William Laud, sometime archbishop of Canterbury; a study

f. ••*'

•A <*& '*.

ARCHBISHOP LAUD

A STUDY

"Et levavi oculos meos, et vidi ; et ecce vir, et in manuejus funiculus
mensorum.

"Et dixi : Quo tu vadis? Et dixit ad me, Ut metiar Jerusalem, et
videam quanta sit latitude ejus, et quanta longitude ejus."— ZACH.
PROPH. ii. i, 2.

WILLIAM LAUD

SOMETIME

ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
A STUDY

ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON, B.A.

SCHOLAR OF KING'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE ; ASSISTANT MASTER
AT ETON COLLEGE

NEW EDITION

LONDON

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LT»

PATERNOSTER HOUSE, CHARING CROSS ROAD

1897

NOV 2 3 *2

(The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved. .)

TO MY FATHER

THIS SLIGHT MEMORIAL

OF ONE OF HIS PREDECESSORS

IS WITH ALL LOVE AND REVERENT AFFECTION

DUTIFULLY DEDICATED.

PREFACE.

Two reasons induced me to try and sketch the life
of Laud. The first was that it has been customary
to take an extravagant view of him — either to set
him forward as the champion of all that is tradi
tional and venerable in Church doctrine or dis
cipline, the type of the moderate High Churchman,
with a clearly defined position neither Romanist
nor Lutheran ; or, on the other hand, to decry him
as an obstinate bigot, self-willed and important,
who fell a victim to his own intolerant prejudices.
Neither of these seemed to me a fair or worthy
view : he was certainly not the latter, he was far
from being the former ; he holds an intermediate
position. I have not endeavoured to make him
into a hero or a saint, but to depict him as a man
of an undaunted spirit, of an inflexible if not
heroic mould, as one of the most vivid and in
teresting figures in the very centre of one of the

LAUD'S APOLOGISTS.

most gigantic tragedies that has ever been played
out on the stage of English history.

And in the second place, living in the house
which is so closely connected with him, being often
brought into contact with some little memorial of
him, talking beneath his portrait, worshipping be
neath his chapel screen, seeing his signature written
in the stiff tall hand, all this created a strong
wish to try and realize, as he moved and spoke
and looked, one of the most definite personalities
that has ever occupied the chair of St. Augustine.

Few people have received so much damage from
their defenders as Laud. His apologists, not con
tent with making much out of the amiable features
of his character, have not only slurred over a great
deal that is undeniably unamiable, but have in
many cases endeavoured to put a favourable con
struction on what is harsh and unpleasing, and
should have been otherwise. Thus they have suc
ceeded in producing a portrait that we feel at once
to be exaggerated and disproportionate, and not
even lifelike. He has been damned with praise.

Now, Laud's was a vehement, almost violent
character, and there was much that was angular
and disagreeable about him. Offensive peculiarities
in a great man have often their humorous side ; and
that, combined with the natural veneration which

HEYLYN. IX

the biographer feels, or grows to feel, may, as in
the case of Boswell's " Johnson," produce a delight
ful result. But it must not be done deliberately.
The picture must be made complete, and framed,
and hung; and others must be left to judge
whether they can love the original well enough to
condone his uglinesses.

First comes Heylyn — Peter Heylyn, chaplain to
the Archbishop, and, after the Restoration, Subdean
of Westminster. He is Laud's Boswell. His bio
graphy — " Cyprianus Anglicanus," as he calls it,
for Cyprian was a decapitated prelate — is very
nearly a first-rate book. It is racy, humorous,
vivid, and affectionate ; but it is portentously long,
and has no index. No one but a student would
read it now.

But to Heylyn every biographer of Laud must
be deeply indebted. Again and again he must be
quoted. He is sometimes, I think, sublime. The
death scene is a noble piece of writing. I have
given it in full.

I subjoin here, as most appropriate, Heylyn's
own account of his first interview with the Arch
bishop. It is a good specimen of his style ; and it
will give the reader a good idea of the character of
the man, his pomposity, his complacency, and his
zeal for his patron.

FIRST INTERVIEW.

" The Archbishop," he writes, " being kept to his
chamber at the time with lameness, I had both the
happiness of being taken into his special knowledge
of me, and the opportunity of a longer conference
than I should otherwise have expected. I went to
present my service to him, as he was preparing for
this journey, and was appointed to attend him the
same day seven-night, when I might presume on
his return.

" Coming precisely at the time, I heard of his
mischance, and that he kept himself to his chamber ;
but order had been left among his servants that if
I came he should be made acquainted with it,
which being done accordingly, I was brought into
his chamber, where I found him sitting on a chair
with his lame leg resting on a pillow. Command
ing that nobody should come and interrupt him
till he called for them, he caused me to sit down
by him, and inquired first into the course of my
studies, which he well approved of, exhorting me
to hold myself in that moderate course in which
he found me. He fell afterwards to discourse of
some passages in Oxford in which I was specially
concerned, and told me thereupon the story of such
opposition as had been made against him in the
University by Archbishop Abbot and others, and
encouraged me not to shrink if I had already found

LE £AS xi

and should hereafter find the like. I was with him
thus rcmotis arbitris, almost two hours. It grew
almost twelve of the clock, and then he knocked for
his servants to come to him ; he dined that day in
his ordinary dining-room, which was the first time
he had done so since his mishap. He caused me to
tarry dinner with him, and used me with no small
respect, which was much noticed by some gentle
men (Elphinstone, one of his Majesty's cupbearers
being one of the company) who dined that day
with him. A passage, I confess, not pertinent to
my present story."

Next must be mentioned Le Bas, who wrote a
life in 1840. He was a Fellow of Trinity, and
afterwards Principal of the East India College at
Haileybury. He did a good deal of theological
work, such as the life of Cranmer and the Wyclif
movement, — lively writing enough, though super
seded now.

Thus there is a gap of two hundred years between
the two biographers. During that period Laud was
accepted and forgotten. With the Oxford move
ment was felt considerable curiosity as to the life
and character of a man so sympathetically inclined
to the Ritualistic creed, a man, it was said, of so
primitive a mould, the staunch upholder of Church
tradition and authority. Le Bas was a man of

X i i HOOK—MOZLE Y.

original mind; his book is brisk and suggestive:
but he did not explore ; he is inaccurate and not
well-proportioned.

Dean Hook's is a good working biography, not
original or high in tone, but a worthy portrait in a
sound series.

Professor Mozley's essay on Laud is perhaps the
best known of his studies, and the liveliest life of
the man. It is delightful reading ; but the more
one knows of Laud, the deeper is the distrust one
feels of that brilliant paradoxical style. Mozley
is too imaginative and enthusiastic ; he builds too
much on small things ; there is too strong a personal
factor throughout. Deep as is the debt which
writers on Laud must owe to his book, much as
I owe him in the way of kindled interest and
sympathetic enlightenment, I cannot help record
ing the fact that it is a portrait reminding one every
now and then, by a clever trick, by a sympathetic
gesture, of the original, but a deceitful portrait after
all. There is no book I would more confidently
recommend to a would-be student of Laud and his
life ; there is no book I should be more surprised at
a genuine student's accepting and retaining.

Of incidental portraiture, Professor Gardiner's
stands at the other end of the scale — Laud steps
on to the scene at intervals in the whole drama of

GARDINER— LAMBETH PAPERS. Xlll

the Rebellion : but Professor Gardiner's portraits, if
the criticism is not presumptuous, are hardly lively
enough ; he is amazingly correct and cautious, and
satisfies without pleasing. Charles, Strafford, Pym,
— it is always the same — not one of them carries the
reader away.

I have also studied carefully such books as
Clarendon's History, the " Rushworth Papers," the
" Eikon Basilike," Aubrey's Letters, and many
other histories and collections, for contemporary
portraits and records of contemporary affairs.
And I have had free access to the Lambeth papers,
which contain many curious points, many de
lightful confirmations, too minute to enter into
larger histories, but which I have endeavoured to
embody in this little study of a character and a
life. Historians have been before me ; the papers
have been ransacked many times. But it is the
privilege of the biographer, who works on a more
microscopic scale, to emphasize and drag to light
all kinds of tiny relics, little papers annotated by
friendly hands, flotsam and jetsam of the ages
that accumulated fortuitously in muniment cup
boards and archive chambers. Whether or not such
search and such treasure-trove can give satisfaction
to others remains to be seen. I can genuinely say
that to me it has been a labour of love — a labour

xiv CONCLUSION.

in which my interest and delight have never flagged
— a task to which I have returned in hour after
hour of leisure, in a life full of little interruptions,
and never found irksome, or dreary, or dull.

I must, in conclusion, record my great obliga
tion to my friend, Mr. W. H. D. Boyle, who has
throughout corrected the following pages, and
suggested many improvements.

A. C. B.

ETON,
July, 1887.

ARCHBISHOP LAUD.

INTRODUCTORY.

IT is impossible to pursue the history of a single
life upon chronological lines, unless it is made a
mere chronology. A single trait has sometimes to
be pursued into remote events, and then to be
recalled into stricter temporal sequence. I think,
therefore, it will be as well first to tabulate several
historical events, in themselves not unfamiliar, but
whose exact relative position is perhaps undecided,
except in the minds of specialists ; so that if I
have to treat historical events unchronologically, it
may be clear that I do so, not because they are not
chronologically related, but because some events
have a more direct connection with primary causes
than other events which preceded them in point of
actual occurrence. A knowledge of dates is not a
knowledge of history.

CHIEF DATES OF LAUD'S LIFE.

Laud born 1573

James I. succeeded ... ... ... 1603

Laud President of St. John's, Oxford ... ... 1611

Proposal for Spanish Marriage ... . ... 1615

Laud Bishop of St. David's ... ... ... 1621

The Spanish Journey ... ... 1624

Charles I. succeeded ... ... ... ... 1625

Murder of Buckingham ; Laud Bishop of London 1628

Strafford Lord Deputy of Ireland ... ... 1631

Laud Archbishop of Canterbury ... ... 1633

Scottish Prayer Book ... ... ... ... 1636

Hampden's Trial ended ... ... ... 1637

Scottish Covenant ... ... ... ... 1638

Short and Long Parliament ; Laud in the Tower 1640

Execution of Strafford... ... ... ... 1641

Edgehill ... ... ... ... 1642

Marston Moor ; Naseby ; Laud executed ... 1644

Execution of Charles I. ... ... ... 1649

To the amateur historian the period of the
Stuarts is wonderfully attractive : it is so accessible.
In any old-fashioned library he can find contem
porary literature in abundance ; he may skim
through pamphlets, sermons, letters, tractates, in
their antique brown type, on stiff wrinkled paper —
sermons that seem formal and affected now, but that
made ears tingle then; letters that kindled rebellion,
and tractates that fanned it into flame. He can
get somewhat of what these people thought them
selves ; he need not take it second-hand : or if he
prefers to do so — if he mistrusts his own judg
ment — he has several competent historians, working
from adequate material, from whom he may select

EARLY ENGLISH HISTORY.

his favourite. Their conclusions may be fanciful,
but, at any rate, they are conclusions. One his
torian may suppress documents, another may dis
tort them, — but the documents are there. It is
not like the history, of which there is so much in
our hands, where both facts and conclusions are
hypothetical.

