Laud was born at Reading, 5th October 1573. He was elected Fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1593. After holding different livings, he was elected President of his College in 1611, and was made Chaplain to James I. In 1615 he became Archdeacon of Huntingdon; in 1621 Bishop of St. David’s. In 1622 he had his famous controversy with the Jesuit Fisher; and in 1624 he was put into the High Commission Court. In 1626 he was made Bishop of Bath and Wells, in 1628 Bishop of London. In 1630 he became Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and in August 1633 he became Archbishop of Canterbury. From this time till the meeting of the Long Parliament he was nearly in the position of a Prime Minister, and was the chief agent in all the arbitrary acts of the time, such as the High Commission prosecutions, the introduction of the Liturgy into Scotland, the licensing of books, and the like. One of the first acts of the Long Parliament was to send him to the Tower in March 1641. His goods were plundered by various violent proceedings. He was brought to trial March 1644, for high treason. The proceedings lasted, under one form or another, till January 1645, when he was beheaded, in the seventy-second year of his age…. Writings: They consist of seven sermons; a report of the Conference with Fisher the Jesuit, held for the instruction of the Duke of Buckingham’s mother; the Diary, of which Lord Macaulay spoke so contemptuously, and a small volume of private devotions; a variety of official papers connected with his duties as Chancellor of Oxford; reports of several of his speeches, especially of speeches at the Council Board and at the Court of High Commission; a history of his troubles and his trial; and a great mass of correspondence with various persons, of whom Strafford is the most remarkable.

Personal

  It is true the roughness of his uncourtly nature sent most men discontented from him, yet would he often (of himself) find ways and means to sweeten many of them again when they least looked for it.

  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 man living; 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 … constant not only to the public prayers in his chapel, but to his private devotions in his closet.

  My very pockets searched; my Diary, my very Prayer-book taken from me, and after used against me; and that in some cases not to prove but to make a charge. Yet I am thus far glad, even for this sad accident. For by my Diary your Lordships have seen the passages of my life; and by my Prayer-book the greatest secrets between God and my soul; so that you may be sure you have me at the very bottom: yet, blessed be God, no disloyalty is found in the one, no Popery in the other.

  A man vigilant enough, of an active or rather of a restless mind, more ambitious to undertake than politic to carry on, of a disposition too fierce and cruel for his coat which notwithstanding he was so far from concealing in a subtle way that he increased the envy of it by insolence. He had few vulgar and private vices, as being neither taxed of covetousness, intemperance nor incontinence, and, in a word, a man not altogether so bad in his personal character as unfit for the state of England.

  A little, low, red-faced man.

  He was a man of great parts, and very exemplar virtues, allayed and discredited by some unpopular natural infirmities; the greatest of which was, (besides a hasty, sharp way of expressing himself,) that he believed innocence of heart, and integrity of manners, was a guard strong enough to secure any man in his voyage through this world, in what company soever he travelled, and through what ways soever he was to pass: and sure never any man was better supplied with that provision.

  Thus died and was buried the king’s and Church’s martyr, a man of such integrity, learning, devotion and courage, as had he lived in the primitive times, would have given him another name: whom tho’ the cheated multitude were taught to misconceive (for those honoured him most who best knew him) yet impartial posterity will know how to value him, when they hear the rebels sentenced him on the same day they voted down the liturgy of the Church of England.

  A dream cometh through the multitude of business. That which the fancy is troubled with most in the day, it reincounters in the night, yet without any deliberation of reason; and therefore must be most groundless to collect an observation from it of any act that hath an intellectual touch in it. I except the infusions of prophetical inspiration, which commonly who can suppose he hath attained without enthusiastical presumption? Juggling astrologers, that will fly at any game for profit and credit, held the people in a dream, how they could interpret dreams which would hit, and which not, by the planet: as Salmasius says (Clymact. p. 789), that it was Hephæstion’s profession to unfold … in what nights of every moon they will happen to be true. But he that records his dreams, as if he weighed a thing so light in the balance of observation, his wits are built upon fairy ground and needs no other astrology to deceive him but his own superstition.

