condemned even in the 1980s as ‘the greatest calamity ever visited upon the Church of England’ (Collinson, 90).
Part of the reason why Laud continues to divide historical opinion so fundamentally clearly derives from the long-term divisions of the civil war which engulfed him. Laud has often been either celebrated or berated as the champion of ideas which many of his pre-war contemporaries shared. He has been seen to a quite bizarre degree as the embodiment of absolutism, autocratic clericalist governance, and high-church bigotry, and thereby made vastly more significant and singular (and, it is tempting to say, more interesting) a figure than the historical facts seem to warrant. The events which surrounded his life, and particularly his death, have lent him a symbolic significance out of all proportion to his real distinctiveness and achievements.