The period of the Stuarts is so refreshing a con
trast to earlier English history, to the childish
directness which characterizes the portraits of
earlier leaders and kings. Now and then, it is
true, a real character peeps out. Henry II., biting
the rushes as he rolls on the floor in rage, or, as
in the Vita Magna of St. Hugh, stitching up his
torn finger, like his grandfather, the glover, — this
is a real man. Abbot Samson is a real man. In
Shakespeare, too, princes and cardinals are real
men, though not the real ones ; they have a flavour
of antiquity about them. But for most of us John
is all wicked and Henry III. all weak ; Richard III.
all hump and hypocrisy ; Henry VI. a melancholy
pietist, with an interest in education. And even
if a certain defmiteness does attach itself to the
characters of the kings, how hopelessly impersonal
the lesser lights are apt to be ! A biographer of
the Black Prince has nothing to tell us. The Earls
Edwin and Morcar are proverbial for being dry.

CHARLES STUART.

Simon de Montfort is little better than an elegant
shadow. Wyclif and Wykeham are nothing but
venerable names. As we get down to Henry VIII.
the mist clears a little, thanks to Lord Herbert and
Strype. There is some flesh and blood about him.
Elizabeth is a little phantasmal from her pomp and
her wardrobes ; but James I., the coarse pedant —
here is a man at last.

And Charles, he is a human being too, — so truth
fully inconsistent, so far stranger than fiction,
from the day when he first said merrily to his
boy-friends at dinner that he could never have
been a lawyer, for he could not defend a bad nor
yield in a good cause, to the day when, all in black,
dazed with fright and desperate dignity, he spoke,
and spoke those poor rambling incoherent words
before the windows of his own hall — words which,
like the ravings of delirium, give the reader a thrill
of horror even now.

" We have the misfortune," Stafford said to Laud,
" to serve a gracious prince that knows not how to
be, or to be made great."

This clever sentence contains epigrammatically
a rapid outline of the character of this unfortunate
king — at least for those who have any sympathy
with him and his position. He was, above all
things, to those who served and loved him a

HIS FASCINATION.

gracious prince. There was something fascinating
about him. Strafford and Laud were enamoured,
not of the monarch, but of the monarchy ; but it is
certain that they would never have given the same
passionate devotion to the service of the throne
had it been occupied by Charles's father, or by
either of Charles's sons, or, indeed, by any but
Charles himself. He was, in fact, a man born to
be king ; there was something kingly in the nature,
inbred, not only developed by circumstances.

In the first place, there was a singular chastity
about the man in a court that was not chaste.
Perfect chastity is a rare and precious jewel among
the crowns of our English kings ; the temptations
of sense are so numerous, and the ease in com
passing any desire so absolute. But the white
coronation robe which Charles, alone of our kings,
chose for himself, rejecting the customary purple,
as a sign of the " virgin purity in which he came
to be espoused to his people," was no mere ideal
allegory ; it truly symbolized his unstained nature.

For the rest, he was of a grimly obstinate
nature, of a stubbornness partly innate and partly
fostered by his position, which not only never gave
way, but never even saw that it was right or politic
to give way. How it has come about that the
commonest view of Charles is that of a weak,

HIS OBSTINACY

religious, melancholy and romantic man is impos
sible to conceive — from his portrait probably, and
nothing else.

I hope that incidental touches throughout this
volume will illustrate this view of his character.
He will never be found to be weak, save perhaps in
the case of Stafford's death ; he was religious, but
in no sense sentimental, almost as sternly practical
as Laud himself, and taking an even more decidedly
Erastian view of the Church as a great State en
gine for securing obedience and right thought;
he became melancholy as he found himself swept
gradually off his feet by the tide which he could
not stem and to which he would not yield ; romantic
in one sense he was, if to be romantic is to be
unfortunate, and to have the power of attaching
to oneself, by character and circumstances, some
of the most ardent if not the noblest spirits of the
land. So he moved in his dignified wilfulness
through life, often stirring the reader's pity, even
his anger, but never contemptible, never not a king.

But he bore one blemish that was deep indeed.
At crises of his life, and at anxious moments of
the national history, a fatal characteristic appeared :
a curious moral obliquity came out — faithlessness,
as Macaulay calls it, an utter inability to keep to
his word. Still, it must be allowed that this, too,

AND FAITHLESSNESS.

was rather the result of his idea of monarchical
prerogative than a deliberate desertion of principle,
a lack of rectitude. He could not bring himself
to feel instinctively that a bargain was as much a
bargain, a promise as much a promise, when made
between king and people as between gentleman
and gentleman. In the smaller field of domestic
and private life Charles was acutely sensitive about
such things as honour and the sacredness of the
pledged word ; but as soon as the scene shifted to
the wider arena of politics, he seemed to forget
that the principles of morality were every bit as
true in that less visible atmosphere.

If the king make a promise, he may also dis
regard it ; no promise can be binding on him
which, at a later date, he may think it right to
violate ; — thus fatally he argued, not, we must
believe, from moral blindness, but from false and
stolid pride.

LAUD'S PORTRAIT.

CHAPTER I.

AT Lambeth, in the guard-room still so-called, now
dining-room, where the portraits of the Archbishops
hang, immediately opposite the door by which you
enter, and close to a window, so that the yellow
London light falls on it, hangs a portrait that in
stantly attracts the attention. True, it is a master
piece of Vandyck's ; but it is not the painting
that surprises, though it is to its utter life-likeness
that the surprise is due. Again and again I have
heard people ask, " And who is that very extraor
dinary-looking person ? " and, on being told who it
is, say in a tone of incredulous bewilderment, " That
Laud ! "

The fact is that the name of Laud, to those to
whom it conveys any ideas at all, stands for one
of two things : either he is a type of all that is
sacerdotal and objectionable in the Church of Eng
land, the most mischievous prelate that has ever
borne supreme rule there ; he is the bigot, the

SURPRISING CHARACTERISTICS. 9

ecclesiastic, par excellence, — the eternal instance of
what is called the "clerical" mind — using the word
in the sense of narrow, sectarian, credulous, and
unsympathetic. And these are astonished, for he
wears the face of a kindly cheery man. Or else he
is the " martyred Laud," the saviour of the Church
in her Catholic aspect, the restorer of the shrine,
the true son of Aaron, robed as God Himself ap
points. And the face bears witness to none of
these things ; if faces betray character this man
had little of the saint about him.

Of all the thirty-four portraits of ecclesiastics who
there appear, this one is the most enigmatic. It
represents a man in a square cap, worn very far
back on the head so as to show a great height of
forehead. The face is plump and short, with but
few lines in it, of a fine fresh colour. He was then
some sixty-seven years of age, and he looks but
forty. The little moustache and imperial worn by
the clergy of that date give a curiously secular finish
to what is already a secular face. But the most
marked features arc the small, delicately pencilled
eyebrows, drawn very high up by the wrinkling of
the brows, giving a look of half-cynical surprise, a
mute protest, to the face. Downdropped brows, like
a penthouse over receding eyes, give either a pen
sive or a gloomy secretive look : of this there is

10 THE PALACE.

absolutely np trace in Laud's face. The whole ex
pression would be called sunny, if it were not for
that half-pathetic, half-humorous raising of the
brow. They seem to say, " I have told you ; I have
warned you. I have laid down before you the
paths you ought to walk in, the paths you ought
to tread ; if you will not be warned you may walk
on still in darkness, you may go your own way, —
I at least have done my part."

It is not trivial to contrast Laud's portrait with
that of his master, Charles Stuart himself. The con
trast is a painful one. The look of serene prosperity
about the prelate loses ground by the side of the
gloom and weariness in the face of the king — that
look of doom, as it has been called — that has won
him, and will win him, so many passionate admirers.

The window by which Laud hangs looks into
the front court of the Palace — gravelled now, a
grass-grown lawn then. The air is full of the
solemn roar of London. To the left is the great
gate which the rioters assaulted ; to the right, the
skeletons of the high garden elms under which he
walked with Hales of Eton. Close below the
windows of the library, in spite of London fog and
sunless air, flourish the broad-fingered, grey-green
leaves of the fig-trees, the successors of those that
he himself planted, by which he used to pace ;

THE TORTOISE. II

where, he records in his diary, at the first touch
of spring, his tortoise, then some sixty years old,
that had been given him when at Oxford, used
to issue from some secret crack and crawl painfully
about. And, curiously enough, when the other day
I was turning over some dusty relics — old parch
ment-deeds, faded stiff church-vestments, seals and
crosses, that repose in an oak press in the Muni
ment-room, — there I came upon a tortoise-shell at
the back of the shelf, on which was pasted a strip
of paper, inscribed in antique brown characters,
" The Shell of a Tortoise, which was put into the
Garden at Lambeth in the year 1633, where it
remained till the year 1753, when it was un
fortunately (or mortally) killed by the overflowing
of the river." *

Laud was born at Reading, a town he always
loved. His memory was long held in honour there.
A minute in the Corporation Diary, in 1695, records
the decision that a small oak desk should be affixed
to the panelling on the left side of the Council-
Chamber chimney-piece, and that a copy of the
" Troubles and Tryal of William Laud " should be
chained to the desk with a chain of brass for ever.
The house where he was born has disappeared, but

* Or perhaps, as Ducarel says, " the negligence of the gardener."
The slip is nearly illegible.

12 READING TOWN.

the fact is commemorated by the nomenclature of
the block that has succeeded it — Laud Place.

In Reading he built an almshouse, which still exists,
endowing it with lands at Bray. " Done" he writes,
with characteristic method, against the project in
the little paper of " Things I have projected to do
if God bless me in them." There is another
curious and characteristic entry about that project,
in the Diary : " The way to do the town of Reading
good, for their poor ; which may be compassed by
God's blessing upon me, though my wealth be small.
And I hope God will bless me in it, because it was
His own motion in me. For this way never came
into my thoughts (though I had much beaten about
it) till this night, as I was at my prayers. Jan. I,

1633-4."

He was of the middle class — a class which
the Puritans introduced to importance : they had
been overlooked till then. He was the only child
of a second marriage. His father was a well-
to-do master tailor, employing many work-people,
and leaving a good report behind him. " E fsece
plebis," said his enemies — " Raked out of the dung
hill." His maternal uncle, Sir Benjamin Webb,
had been Lord Mayor of London. There was no
trouble in the family from poverty.