  A man of such admirable judgment and learning, that he knew what danger the nation was in, and whence it proceeded, and did declare, that if they would take his advise, he could heal all breaches; which the fanaticks (or puritans, as Joyner calls them) well perceiving, they dispatched him as soon as possible; which when they had done, they used these words,

  The very enemies of the unfortunate archbishop admitted that he was learned and pious, attentive to his duties and unexceptionable in his morals: on the other hand his friends could not deny that he was hasty and vindictive, positive in his opinions, and inexorable in his enmities. To excuse his participation in the arbitrary measures of the council, and his concurrence in the severe decrees of the star-chamber, he alleged that he was only one among many; and that it was cruel to visit on the head of a single victim the common faults of the whole board. But it was replied, with great appearance of truth that “though only one, he was the chief;” that his authority and influence swayed the opinions both of his sovereign and his colleagues; and that he must not expect to escape the just reward of his crimes, because he had possessed the ingenuity to make others his associates in guilt. Yet I am of opinion that it was religious, and not political rancour, which led him to the block. Could the zealots have forgiven his conduct as archbishop, he might have lingered out the remainder of his life in the tower. There was, however, little difference in this respect between them and their victim. Both were equally obstinate, equally infallible, equally intolerant.

  The friend of Stratford, archbishop Laud, with less worldly passions, and a more disinterested ardour, brought into the council the same feelings, the same designs. Austere in his conduct, simple in his life, power, whether he served it or himself wielded it, inspired in his mind a fanatical devotion. To prescribe and to punish, this was in his eyes to establish order, and order ever seemed to him justice. His activity was indefatigable, but narrow in its views, violent, and harsh. Alike incapable of conciliating opposing interests, and of respecting rights, he rushed, with head down and eyes closed, at once against liberties and abuses; opposing to the latter his rigid probity, to the former his furious hate, he was as abrupt and uncompromising with the courtiers as with the citizens; seeking no man’s friendship, anticipating and able to bear no resistance, persuaded, in short, that power is all-sufficient in pure hands; and constantly the prey of some fixed idea, which ruled him with all the violence of passion, and all the authority of duty.

  For the individual, indeed, we entertain a more unmitigated contempt than for any other character in our history. The fondness with which a portion of the church regards his memory, can be compared only to that perversity of affection which sometimes lead a mother to select the monster or the idiot of the family as the object of her especial favour…. The severest punishment which the two Houses could have inflicted on him would have been to set him at liberty, and send him to Oxford. There he might have stayed, tortured by his own diabolical temper, hungering for Puritans to pillory and mangle, plaguing the Cavaliers, for want of somebody else to plague, with his peevishness and absurdity, performing grimaces and antics in the cathedral, continuing that incomparable diary, which we never see without forgetting the vices of his heart in the abject imbecility of his intellect; minuting down his dreams, counting the drops of blood which fell from his nose, watching the direction of the salt, and listening for the note of the screech-owl! Contemptuous mercy was the only vengeance which it became the Parliament to take on such a ridiculous old bigot.

  Cast in a mould of proportions that are much above our own, and of stature akin to the elder days of the Church.

  Stranger Primate of all England I have never in my life fallen in with. And it is a clean-brushed, cultivated man, well-read in the Fathers and Church history; a rational, at least much-reasoning, extremely logical man. He will prove it for thee by never-ending logic, and the most riveting arguments, if thou hast patience to listen. What he means, what he can possibly mean?… Human scepticism will not go the length of disbelieving that he lived; and yet alas, in what way; how could a human figure, with warm red blood in him consent to live in that manner? It is, and continues, very difficult to say! Future ages, if they do not, as is likelier, totally forget “W. Cant.,” will range him under the category of Incredibilities. Not again in the dead strata which lie under men’s feet, will such a fossil be dug up. The wonderful wonder of wonders, were it not even this, a zealous Chief Priest, at once persecutor and martyr, who has no discoverable religion of his own? Or why not leave Laud very much on his own basis? Let the dead bury their dead. Land is little to me.

  Laud is regarded too generally in the one light of a zealous champion of forms and ceremonies, an uncompromising advocate of rubrical uniformity. He was certainly this; but he was a great many other things too; and in the department of character additions tell more than simply arithmetically; they enlarge, elevate, alter the whole nature of a man. The political department, e. g. in Laud, throws depth on the ecclesiastical, and each benefits the other. But the biographer is afraid of the politician. The combination of bishop and politician has a worldly look, and seems to give an advantage to Puritans. The politician is accordingly put in the background: the pious upholder of vestments and the Church-service is presented to us. The age catches the character, and expresses it in its own way; and the stickler for obsolete forms, the obstinate old zealot about trifles, becomes the one popular figure of Laud.