This origin must be kept in mind. It is some-

THE MIDDLE CLASS. 13

times supposed that he sided with the party of
aristocratic instincts against democratic tendencies ;
if he did, it was because the former represented
tradition, authority, rule, as against freedom, in
dependence, self-government. No man ever had
fewer aristocratic sympathies. Men of low origin
rising to great positions are often unduly dazzled
and impressed by the atmosphere in which they
find themselves. Laud was neither dazzled nor
impressed ; he had not a touch of meanness in
his composition. He had a keen eye for men of
weight — the King, Buckingham, Strafford, — these
were great influential factors in politics, and Laud
gravitated to them ; but for birth and position
he had no sort of respect. One of the reasons
why he made such universal enemies — enemies in
every class and every rank — was that he heeded
distinctions so little ; whether the offender was
earl or barber, if he offended he must suffer.
He was hard on the people, and they hated him ;
he was hard on the nobility, and they would not
protect him. His origin was constantly made the
subject of taunt and ridicule in later life. Heylyn
describes how he found him walking in his garden,
looking troubled at a lampoon that he had found
on the walk, flung over the wall ; not so much at
the fact that he had not, as he said, the good fortune

14 WEAK HEALTH.

to be born a gentleman, as at the virulence and ill-
feeling that such an attack betokened ; and it is
evident that he was very genuinely pleased with
Heylyn's apt and humorous quotation, of a certain
pope who said of himself that he was " illustri domo
natus," i.e. a broken-down shed that let in the light.
Laud's morbid sensibility to libels and lampoons is
among the most curious traits of his character : his
entries in the Diary on the receipt of one of them
became pathetic and soft to a strange degree in a
man of so flinty a purpose. But this is a side issue.
It must be borne in mind that he was of ordinary
burgher origin, brought up in middle-class tradi
tions. However, his education began early, his
home traditions were probably never very strong,
and he was 'never married — that is to say, he had
none of the temptations to the domestic point-of-
view, which is so characteristic of the English
middle-class.

In the first entry in the Diary occur the words,
" In my infancy I was in danger of death by sick
ness." In 1596 the only entry is, "I had a great
sickness." In 1 597 the only entry is, " And another."
And it is so all along. In 1619, he "falls suddenly
dead for a long time at Wycombe ; " he is taken
ill in his coach ; he has a very " fierce salt rheum
in the left eye that almost endangers it ; " " became

STRONG CONSTITUTION'. 15

suddenly lame, whether through some humour fall
ing down upon my left leg, or through the biting
of bugs, I know not." The Diary is full of these,
almost as full as George Eliot's. But Laud never
diagnoses his sensations. I think it is important
to keep this knowledge in our minds about him ;
neither his portrait nor his public acts would betray
it. He never broke down ; he never took a
holiday ; he never took any exercise. A public
man is even censured nowadays if he docs not take
a respite from his official labours, and refresh the
jaded brain with sea or glacier air. Laud never
left England. There is little trace of his having
left his work, and this when, besides being a very
active Archbishop — not, however, with the care of
the colonial Churches — he was also Prime Minister
and President of the Board of Trade, with a seat
on the Foreign Committee, besides discharging
spontaneously year after year for Oxford and
Dublin Universities, in his capacity as Chancellor,
duties which whiten the hairs of Heads of houses
when undertaken most unwillingly for a period
of two years. The fact was that Laud, like his
friend and ally Strafford, was possessed of what
has been well called an obstinate indoors consti
tution. He was never well, never incapacitated.
A week after breaking a sinew of his leg he

1 6 THE THORN IN THE FLESH.

officiated at the marriage of the Duke of Bucking
ham's daughter.

Constant ill-health with conscientious strong-
willed people seems to act as a perpetual stimulus
to action. On gentler meditative souls it sometimes
traces gracious saintly lines ; but not on men of
tougher fibre — they need the counter-irritation of
work and life, otherwise they chafe and writhe. If
they get work, they take it greedily ; they do not
become valetudinarians ; they do not succumb ;
they busy themselves in details, and thus contrive
to stifle the constant feeling of uneasiness : at the
same time it keeps them alive to graver questions.
Invalids are generally idealists. When, on the
other hand, men of superb physique and super
abundant vigour find themselves at a great centre,
they are apt to fritter themselves away upon
material surroundings and absorbing attention to
details. Absorption in details was a temptation of
Laud's, too ; but the pressure of malaise kept him
from losing himself in fancied effectiveness ; he
kept his principles in view. No doubt his principles
erred on the side of being too material, but they
were principles ; he worked not by the impulse of
the moment, but on certain deliberate lines.

A SEVERE SCHOOLMASTER. 1 7

CHAPTER II.

" I HAD the happiness," Laud says, " to be edu
cated under a very severe schoolmaster." He was
also a perceptive one ; he said of the boy, just as
it has probably been said of dozens of clever lads
who never do emerge to greatness, that he would
make a name some day. His high spirit, his quick
apprehension, and, curiously enough, the strange
stuff of his dreams, aroused great expectations.
" When you are a little great person," said this
austere tutor, alluding to Laud's stature, "I hope you
will remember Reading school." The boy's industry,
in spite of his invalid constitution, was very great ;
and there was a curious solidity of judgment and
quiet independence of temper noted even in those
early days. At sixteen he went to Oxford, to
St. John's, a humble pile of mottled flint and gray
stone ; its stately garden front and academic grove
were of Laud's own later contriving. A year after
his admission he was chosen scholar, partly on

C

1 8 AN ECCLESIASTICAL BIAS.

his abilities, partly, it is said, out of respect to the
memory of his father, the Mayor of Reading
having the nomination for that turn.

It is an interesting fact, perhaps not more, that
Laud's tutor at St. John's — that is to say, the man
to whose teaching and care he was absolutely
committed at a most impressionable age — was John
Buckeridge, afterwards Bishop of Rochester, and
later, through his pupil's influence, of Ely. He
was, perhaps, the leading controversialist in sacra
mental matters, and upheld the lowly kneeling to
receive the sacred elements as a matter both of
tradition and natural feeling. It is not probable
that Laud had up to this time enjoyed any par
ticularly ecclesiastical conversation. He was, of
course, intended for the Church. Most ambitious
young men, of the middle and lower orders, who
meant to rise, did so through the Church ; the Bar
was not the ladder to advancement that it is now.
Laud must have been all along, by his most instinc
tive and deepest promptings, a churchman, an
ecclesiastic; and his High Church, Traditional, even
Arminian tendencies were natural to him : — but
it is not mere fancy, I think, to attribute to this
early influence the bent which was so decided
afterwards ; he probably made his first entry into
the ecclesiastical world of controversy and discus-

CALVINISM AT OXFORD. 1 9

sion at this point. Buckeridge would be sure to
have talked the altar controversy over with his
pupils, especially with so eager and sympathetic
a listener as Laud ; and it is not improbable that
to this early bias his later strength of feeling on
the subject is due. It probably then assumed
undue proportions in his mind, and never quite
lost them.

At the age of twenty he was made a Fellow.
At this time the atmosphere of Oxford was
charged with Calvinism. Abbot, Master of Uni
versity, Laud's predecessor at Canterbury, was the
ruling spirit* Laud, one against a host — for he
had hardly a single sympathizer — detested not
only their doctrines but their accessories. It was
characteristic of that gloomy superstition to over
ride all the more pleasing ornaments of worship,
all the beauty of holiness — music was worldly and
architecture distracting. " No whistling in church,"
said Glover, as the great organ at Ely came down.
They forgot that the capacity for beauty in natural
things was, after all, God's work as well. It escaped

* His favourite tenet was the descent of the visible Church, not
through the main unmistakable channel, but through by-waters and
side-streams. That a man should have gravely held the truth to
have passed through Berengarians, Albigenses, Wicklifites, Hussites,
to Luther and Calvin, is nearly incredible ; yet this was the text of
Abbot.

20 ITS BARENESS.

them that when they cried for the Bible and
nothing but the Bible, all they meant was texts
which they had themselves selected. Lectures and
homilies, sermons and discourses, extempore prayer,
broken only by grim psalm-singing, went near to
eclipse the delicate fabric of Church worship that
had attracted their forefathers, and that Laud loved
with a consuming love : " The zeal of Thine house
hath even eaten me," he said.

It seems, however, that Laud did not so much
despise the directness and ugliness of these Bible
Christians, as hate their rashness and temerity in
dealing with the class of subjects over which they
loved to linger — Reprobation and the bondage of
the Will. Calvinism bore the same relation to the
religion of the day that militant agnosticism and
scientific unbelief bear to it now. Calvinism
was free thought — the rationalizing of religion on
biblical lines. Laud loved authority ; he had the
Roman instinct of sternly forbidding the by-paths
of speculative thought to ordinary minds. And to
unenlightened wavering souls such speculation is
beset with dangers ; submission is the more prac
ticable way. All along it is evident that Laud's
battle was fought against free speculation ; and
when we see him pitted against Calvinism we
are apt to forget this — we are inclined to treat it

LAUD A RELIGIOUS RADICAL. 21

as a purely ecclesiastical contest, circulating about
the washing of pots and cups and the furniture
of the sanctuary. But the altar controversy, to
which I shall have to allude, was only the symbol
of a far deeper schism, where Laud was fighting
for authority and tradition, and his enemies for
liberty of practice. The arena has opened so
much lately. It is religion against, not irreligion,
but non-religion now. Then it was a more
intestine warfare, but the interests involved were
the same. We are prone, too, to feel that
men like Laud, with strong feelings about the
Divine right of kings and the authority of the
Church, must have been of the party which we
call by the name of Tory. But this is not the
case. At Oxford, in the midst of this Calvinistic
school, he appeared as the daring innovator
against all the prejudices of the day. He was
described by the leaders of University thought in
the terms in which we should describe a fanatical
Radical : though the tyranny for which he strove
was retrograde in their eyes. In fact, it was
the tyranny over thought that he aimed at —
Calvinism was the tyranny in thought.

The altar controversy deserves a special con
sideration at this point, from the important place
which it holds in the disputes of the time. It is

22 THE ALTAR CONTROVERSY.

a controversy which falls peculiarly under the
derision of the unsympathetic mind. The man
who takes what he calls an unprejudiced view of
history, — which may be more properly called
an ignorant view, — finds great matter of mirth in
the fact that a nation should be divided over the
position of the Communion table in church. " They
could not really care," he says. He is inclined to
relegate it to the same category of controversies as
that which agitated Lilliput — at which end to open
an egg. But it is always so : strife rages most
fiercely when mere details are the matters of dis
pute. We are as little free from it now as ever. Is
not the position of the Priest at the altar an un
worthy matter to make good men enemies ?

The facts are shortly these. The Elizabethan
rubric was all for convenience. The table was to
stand where it had stood at times when it was
not wanted for use. At celebrations it was to be
moved to the centre of the church or chancel,
wherever the minister could be most conveniently
seen and heard, and where general access to the
table was easiest.

But the table was heavy, and sacristans are
seldom known to err on the side of physical
activity. The table was moved to the centre of
the church, and there it stayed. In cathedrals and

DEGRADATION OF THE TABLE. 23

private chapels it remained, as a rule, at the east.
Then began the Puritan revival. The Communion,
the mystic, super-rational, direct union of the
believer's soul with his Lord, the sacrament of
spirituality, was thrust out. The pure Word, or
rather diluted extracts of the Word, took its place ;
pulpit and reading-desk were glorified. The
Shechinah migrated there. The altar became
a convenient table, a depository for the accidents
of a mere commemoration.

Had matters remained at this point, no dispute
need have arisen ; but this degraded table was
treated with gross irreverence — schoolboys laid
their satchels, farmers their hats and sticks upon
it. The churchwardens made up their accounts
on it ; it was even put to lower uses by plumbers
and glaziers. The Puritans would have it that it
was common and unclean.

When Laud, as Archbishop, summarily ordered
it to be placed altarwise at the east, railed in by
the cancelli, which had given their name to the
chancel, the Puritans saw in it a deliberate attempt
to restore a hated doctrine. And it was a delibe
rate attempt. Laud's view of the Sacrament was
much what a moderate High Churchman would
hold now. He felt it to be the crown and con
summation of Christian mysteries ; to stand at the

24 LAUD ACCUSED OF HERESY.

head of the scheme ; to impart the Divine union
for which the teaching of desk and pulpit prepared
and fitted a devout soul. The Puritans, who held
it to be merely a commendable practice which
every man who was at heart devoted to the Word
would be glad to continue, saw the old tyranny
of the Church rehabilitated by this assertion.

Laud was Fellow of St. John's for ten years.
During the whole of this time his character was
maturing ; but he was himself all along. He knew
the precise extent and limits of his own beliefs ;
he never lost an opportunity of recommending
them. Whenever he got an opportunity he stepped
forward, explained and justified some obnoxious
doctrine : now Baptismal Regeneration, now Apos
tolical Succession through the Church of Rome.
On one occasion he was actually cited before the
Vice-Chancellor, to answer to a charge of heresy.
And here he behaved most characteristically : he
did not defy, or prophesy, or make a meek sub
mission ; he gravely refuted the charge, step by
step, coldly and courteously, and was dismissed.
Abbot hated him ; and Abbot was Oxford then.
" It was a heresy," Laud writes, " to be seen in my
company, to salute me in the street." A sermon
was preached against him at St. Mary's, in his
presence.

HE IS BLOWN UPON IN SERMONS. 2$

" Might not Christ say," cried Mr. Robert Abbot,
brother of the Vice-Chancellor, from the University
pulpit, pale with passion, and staring at Laud,
where he sat among the masters — " Might not
Christ say, ' What art thou ? Romish or English ?
Papist or Protestant ? Or what art thou ? a
mongrel, or compound of both ? — a Protestant by
ordination ; a Papist in point of free will and the
like ? a Protestant in receiving the Sacrament ;
a Papist in the doctrine of the Sacrament ? What !
do you think there are two heavens? If there be,
get you to the other, and place yourselves there ;
for into this, where I am, you shall never come.' "

This was hearty speech. No one pretended to
be ignorant that Laud was meant. People on the
back benches stood up to look at him to see how
he was taking it, so violent a tirade it was ; but he
sat unmoved and cold, giving the preacher an
impenetrable attention. Against such an adversary
nothing could be done. Against ill-feeling and dis
like, against public and private affronts, he opposed
that magical weapon — indifference. Whenever an
opening occurred he took up an unpopular doctrine
and preached it — was never violent or discourteous.
Like Luther in this respect alone, he enjoyed the
feeling of danger. Laud had the key of success, if,
as is said, self-possession is the secret of it. When

26 ELECTED PRESIDENT OF ST. JOHN'S.

Buckeridge, by this time President of St. John's,
resigned, it became clear that this unpopularity was
not going to stand in his way. He had done,
without aiming after it, what great characters do
— he had impressed those close about him. He was
elected President by a clear majority ; but even then
the feeling ran so strong that one of the Fellows
tore the paper containing the result of the scrutiny
out of the bursar's hand, and burnt it. There was
an appeal, and Laud was confirmed. Then he set
to work to weed out, by fair and polite means, the
obnoxious unprogressive Fellows. He got them
livings, and eradicated them quietly, till the college
was his own. Then he began to procure the elec
tion of men after his own heart, " breeding up,"
as Ascham says of the sister foundation, " so many
learned men in that one College of St. John's at
one time, as I believe the whole University of
Lovaine in many years was not able to afford."

The last person in the world of whom anything
is expected nowadays is the master of a college.
To be energetic and original is not his forte. To
be supreme within the precincts of a noble building,
with no defined duties — such a position has a
terrible tendency to persuade a man that he has
deserved it ; to make him exalt whims and caprices
into laws and ordinances. The spirit of Mumbo

BUT PREFERS LEARNING TO TEACHING. 2/

Jumbo is apt to prevail in those circles — the spirit
of false officialism, the taste for the trappings of
authority, the disposition to mistake pomposity for
magnificence. None of these things were tempta
tions to Laud. His presidentship gave him a posi
tion in the world, and moderate wealth ; it fitted
him, in fact, to move one step closer to the centre on
which his eyes were fixed. He became at once a
learner in another sphere — the sphere of politics, of
national movements. He went to Court — the Court
of James I.

28 JAMES 7 HE FIRST.

CHAPTER III.

JAMES the First is one of those figures who would
be treated with mere ridicule were he supposed
to be the creation of fancy. Such a character
would not be tolerated in a fiction — a wilder fusion
of incongruous elements than a maker of books
would dream of bringing together. Behind a gro
tesque exterior, padded clothes, and rickety legs,
supporting a huge misshapen head, rolling eyes, and
a slobbering mouth, lay a profound but unpractical
shrewdness, a fund of out-of-the-way knowledge,
much humour and power of repartee. " The wisest
fool in Christendom," said Henry of Navarre. He
was a pedant of the deepest dye : that is to say,
he had a German hankering after theory ; he
strung theories together from insufficient premisses,
and forced subsequent facts into the places he had
reserved for them ; he never allowed himself to be
corrected by them. On witchcraft, on reprobation,
on the Divine right of kings he wrote tractates,
in his silly learned fashion. When he visited

FOOLISH BU7^ AMIABLE. 2Q

Cambridge he made the assembled professors a
harangue ; in which, the complimentary addresses
said, he outdid them each in his own line. This
was not true ; but that a king should attempt such
a feat was strangely bewildering. To this he
added a fondness for buffoonery and endless
chatter, a most despicable cowardice, habitual
drunkenness, and possibly other vices. He was
ruled by his young favourites, adventurers with
pretty faces, whom he fondled and hung upon
before the whole Court.

Sir Walter Scott has left, in " The Fortunes of
Nigel," perhaps the liveliest and most sympathetic
sketch of this undignified monarch, who, weak and
wearisome as he was, yet had that affectionate fibre
in him which makes him an affectionate memory-
rolling about his dusty rooms, plucking a jewel
from his hat-buckle in default of money in his
purse, and brimming over with quaint Scottish
epigram and pungent phrases, striking straight to
the heart of the matter with humorous power.

Of course, some of his favourites were mere
playthings. The wretched Earl of Rochester,
executed for a loathsome poisoning, was not so
harmless. But one choice that the king made,
surely not wholly by chance, has set its mark on
English history.

10 THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM.

George Villiers, whose wit, face, and bearing
attracted the king's attention, was hurried up the
ranks of the peerage, thrust into court offices, made
finally the director and dispenser of court favour
for the realm. The scenes that are so familiar of
the poor monarch in a maudlin fit, crying and
kissing " Baby Charles and Steenie," as he loved to
call them, are sufficiently degrading. Buckingham,
we need make no doubt, found them disgusting
too. He was a man too much alive to sensuous
and artistic perceptions not to have realized the
baseness of the scene ; but he suffered it as a
troublesome apprenticeship, through which to
climb to a very tangible and unsentimental goal.
He was a man with keen ambitions and something
of a kingly soul. Disconnect Buckingham from
his first adventures, and the means by which he
rose, and he appears as a man with much greatness
about him. He was strong enough and popular
enough, at any rate, to secure the passionate love
of his foster-brother and future king. Charles was
evidently never in the least jealous of his position ;
and at Court, and with the country at large, he
maintained his position. There were occasional
fits of hostility — one definite attack upon him ;
but, considering his origin, it is wonderful that
there were no more. He had some of the generous

HIS CONNECTION WITH LAUD. 31

qualities of greatness — a unique devotion to his
friends was among them. In Laud's connection
with him it is noticeable, I think, that Bucking
ham's manner, at first businesslike, gradually
melts into something warm and personal. Not so
Laud. The prayers, " Pro Duce Buckinghamiae,"
in his devotions for daily use, and the prayer at
the Duke's death, are not edifying or satisfactory
compositions. They reflect little genuine personal
affection, and a good deal of worldly anxiety. I
should be glad to strike them out from my im
pressions of Laud. What can be made of this
sentence ? " Continue him a true-hearted friend to
me, Thy poor servant, whom Thou hast honoured
in his eyes." That is not a noble sentiment for a
man to utter secretly, in the presence of God, about
his friend. Whether or no Laud loved him — and
this is hardly credible — it is certain he owed every
thing to him. There is no reasonable doubt that
the motive which induced Charles to take Laud as
his supreme adviser on the duke's death, was the
fact that Laud was known to possess Buckingham's
confidence, to have been much with him — in fact,
his confessor. Laud had owed his original episcopal
promotion to Buckingham ; but the seal of his
greatness was set by Buckingham's death, and the
relation in which he had stood to him when alive.

32 THE DUKE'S CONFESSOR.

Poor Buckingham ! the heart goes out after
him. Filled with strange presentiments, he went
heavily down to Portsmouth to die by so unfore
seen a death ; and the news of his fate, received
by the king with a passion of tears, was the signal
for the little cold far-sighted figure, never unrea
sonably swayed by any romance or personal bias,
save once, to step into his place and move
onwards in the same line — that line which was so
enigmatic, by being at once imaginative and hard.

This stage of Laud's life is a quiet one — he made
no great parade. It was a period of silent secret
growth — growth of influence, growth of purpose.
All this time he was accumulating weight ; it cannot
be described as making friends, because Laud's
was a cold nature. The sentiments, the close
relations of human life, were wonderfully aloof from
him. He stood in the priestly relation with several,
but that is by no means always an intimate relation,
because it presupposes the accurate knowledge of
facts and thoughts which it would be death to
intimacy to know. In Confession the soul that
seeks for guidance speaks to his confessor as he
would to God, and human beings cannot speak to
one another as they would to God ; there is a kind
of confidence that love ignores.

Only once did this wary self-contained career

THE EARL OF DEVONSHIRE. 33

halt ; only once did he make a false step. " Dec.
26, 1605, Dies erat Jovis et Festum Su. Stephani,"
says the Diary, " My cross about the Earl of
Devon's marriage."

Charles Blount, who became Lord Mountjoy
on the death of his elder brother, and afterwards
created Earl of Devonshire, was a soldier of some
repute. He put down the rebellion of the Earl
Tir-owen in Ireland, at the battle of Kinsale, and
in reward for his services was advanced to be Lord
Deputy of that kingdom by James I.

When a younger son, without prospects, he had
set his affections on the Lady Penelope Devereux,
daughter of the Earl of Essex, a most sweet and
attractive maiden, if we can trust contemporaries.
Their troth was plighted, but her friends would
have none of him, and married her out of hand
to an austere uncourtly gentleman, Lord Rich,
who behaved, if not cruelly, at least with great
roughness towards her. Of such romances, where
lover and wife are both weak and passionate, there
can be but one melancholy ending — a sonnet in
the " Arcadia " records the circumstance.