  The church of All-Hallows, Barking, happened to stand open, much to my satisfaction, as I was threading a very narrow and old-fashioned street near the Tower; and I entered, with a thrill of emotion, to behold the venerable interior, where the service for the burial of the dead was read over the bleeding corpse of Archbishop Laud, as it was brought in just after the axe had made him a martyr, and here temporarily interred. I remember that Southey remarks that the Prayer-Book itself seemed to share in his funeral, for on the same day, the Parliament made it a crime to use it in any solemnity whatever; and I endeavored to recall the scene of desolation which must then have smitten to the heart any true son of the Church of England who was its spectator, beholding, as he did, the Primate of all England going down into the sepulchre, as the last, apparently, of his dignity and order; the Church herself beheaded, if not destroyed, with him; and the Prayer-Book reading its own burial! Thank God, there I stood, two hundred years later, a living witness of the resurrection of that Church and its ritual, and of its powerful life, in the new world of the West.

  Whose memory is still loathed, as the meanest, the most cruel, and the most narrow-minded man who ever sat on the episcopal bench.

  The little restless, ubiquitous, statesman-priest, who so grievously mistook and under-rated the forces with which he had to deal, and the times in which he had fallen—Laud.

General

  Laud seems to have been an imitator, or follower, of Bishop Andrewes: and in some particulars the resemblance holds. The seven sermons contained few doctrinal allusions, with the exception of an important discussion on the future state of the Jews in Sermon I.; and they are chiefly remarkable as expositions ad populum of Laud’s high views of the regal office. Thus they show him as a statesman more than as a theologian, and their value is rather in relation to the political than to the ecclesiastical or controversial history of the Caroline era. Public, and especially State, occasions, almost necessitate a stiff and artificial manner, as well as a confined range of thought; and it is much to be regretted that none of the many Sermons Laud preached in the ordinary course of his ministry have been preserved. That he was a theologian, and had read extensively and accurately, is proved both by his “Conference” and “Defence.” That he was a frequent preacher his Diary abundantly testifies: and that his religion was eminently deep and earnest, we know from his published Devotions, as well as from his patient endurance of persecution and suffering. But neither as a divine, nor in other respects, must his character be altogether measured by these Sermons.

  Laud, largely as he figures in the social history of his period, is a less figure in our ordinary literary histories than Herrick, who would have licked his shoe.

  He was no mean theologian, and while his style of writing is far from attractive, it certainly has the merit of being vigorous and pithy. But better far than all mental gifts and stores of learning, it can be said of Laud, with strictest truth, that he was a man of prayer. The distractions of the times, the multiplicity of occupation, the troubles of his position, prevented not the communion of his soul with his heavenly Father. Seven times a day did he pour out his confessions, prayers, thanksgivings, at the thorne of grace; nor were the dark and silent watches of the night unprovided in his manual with suitable devotions, the language of which is remarkably scriptural, and showed a mind deeply imbued with knowledge of Holy Writ. The same book contains special prayers for prosperity, for adversity, for the State, the King, the Church, the Clergy.

  Laud’s highest praise lies in his patronage of Letters.

  No one who has studied with care the devotions and the “Diary” of William Laud can doubt that his religion was personal, deep and strong; that his sympathies were wide and his ideals high; that the ceremonial which he advocated was dear to him only so far as it stimulated a more intimate knowledge and love of God; and that his personal sanctity must have played a notable part in the events of his disturbed and difficult life.

  Laud’s reputation, good or ill, as an ecclesiastical statesman has almost entirely obscured his fame as a theologian. His sermons are almost unknown even to students of the seventeenth-century pulpit, and his Controversy with Fisher is rarely, if ever, referred to by modern controversialists who contend over the same field and not infrequently, though perhaps unconsciously, use the same weapons. Two hundred years ago men thought differently. The sermons were reprinted even in the dark days of the suppression of the Church, and the Conference, republished four times in the seventeenth century, became the authoritative statement of the position of Anglicanism in opposition to the Roman claims…. For the oblivion into which Laud’s pulpit discourses have fallen many reasons might be assigned. They are probably not even typical of his style. He was a constant, and, from the demand, apparently an admired preacher. He preached as willingly and as often in little country churches as in London or at Court. But he seems to have intentionally avoided all ostentation and as far as possible all record of his pulpit ministry. Not until comparatively late in his career did he notice in his Diary even his most important discourses; and he never suffered any of his sermons to be printed except by direct royal command. In his will he left the publication entirely in the hands of his executors.

  The “Conference with Fisher” is marked throughout by a reasonableness and masculine good sense which might not be expected by those who know Laud only through the partisan pages of certain popular historians. Laud was learned, but he was no mere “bookman,” to use a word of his own; and in this controversy he does not suffer from being a man of the world, accustomed to observe, to consider, and to judge the facts of life and history. But, it seems to me, the chief interest that now attaches to the “Conference,” is the light that it throws on the general attitude of mind, and particular beliefs, of the most prominent high-churchmen of his day.