Lord and Lady Rich were divorced. She had
already borne several children — to Mountjoy, it
was known ; for there was no attempt at disguise
throughout.

D

34 PENELOPE, LADY RICH.

Laud had been made Mountjoy's chaplain, living
with him at Wanstead in Essex ; there, being much
worked upon and, it appears, threatened by the
earl — for he was now Earl of Devonshire — he
broke down, and married the pair, knowing that
only the loosest Calvinism gave anything like a
hearty assent to such a match, and that the prin
ciples that he himself adhered to, most vigorously
condemned it ; " serving my ambition, and the
sins of others," as he sadly says. He was threatened,
it seems certain, with loss of court favour if he
refused ; and it is not improbable that he had a
great friendship for the earl, if not for his lady.
It was to temptation of power that he suc
cumbed : the result was precisely the opposite
of what he had expected. James, in his capacity
as ecclesiastical lawyer, was so angry with the
earl that he had to write an apology, and died
of "the spleen," that is to say disappointment,
within a year. He very nearly involved his chap
lain in the disgrace, and it is not improbable that
Laud's long waiting for advancement was connected
with this false step.

The day was ever after a day of solemn obser
vation and humiliation for him. Four years after
there was another mysterious and similar event
on the same day — "E.M. Die lunae, 1609" — some

LAUD'S PENITENCE. 35

strange sin of which we have lost the secret.
"Lapidatus non pro sed a peccato " - " Stoned
(like the martyr whose day it was), not for but by
my sin," he writes of it, making the enigma deeper
than ever. The Latin prayer which stands first
among the " Anniversaria," has reference to these
two events, and is in a tone of deep, almost abject
abasement. He prays that it may not prove a
divorcing of his own soul from the spirit*

I came, the other day, upon the actual petition
of Lord Rich for divorce, filed among the Lambeth
papers ; and there is also a curious relic, attributed
by tradition to the time of Laud, which has
undoubtedly reference to the same event.

This is a portrait, rather stiff and Flemish in
style, which hangs in the great corridor of the
Palace, of a sweet-faced gentle lady, her bunches
of auburn hair standing out very strongly against
a pale-green background. On the back, in large
old letters, are traced the wofds, " A Countess of
Devonshire." It cannot be doubted which.

* In 1621, when Bishop of St. David's elect, by a curious chance
he had to preach before the Court at Wanstead, in the very chapel
where he had celebrated this fatal marriage ; he preached on the
peace of the Church. The following passage occurs in it : " Yet
will I do the People right : for tho' many of them are guilty of
inexcusable sin, as sacrilege, so too many of us Priests are guilty of
other as great sins as sacrilege, for which no doubt we and our
possessions lie open to waste : it must needs be so." This was part
of his penance ; none of his hearers can have been ignorant of what
he meant.

36 DEAN OF GLOUCESTER.

CHAPTER IV.

A WEARY period of waiting ensued.

Laud was so nearly disgusted with court life, that
he resolved to quit it, and was only just persuaded
to resume it. Dr. Neile, Bishop of Durham, a man
of wonderful tact in choosing remarkable men,
though without many gifts himself, except that
of amiability, became his patron. He gave him
chambers in Durham House. At last James began
to relent He made him a Royal Chaplain, and
at last gave him the Deanery of Gloucester. Here
he fell into a nest of hornets, but routed them.
The cathedral church was in a dismal state. He
set about a drastic reform ; in fact, he had been
sent there as a kind of experiment. James had
no pleasure in neglect and carelessness, and Neile
suggested to him that the fearless active Laud
would be the very man to reform Gloucester.

Up went the altar to the east, and all the subor
dinates of the church were compelled to bow to

CLEANSING THE SHRINE. 37

it ; the organ was repaired, the dirt and cobwebs
cleared away, new and unfamiliar doctrines preached
by the little dauntless Dean. He had burst upon
the quiet slumbering western city like a thunder
bolt ; the place had drowsed away into a contented
Calvinism.

There is nothing like the resistance of a limited
place where gossip can rage. Laud was the best-
hated man in Gloucester. The Bishop said that
he could not possibly enter the church till that
Nehushtan (meaning the altar), had been removed
to some less offensive place. For eight years this
worthy follower of the Prince of Peace heard the
bells call to prayer from the palace study, and
thought bitterly of the active Dean scraping and
posturing in the well-known choir.

This was stirring enough, but there were larger
events to come. In 1616 he accompanied the
king to Scotland. James, with that unsympathetic
clumsiness whose very naivete disarmed offence,
told the Scottish divines that he had brought them
a theologian to enlighten their minds a little.
Had Laud known it, on this occasion was sown
that vast unintermitting Scottish hatred of the man
that was so great a factor in his fall. Then he was
made Bishop of St. David's, " a poor city, God wot,"
as Heylyn says. He also held in commendam

38 BISHOP OF ST. DAV1&S.

more than one living. His only visit to his Welsh
cure of souls is so humorous, that I cannot refrain
from quoting it. His coach was overturned twice
in the last, seven miles before Abergwili, his palace.
There he consecrated a chapel on the Decollation
of St. John, a day that connected itself with several
other important crises of his life. A Mr. Jones
applied for ordination, but on examination he
proved so widely ignorant, especially of Latin, that
" I sent him away," says Laud, " with an exhorta
tion, not ordained."

But the great event of this time was his friend
ship with the Duke of Buckingham — a far more
serious politician, as we have said, considering his
meteoric rise, than is generally allowed. The two
men came naturally together. In those days so
much went by favour, that it was necessary to
fascinate or impress the great personages of the
kingdom in order to succeed. Laud impressed
Buckingham. The following entries in the Diary
are significant.

" Jan. 22. My La of B. and I in the inner chamber
at York House. Quod Deus est salvator noster
J. C.»

"June 9, Whitsunday. My Lord M. B. was

* I suppose that this refers to some doubts in the duke's mind
as to the Divinity of our Saviour.

CONFESSOR TO BUCKINGHAM. 39

pleased to enter upon a near respect to me : the
particulars are not for paper.

"June 15. I became C. to my Ld of B., and June
1 6 being Trin. Sund. he received the Sacr. at
Greenwich." " C." is Confessor. After this, there
was no possibility of mistaking Laud for anything
but an important man.

The early stages of their intimacy are curious.
" When the Duke fell sick of an ague in the be
ginning of May, he was extreme impatient of his
fits, till Laud came to visit him : by whom he
was so charmed and sweetened, that at first he
endured his fits with patience, and thus did so
break their heat and violence that at last they left
him."

The projected match between Charles and the
Infanta began to cause great uneasiness in the
country ; and this was increased by the wild
journey to Spain of the prince and Buckingham.
Laud was one of the few in the secret ; he corre
sponded with Buckingham throughout, and when
it was thought necessary to conciliate the Pope,
whom James had definitely and unmistakably been
calling Antichrist in a theological treatise, it was
Laud who suggested the lines of the apology — that
it was all done argumentatively, " as a man might
say." This sent Laud's popularity down lower

40 ABBOTS JEALOUSY.

still : the dread of the Papacy was fast becoming
morbid in England.

Laud's great quarrel with Abbot, now Arch
bishop, took place at this time. The members of
Convocation had subsidized the king to the extent
of twenty per cent, of their incomes. Laud, who
knew more about the country clergy than any one,
represented to Buckingham that this meant very
serious sacrifices, and a memorandum was drawn up
to be presented to the king. Laud went to consult
Abbot about it, and that jealous secretive man,
thoroughly angry at Laud's growing and his own
waning influence, told him sharply that, by first
going to a lay lord, without ecclesiastical consulta
tion, he had inflicted such a wound on the Church
as she would never recover. The expression is
absurdly disproportionate to the offence : and
Laud's answer, under its courtesy of manner, shows
an almost irrepressible disgust and irritation. " He
could not conceive," he said, "what fault he had
committed. The matter had to be settled, and he
had gone to the obvious sources." Professional
jealousy was never a vice of Laud's. After that
time the two never met amicably.

Another enemy of Laud's was a prominent man
—Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, Lord Keeper of the
Privy Seal, and Dean of Westminster. Alarmed at

BISHOP WILLIAMS HIS ENEMY. 41

Laud's growing power and his ominous friend
ship with Buckingham, he formed with Abbot a
secret coalition to defeat it. Williams was a
clever shifty man of latitudinarian opinions. He
intended to conciliate, even to reconcile the two
extremes ; he succeeded in making enemies of
both. Such has always been the fate of Broad
schools. Still, Williams was a man of great ability
and moderation, and of strong common sense.
His letter to the Vicar of Grantham, where the
fiercest altar controversy had taken place, is a
model of gentle decision. " I shall esteem him
the truest Christian that yields first," he wrote.
Williams would have been a very dangerous rival to
Laud, not, that is, in the personal sense, but as
the representative of a different school, equally
adverse to the Puritans ; but he fell into disgrace
at Court, became unpopular with the king, was
finally dismissed on a mere quibble, and had to
retire to his diocese, where he wrote moderate
letters with indifferent success.

It is curious, but there seems no reason to doubt
it, that Williams had been one of the keenest
advocates of Laud's elevation to the episcopal
bench ; the following conversation, whether apo
cryphal or not, is represented by Bishop Hacket as
having taken place between Williams and the king

42 SECRET HISTORY OF LAUD'S PROMOTION.

on the subject : it contains so much of James's
caustic perceptive humour, that it is well worth
reading. How Dean Hook came to omit so
valuable a contemporary judgment of Laud it
is impossible to understand ; he alludes to it in
a foot-note as being of uncertain authority. It
appears to the general reader, perhaps, the most
interesting and acute criticism ever passed upon
Laud.

Williams was introduced, and began to plead.

" 'Well,' said the king, ' I perceive whose attorney
you are ; Stenny * 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 who forsook her husband, and married
a Lord that was her paramour? Who knit that
knot ? Shall I make a man a Prelate, one of
the angels of my Church, who hath a flagrant
crime upon him ? ' ' Sir,' said the Lord Keeper,
' you are a good master ; but who will dare
serve you if you will not pardon one fault, though
of a scandalous size, to him that is heartily peni
tent for it ? I pawn my faith to you that he is
heartily penitent ; and there is no other blot that
hath sullied his good name/ 'You press well,'

* The Duke of Buckingham.

JAMES THE FIRSTS OPINION OF LAUD. 43

said the king, 'and I hear you with patience.
Neither will I revive a trespass which repentance
hath mortified and buried. And because I see that
I shall not be rid of you, unless I tell you my
unpublished cogitations, t/ie plain truth is 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 ^vell, but loves to toss and
change, and to bring things to a pitch of reforma
tion floating in his own brain, which may endanger
the steadfastness of that which, God be praised, is
at a good pass. I speak not at random : he hath
made himself known to me to be such an one.
For when, three years past, I had obtained of the
Assembly of Perth to consent to five articles of
order and decency in a correspondence with this
Church of England, I gave them promise that I
would try their obedience no further anent eccle
siastical affairs. 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 draft that he had drawn.
And now your importunity hath compelled me to
shrive myself thus unto you, I think you arc at
your furthest, and have no more to say for your
client.'

"'May it please you, sir,' replied Williams, 'I

44 WILLIAMS' REAL REASON.

will speak but this once. You have convicted your
chaplain of an attempt very audacious and very
unbecoming. My judgment goes quite against his :
yet I submit this to your sacred judgment : that
Dr. Laud is of a great and tractable wit. He did
not well see how he carne into this error ; but he
will presently see the way to come out of it. Some
diseases, which are very acute, are quickly cured.'

" ' And is there no whoe,* but you must carry it ? '
said the king. ' Then take him with you, but, by
my soul, you will repent it ! ' and so went away
in anger, using other words of fierce and ominous
import, too tart to be repeated."

The explanation of this seemingly enthusiastic
advocacy is not creditable to Williams : he was
anxious to retain his Deanery of Westminster.
Had he resigned it, it must have fallen to Laud,
whom he disliked very much, both the man and his
principles ; consequently he advised his removal to
St. David's in a way which, to the unprejudiced
reader, will appear strangely disinterested ; any
careful student, however, of Williams' life is forced
to conclude that such a course of proceeding was
so unfamiliar to the Lord Keeper as to make the
plain reading of his conduct impossible.

But just at this point a strange and unfore-

* Way.

ABBOT COMMITS MANSLAUGHTER. 45

seen accident occurred. Abbot, hunting at Lord
Zouch's park at Bramshill, in Eversley parish,
had the misfortune to kill a keeper. This in
voluntary homicide, making him, as it was techni
cally called, " a man of blood," had the effect
of suspending him from many of the duties of his
position. " I wish," wrote the Lord Keeper to
the Duke of Buckingham — " I wish with all my
heart his Majesty would be as merciful as ever
he was in all his life. To add affliction unto the
afflicted (as no doubt he is in mind) is against
the King's nature: to leave a man of blood Primate
and Patriarch of all his churches, is a thing that
sounds very harsh in the old Councils and Canons
of the Church." The case was a difficult one. It
was argued that the Archbishop had no right to be
hunting at all ; that he was acting feloniously in so
doing. If this was the case, it turned what was
otherwise little more than a deplorable incident into
a crime ; just as a burglar, nowadays, who dislodges
a tile from a house roof may, if it proves fatal to any
one in the street, be tried for murder. This kind of
case, turning on antique precedents and pedantic
pleas, delighted the king ; he flung himself into it.
Coke, the great lawyer, saved Abbot : he dragged to
light an immemorial statute that a bishop's morte
of hounds was to escheat to the king on his decease,

46 HIS REMONSTRANCES FATAL.

not to the natural heirs. Ergo, argued Coke, he
may hunt with them when he is alive if they are
to pass to some one else on his death. Abbot,
however, though legally acquitted, was still debarred
from spiritual functions, his powers and official
duties were placed in commission, and he retired
to the melancholy seclusion of the hospital that he
had built at Guildford, whose red brick towers are
the glory of the High Street still.

Besides this, though not, it was said, naturally
a harsh or unfeeling man, he had been particularly
unfortunate in his domestic relations. His only
brother, Robert, was made Bishop of Salisbury
at the age of sixty-five, and shortly afterwards
announced to his friends his intention of marrying
a young lady of his acquaintance. Upon this, in
the double character of injured brother and indig
nant metropolitan, the Archbishop, who chose to
consider the proceeding a public scandal, wrote his
brother a letter so stern and vindictive in tone,
that the poor man died literally of a broken heart
in a few months — no one even professed to give
any other explanation. Abbot was considerably
shocked at the result of his epistle. His shafts
were seldom harmless.

When the unhappy man returned to Lambeth
he deliberately began a policy, suggested by

DEATH OF JAMES. 47

suspicious jealousy, which reduced his influence
to a cipher ; he never appeared in public, but
confined himself to the palace, and let the whole
place wear the disguise of a haunt of conspirators :
from across the river the tall windows flamed
all night ; there were midnight gatherings, secret
conclaves, all the more contemptible because
they effected nothing. He and his friends were
named the Nicodemites, because they came and
went by night. It became a mere rendezvous of
all disaffected, discontented persons in Church or
State. His portrait, handsome, pale, thin-featured,
has a very melancholy look, next Laud's brisk
work-a-day face.

James died suddenly of an ague at Theobald's.
Laud, who happened to be preaching at Whitehall,
broke off his sermon when the news came in, hear
ing the Duke of Buckingham's open lamentations.
And Prince Charles was proclaimed. It is an ex
cusable dream to think how differently all might
have gone if the generous kindly Prince Henry of
Wales had lived to succeed, who had said in boyish
enthusiasm that when he was king Charles should
be Archbishop. Henry and Charles would have
been very different from Charles and Laud.

Laud was in his fifty-second year when the
assassination of the Duke of Buckingham, at Ports-

48 LAUD BECOMES PREMIER.

mouth, by a debauched maniac named Felton, out
of private enmity, threw another great chance into
his hands — he became First Minister of the Crown.
He had been Bishop of Bath and Wells for nearly
two years, and now he became Bishop of London.
Charles already, by a fatal instinct, had begun to
select men for his advisers and ministers who were
uncompromising advocates of the autocracy of the
Crown. Laud was one of these, Strafford another.
It is necessary to remember that the common un-
judging estimate of Charles as a man with elements
of weakness and sentimentality in his composition
is utterly unfounded. He was tenacious and stub
born, intensely irritated at the smallest show of dis
obedience, profoundly indifferent to public opinion,
and entirely under the domination of one idea — the
prerogative of monarchy. Such a character was sure
to attract to itself characters working on similar lines
— and politics and religion shared the field of life
in those days. There did not then exist that large
and growing class who are indifferent to both. So
Laud and Strafford, with their magnificent indiffer
ence to opinion, their absolute determination to
be obeyed, their strong illogical minds, accepting
and never questioning facts, taking the Royal
Supremacy for granted, and Episcopacy as an
institution dear to God, necessarily became his

THE TRIUMVIRATE. 49

chosen ministers. It was a triumvirate working
single-handed against the whole force of a nation
—a triumvirate, it is true, with certain mechanical
and traditional advantages. But in the face of the
great explosion of democracy the triumvirate was
blown away.

50 PORTRAITS OF STR AFFORD.

CHAPTER V.

ANY one who visited theVandyck exhibition at the
end of 1886, could not have failed, I believe, to be
struck with the two portraits of StrafFord. In the
first place, by reason of their extreme dissimilarity.
Without the catalogue none but a very critical eye
would have divined that they were portraits of the
same person. One was painted in his earlier days,
when he was nothing more than an energetic, public -
spirited Yorkshire squire ; the other, on which con
sequently the interest centres, was after public and
private troubles, passionate loyalty, and a despotic
authority had set their mark upon the face. The
least imaginative could not have passed the latter
portrait by with indifference, even if ignorant of the
subject. There is a violence and a vehemence in
the face, a sullen directness which arrests the atten
tion. No engraving has ever done justice to this.
The iron cuirass out of which the stalwart head
springs seems to be a natural adjunct for such a

FRIENDSHIP WITH LAUD. 51

face ; the great lowering lines on the brow, the
converging eyes, the heavy jaw, all speak of a
temper born to rule and encouraged by fortune to
do so. It has not often fallen to the lot of an
English citizen to wield so despotic a power as
Strafford was enabled to exercise.

Of all the figures of the Caroline court, this man
was Laud's chosen friend. " It is in sadness," writes
Strafford to the Archbishop, " that I have wondered
many times to observe how universally you and I
agree in our judgment of persons, as most com
monly we have done ever since I had the honour
to be known to you." They were both of them
absolutely possessed by devotion to the cause of
royal prerogative. It was the unconscious action
of this blind triumvirate, Charles and his two un
compromising servants, that broke open the clouds
of rebellion and drew the tempest down which
engulfed them first.

Let us have a little picture of Thomas Went-
worth, Earl of Strafford, in our minds, to give us
the idea of the qualities which Laud worshipped,
his ideal of the public servant, to which his cold
nature came spontaneously out in friendship-
making them into that pair who were, as Hamilton
said, the one too great to fear, and the other too
bold to fly.

52 STR AFFORDS EARLY LIFE.

He was a Yorkshire man. He succeeded to a
baronetcy and a very plentiful estate when quite a
young man ; he had one of the best incomes in the
kingdom. When he first came up to London, after
a thorough quiet self-education at St. John's, Cam
bridge, and abroad, he attracted much attention by
a kind of undefinable atmosphere of power that
hung about him, and a magnificent insolence
in his demeanour. " Dammy," Lord Powis said
when it was pointed out that he was of blood royal,
" if he ever comes to be king of England, I will
turn rebel." He married a daughter of the Earl
of Cumberland, and then sat down apparently
to do nothing. He watched life ; he made some
peaceful friends, such as Sir H. Wotton, Provost
of Eton, whose gentle cloistered letters read very
peacefully in his agitated correspondence ; he at
tended the Star Chamber ; he read and wrote ; and
down at Wentworth-Wodehouse, his waste park,
he contracted the passionate love for sport and
country life that comes out in such natural sighs in
the letters he wrote when worn with disease and
state troubles, as lord of that unruly isle. His
taste in reading was curious. Donne was his
favourite author, an uneasy metaphysical poet.
Laud laughs at this in one of his letters ; he hints
that if Strafibrd wishes to learn the secret of life,

HIS DISGRACE. 53

the true valuation of mortality, let him read a
chapter in Ecclesiastes — better than all the ana
grams of Dr. Donne, " or even," he adds ironically,
" the designs of Van Dike," Stratford's favourite
painter.

Strafford, for we will call him by his later well-
known title, was a man of stormy pride. " I have
hated," he said, " to borrow my being from any
man." Buckingham was at this time the dispenser
of all court patronage, so supreme that it was well
known that there was no way to power but through
him. Laud had availed himself of this ; it did not
revolt Laud to take his hand and be assisted
up. But it revolted Strafford. There was some
obscure quarrel between the two ; letters passed,
hinting on Buckingham's side that a genial sub
mission would help him : Strafford, however, utterly
disdained to respond.

A little gentle pressure was tried. Strafford was
pricked for sheriff, which disqualified him for parlia
ment ; and he was dismissed from the office of
Gustos Rotulorum for Yorkshire, the letter from
Buckingham announcing it being brought to him
in court when he was sitting as justice of the peace
in the petty sessions. This drew from him his first
public utterance — a passionate dignified appeal to
his public services ; a grave avowal of his con-

54 INVOLUNTARY REPUBLICANISM.

scientious purpose ; and a significant hint, which
shows that both he and his audience knew only too
plainly that he was being sacrificed to a private
feud.

It is another instance of the lack of instinctive
perception in Charles and his advisers that the
most wildly loyal man in all his dominions — and
they were becoming a rare species — should have
been so deliberately discouraged at the outset.
Had not loyalty been a real devouring and consum
ing passion in Strafford, this would have killed it.

It was followed by a demand for money, under
the Great Seal, on some obscure legal precedent :
this was refused, and Strafford was actually im
prisoned in the Marshalsea.

When he came out he found himself in strange
company — so strange, that it has led some writers
to believe that Strafford was a Radical turned
Royalist; with Pym and Prynne he joined in the
ferocious assault on Buckingham, on the occasion
on which Laud suggested the lines of his apology
before the House. This was the turning-point.
It was at last realized by Charles what a capacity
for devotion was in the man ; he was no longer
dallied with, but received with open arms and
splendid honours. He was made a viscount, and
Lord President of the North — a kind of ex-

LORD DEPUTY OF IRELAND. 55

aggerated lord lieutenancy, a reward enough to
gratify the most ambitious courtier. No wonder
that he was called a turncoat ; no wonder that
he was treated as a mere venal slave of pomp and
power ; no wonder that, after an angry conference
with Pym, they parted with the following prophetic
words echoing in Strafford's ears : "You are going
to leave us, my lord ; but I will never leave you
while your head is on your shoulders."

Before long, the Lord Deputyship of Ireland fell
vacant, and Strafiford went naturally thither. In
1633 he was settled at Dublin. Then began that
kind of rule to which it is impossible to give an
unqualified approval, but the narrative of which
gives the same sort of pleasure to the reader as the
account of a prize-fight where the little dogged man
floors his gigantic opponent. Strafford was in
domitable throughout ; he never let there be any
mistake about what he meant to do : he had come
over to Ireland to rule the country, and rule it he
would. "Where I found," he said, "a Crown, a
Church, a people spoiled, I could not imagine to
redeem them from under the pressure with gentle
looks ; it would cost warmer water than so."

The Irish Council was an insolent patronizing
body, who looked upon their own permanence and
local influence as far more weighty than the

56 REFORMS ETIQUETTE.

apparent precedence of an alien head. Strafford
let them find out their mistake. He obtained from
the king several royal privileges : he forced the
Council to uncover in his presence, while he sat
with his hat on ; he forbade any conversation at the
Board — if any one wished to speak, he must speak
to the Deputy ; he kept them hours waiting till he
was at leisure, to destroy their false sense of im
portance. He gave them what he called " round
answers." When they spoke of sending a petition
to the king, he informed them that he was the
mouth who came to answer for them all. He
introduced his two oldest friends, Radcliffe and
Wandesford, to the Board, and made them Coun
cillors. He reformed the etiquette of Dublin Castle,
which had apparently sunk low. Great noble
men had been accustomed to walk in and out
of the presence for interviews without asking
leave. Strafford denied himself to them and
kept them waiting too. Drinking toasts had be
come a regular part of the Deputy's daily public
dinner. "Deep drinking is too universal a fault
in Ireland to-day," said Strafford ; " there shall be
no toast drunk but the king."

All this is the more forcible from the undoubted
fact that it did not proceed from a man who was
either pompous or authoritative in ordinary life ;

CREATION OF IRISH PARLIAMENT. 57

it was a deliberate policy directed to a definite
end. At Wentvvorth-Wodehouse, Strafford hunted
and shot all day, splashed about in marshes after
wild duck, stalked deer, and hawked. In the
evening he told stories over a pipe of tobacco. No
formalism there ; it was not the nature of the man.
His creation of the Irish parliament is a very
notable instance of this. A parliament was Charles's
aversion ; he did his best to discourage the step.
" No," said Strafford ; " the king must have money.
He can take it, it is true, but it is better voted—
the parliament shall vote it." He was not afraid
of parliaments. He dragged to light the obso
lete Poyning's Act, which limited the discus
sions of the parliament to such subjects as the
Deputy and Council should originate. So, with
much pomp and antique ceremonial, a parliament
was called. Peers, in order of degree, walked in
procession, escorting the Deputy in royal state.
And he made them a tremendous speech, at which
they sat aghast and open-mouthed. " England
was giving subsidies," this was the substance of it,
" for the king's purposes, which were, as it hap
pened, those of national defence. Ireland must
not hope to escape. Vote money for the king,
without clogs or conditions." It was "the king"
throughout. Six subsidies, amounting to £180,000,

58 ILL- HEALTH.

a larger sum than Ireland had ever voted, or than
Strafford had conceived that she would vote, were
eventually declared. It had been one man against
a nation, one man of rude fiery vehemence, who
knew his own mind thoroughly : and he conquered,
as such men will.

Alas ! the physical constitution was not equal
to this iron soul. " Well, spoken it is, good or bad,"
wrote Stratford to Laud about this very speech,
" I cannot tell whether ; but whatever it was, I
spake it not betwixt my teeth, but so loud and
heartily that I protest it unto you that I was faint
withal at the time, and the worse for it two or three
days after." And all through the Irish letters,
though there is no complaint, yet the ill health is
a constant excuse for business which has been
necessarily set aside. The stone, agonizing attacks
of gout, agues, fainting-fits broke and tortured the
body, but never tamed the indomitable mind.

Before Strafford set out for Ireland, Laud, then
Bishop of London, had a long and secret interview
with him at Fulham. They had been gradually
draw together, not by affectionate natures — for
though Stafford's was ardent and impulsive,
Laud's was undeniably cold — but by the enthusiasm
of a common purpose, and by what gives perhaps
a still stronger footing for intimacy — a common

1LJEALS OF STATE AND CHURCH. 59

mctfiod. If two men have to work together the
surest recipe for disintegrating their friendship is
that their methods of work should jar ; slovenliness
and the want of pigeon-holing and docketing habits
have marred more intimacies than gentleness and
common admiration of high things have cemented.
Jean Paul has shown us how love is slain, not so
much by variance of temperament and aim, as by un
seasonable bonnets and an untimely besom. Laud
and Stafford worked on identical lines. They
had both a fondness for detail that was perhaps
extravagant : prosperity and increase expressed
themselves for both in material outlines. If Ire
land was at peace with itself it should have a
flourishing fabric trade, and the Customs should
make a handsome return to the king ; if the
Church was prospering, in Laud's view it should have
its altars in the right places, the fabrics should be
in repair, the service should be worthy of its Divine
origin and end. And Strafford, too, beside the
attraction which Laud's similarity of character had
for him, found a reverential relief in acting with
a great spiritual superior. Closely connected with
the sacredness of royal power, was the inherent
royalty of sacred persons. The Church came
next to the king with Strafford, and they were
indissolubly connected.

60 THE SECRET CONFERENCE.

What was settled at this conclave we do not
exactly know, but we can make a very fair guess.
There were certain rampant abuses of patronage,
and spoliation of the Church, in Ireland ; this had
all to be set to rights. This was the detail, the
individual issue on which they came to terms ; then
Laud probably opened out his general policy, and
received assurances from Strafford of his loyalty
to the same cause. It is one of those memorable
conjunctions of which one thinks with wonder :
the two eager men — Laud fresh and plump, with
sparkling eyes, pacing up and down as was his
wont ; Strafford sitting with his chin upon his hand,
partly sunk down in a chair, as he was used to sit,
feeling perhaps the first lassitude of ill health.
And the keen scheming, on so noble, so hope
less, so mistaken a line, gives the occasion a pathos
which is infinitely increased by the strange doom
that overshadowed both, and of which, in their
abundance of life and energy and importance, they
so little dreamed. There is no recorded instance
of their meeting again, or seeing each other's faces
till they met in the Tower in the last sad act of the
drama.

At all events, they then or afterwards invented
a mysterious cipher, embracing their policy : some
of this is clear and unmistakable ; some has, I

THOROUGH. 6 1

think, never been interpreted. THOROUGH is too
well known to require much elucidation. That
was to be their watchword. From the highest down
to the lowest all were to serve the king in single
ness of heart. There were to be no back thoughts.
All who held office under the king, who were his
chosen ministers of government, were to be ever
thus.

" Them that go thorough for our master's ser
vice."

" All able, and all hearty, and all running one
way, and none caring for any ends so the king be
served," is Laud's expression of the ideal Govern
ment (October 14, 1633).

The Lady Mora or Delay, to whom constant allu
sion is made, seems to embody the opposite prin
ciple, especially as exemplified in the Home Council.
There Laud could not quite get his way. There
were potent lords and councillors, such as Weston
and Cottington, who worked on private motives,
and still were influential with the king. That
could not be amended ; but Ireland was a virgin
block, to be carved to whatever Strafford would.

On one occasion (July 3, 1634), Laud speaks of
" his cipher being packed up for Croydon, else he
would tell him how little rest he was likely to have
. and somewhat else."

62 LAUD'S CIPHER.

But as far as we are concerned his cipher is
packed up for many passages. I feel certain, after
studying the letters, that many passages of seem
ing unimportance, where the two seem to be in
dulging in mere personal banter, contain secrets of
State. I believe there is much to be extracted yet
from the letters if only one could hold the key.

I venture to quote one of the many unintelligible
passages. Can anything be made of it ?

" In the next place you begin to be merry with
your Heifer, and I wonder you have so little pity
as not to let it rest when I have plowed with it.
By St. Dunstan (if it were not for swearing), I see
you guess unhappily that your friends can tell how
to be merry as well as serious together, and you
shall not need to intreat us to continue it, for we
have no other purpose, only I am in ill case by it.
For your Spaniard, and the gravity which he learnt
there, while he went to buy Pigeons, has tempted
my old friend the Secretary from me, and he is
become his man."

These passages have no apparent allusion to
anything that precedes or follows them ; they
seem to be perfectly isolated : and it must be con
cluded that they are a cipher of some kind. Again,
there is an expression, " Peccatum ex te, Israel,"
which stood for some line of action, or the result

ANTIQUE HUMOUR. 63

of some policy. I find it in places where its natural
rendering can have no sort of application.

The correspondence of Strafford occupies two
folio volumes. They consist of letters which he
received or wrote from the beginning of his public
life. The collection would be an interesting one, as
containing the epistolary expression of the thoughts
and politics of all the leading men of the day.
And it is agreeably diversified by long scandalous
chronicles, containing all the main gossip of the
fashionable world, from Mr. Garrard, the master
of the Charterhouse, who was apparently pledged
to keep Strafford an fait with all the news of the
town.

There are about twenty of Laud's letters in the
collection — at first rather formal, but unbending
often enough into a species of frigid fun, which,
by its antique form and crabbed range, has for
feited all the humour it can have ever possessed,
but by no means the interest. It shows the kind
of clumsy word-juggling that passed for wit of a
grave statesmanlike kind among the Caroline men
of affairs.

The metaphor that is perhaps commonest
throughout the letters is that of " vomiting " and
" purging " the lay appropriations of Church pro
perty. The grasping Churchmen themselves that

64 CHURCH REFORMATION IN IRELAND.

then infested Ireland pass under the names of
Church Cormorants, Ravens, and other opprobrious
titles ; they are to be trounced, and made to dis
gorge what they have swallowed. And when we
compare this with the fact that property worth
.£30,000 a year was actually refunded to the Church
in Ireland under Stratford's administration, we
feel that the purging was at once drastic and
effectual.

The Bishops had set the example. They had
done unheard-of things. They sold the leases of
woods and wastes for several lives. In one place
a Bishop had leased the palace to his son for fifty
years. Six preferments was a small number for
an important dignitary to hold. Strafford, on the
spot, and Laud beckoning across the Channel, set
these quiet roosters cackling. Such a stirring up
of dust there was, such a flutter ; but, with those
determined men at work, no complaints, only dole
ful entreaties and melancholy submission. The
Archbishop of Armagh has no altar even in his
chapel. " No bowing there, I warrant," says Straf
ford. "Poor Beagle!" he says of himself; with
his nose to the ground he patiently tracked these
abuses out.

Among these cares the two careful men have
time to exchange presents and hatch little plans

ANIMATED CORRESPONDENCE. 65

and private ventures. The Archbishop wants a
gown of furs ; he would like marten-skins (the pine-
marten, then a familiar denizen of Ireland). Dried
fish for the Lenten table at Croydon comes from
the Deputy, and an apology for the scanty supply
of furs. Laud suggests elaborate pisciculture of
salmon and trout, unless — which is, perhaps, more
probable — this is merely another cipher. I give
the reference (October 20, 1634). Strafford tells
him of the wooden hunting-lodge he is building
down at Wicklow, or his sport at " Cosha, the Park
of Parks," as he dates his letters, " the finest moun
tain desolate place I ever saw." " You think," says
Laud, "to stop my mouth with some of your
hung beef out of Yorkshire ; which, to your
skill and commendation be it spoken, was the
worst I ever tasted, and as hard as the very horn
the old Runt wore when she lived. But I wonder
you do not think of powdering or drying some of
your Irish venison, and send that over to bray too.
Well, there's enough of this stuff!"

Strafford evidently thinks that Laud is finding
fault with his love of sport ; for by this time the
correspondence has become very outspoken and
easy ; so he ridicules delicately Laud's suggestions
about pisciculture, and gives some clear reasons.
" Perchance you think now," he says, " I learn

F

66 STR AFFORD* S MONEY MATTERS.

nothing going up yonder amongst them into the
Forests and Rocks."

Or Laud's superstitious mind comes out. A
certain mad lady, the Dame Eleanor Davies, whose
story we shall allude to more in detail elsewhere,
prophesied Laud's death on the 5th of November.
" I make no matter of it," he says. But why does
he allude to it, even though half-laughingly, in his
next three letters ? And Strafford thinks it worth
while to encourage him.

They are business-like letters for the most part.
Laud's weariness creeps in in little natural sen
tences. He closes one letter abruptly ; " he can
keep his eyes open no longer ; it is so late." He
is evidently overrun with work. In one letter
Strafford tells Laud with great exactness — he evi
dently means it to be repeated — his exact increase
of fortune since he entered the king's service.
There had evidently been calumnious statements
made. He has laid away £13,000 in nine years.
Considering that his private fortune was £6000 a
year, equal to perhaps £40,000 now, it is a won
derful proof of his incorruptibility and absence of
self-interest. In similar situations many people
had raised themselves to the fortune and condition
of peers. In one letter the intimacy has even gone
so far that Laud delicately chides him for marry-

HIS DARLINGS. 67

ing his third wife. However, he says he is sure
he has had good reason ; deploring, with a half-
humorous pathos, the wife — Official Drudgery — to
whom he himself is now so hopelessly mated.

Every now and then there are some sweet human
touches. " In good earnest," writes Strafford from
Dublin Castle, " I should wax exceeding melancholy
were it not for two little girls that come now and
then to play with me."

His letters to the Countess of Clare about his
children are simply affectionate. He writes from
Fairwood, his own Irish estate, just before he
crossed to Anglesea at the beginning of the Re
bellion, a long letter all about his darlings. " Nan,
they tell me, danceth prettily. Arabella is a small
practitioner that way also, and they are both very
apt to learn that or anything that they are taught
Their brother is just now sitting at my elbow, in
good health, God be praised."

And so the correspondence drops ; and the friends
meet no more till the Tower unites them, and even
then they are not permitted to have speech of one
another.

The word " devoted " is used of Laud's friend
ships. Hook uses it of the relation on both sides.
This, I cannot help feeling, was a mistake ; a man
without wife or child is allowed a little of passion

68 THE COLDNESS OF LAUD'S FRIENDSHIP.

in his friendships ; but passion was not in Laud's
vocabulary. It is true he was bitterly moved, he
fell to the ground "in animi deliquio" when he
spoke the words of blessing. But there is little
of the David and Jonathan about it : there is no
hungering for the personal relation, of individual
man for individual man, that is the essence of all
friendship ; there is an elated consciousness of the
same solemn mission, a common attachment to a
great intermediate cause. But the friendship is, so
to speak, common, not mutual ; it was not followed
for itself, but sprang from circumstances, and kept
circumstances in view all along. Such direct
pleasure as the intimacy afforded was by the way,
irapspyov, not followed for itself. They were friends
because they were patriots. Human nature cannot
help wishing that they had been patriots because
they were friends.

PURITAN HATRED OF LAUD.

CHAPTER VI.

IT will here be as well to give a brief account
of some of the circumstances that brought Laud
into extreme odium with the Puritan and demo
cratic party. " Like a busie and an angry waspe,
his sting is in the tail of everything," they said. His
determined enmity to popular liberty as opposed
to autocratic government may be said broadly to
have been the cause of his downfall. I do not
suppose that it was, even at the time, summed up
in such words : "Liberty," "the rights of the masses,"
" the will of the people " were not party cries then ;
but public opinion expressed itself in its extreme
readiness to adopt any accusation, probable or
possible, against him. In most minds this con
sisted in identifying him with the Papal tyranny,
making him an ardent though secret advocate in
the cause of reconciling the two Churches.

This will be illustrated by the three episodes
which I have selected to indicate the line he

70 HIS FRIENDSHIP WITH THE QUEEN.

adopted, and the light in which it was viewed by
his opponents, — his connection with the queen,
the case of Richard Montague, and his censorship
of the press.

It is clear that the queen obtained a gradual
ascendency over Charles, an ascendency which she
did not at first possess ; and nothing in Laud's
court life incurred such suspicion in the country
as his intimate connection with her Majesty. It
must be looked upon as a most unfortunate event
that Charles should have chosen at that juncture a
Roman Catholic wife, and that she should have
been of that peculiarly un-English type that
Henrietta Maria represented. But it was merely
another stroke from that persistent ill fortune
which pursued Charles from first to last.

She was a high-spirited child, of quick and
generous emotions and passionate impulses ;
romantically interested in the young king at first,
and blankly disappointed when she found he was
not all she had imagined. But her freaks and
fancies, her pettishness and her pathos, and, most
of all, her religion, merely struck the hard gloomy
Roundheads of the time with a sense of painful
disgust. She chose, too, with fatal precision, the
very prejudices at that time so dear to the Puritans
to insult and mock at.

HER LEVITY. 7 1

At Titchfield, when, against her wishes, the Pro
testant service was continued in the house in the
king's absence, she disturbed the preacher by plan
ning a malevolent laughing expedition into the
room with her train of chattering maidens, and
sweeping through, to the consternation of the
assembled servants and the preacher staring over
his cushions.

Again, what is more touching than her visit
to Tyburn, in the course of a ramble, and the
natural tears she shed in the sight of a gaping
crowd at the thoughts of the martyrs who had
there laid down their lives for the faith so dear
to herself, and yet so hopelessly perished out of
the land ? It was this last performance that made
Charles, for once in his life, ungentle. He locked
her into the private apartments at Whitehall, and
told her brutally that he had issued orders for
the immediate banishment of all her ladies and
attendants back to France. The poor young
queen, passionately attached as she was to all that
recalled her happier childhood and the sunny land
she had left, hearing voices below, dashed her hand
through the window-pane to call for help, and was
actually dragged away by her irritated husband,
with bleeding fingers. And what can be sadder or
more human than Charles's own account of a bitter

72 HER GROWING INFLUENCE WITH THE KING.

interview that took place one night between them,
after they were in bed, about her jointure ? " Take
your lands to yourself," said the queen. " If I have
no power to put whom I will into those places, I
will have neither lands nor houses of you. Give
me what you think fit by way of pension."

" Remember," said Charles, having recourse to
his authoritative manner, — " remember to whom
you speak. You ought not to use me so." At this
the poor young queen broke down and cried,
saying she was utterly miserable. She had no
power. Business that she took an interest in fared
worse for her recommendation. She was not of
that base quality to be used so ill. At last Charles
insisted upon being heard. " I made her end that
discourse," he says.

Rough measure though it was to send away her
friends, it had its desired effect. She learnt
to lean on and to love her husband, and thus
gained that influence over him which those who
seem to lean on a stubborn nature will always
gain. Charles began to show signs of making
dangerous concessions. It is true he interfered
when she took the Prince Charles to Mass, but
he began to make great allowances for her
religion.

About this time an emissary of the Pope's,

THE PAPAL EMISSARY. 73

Panjani by name, visited England, with the inten
tion of getting better terms, if possible, for the
English Catholics through the intervention of the
queen. He had long conferences with Winde-
bank and Cottington, Secretaries of State. The
latter even went so far as to raise his hat whenever
the Pope's name was mentioned. Panjani even dis
tributed artificial flowers and sacred pictures among
the gentlemen of the Court. He thus felt he had
prepared a real basis of operations ; that he had
got a hold, though a flimsy one, upon the Court.
He even had a talk with Bishop Montague, the old
controversialist, who suggested several grounds of
concession upon which the two Churches might
meet. But every one felt that this was merely
playing over the surface. In the background of all
these leisurely conversations there lurked the hard-
headed clear-sighted personality of the Archbishop.
There was nothing misty about him. Montague
told Panjani that he had been talking to him, but
that Laud was very "timid and circumspect."
The conversation languished after that.

Laud was approached through the queen. On
August 30, 1634, he enters in his Diary that the
queen sent for him to Oatlands, and gave him
thanks for a business which she had trusted him
withal, promising him to be his friend, and that

74 LAUD INNOCENTLY DISCREDITED.

he should have immediate access to her when he
had occasion. Again, on May iS, 1635, he writes
that he brought his account to the queen on Whit-
Sunday, and received from her an assurance of all
that was desired by him.

It was in the winter between these dates that
Panjani came to London, and it is impossible not
to connect the entries with that event. Panjani's
first attempt was to get leave from Charles to have
a Catholic Bishop in England, nominated by the
king, and acting under such limitations as the king
should impose ; but this certainly met with no
countenance from Laud, and the king was obliged
to discourage it. Panjani's mission came to nothing,
except to discredit Laud still more in the eyes of
the extreme party.

They believed him guilty of a deliberate attempt
to foist the Pope on England. Libellous squibs and
anagrams fell fast and furious. There are several of
them bound up in the Lambeth papers, annotated
and dated with his own hand. The letters of his
name, WILLIAM LAUDE, furnished the scurrilous
with the most popular of all — WELL, I AM A DIVEL.
A paper was dropped at the south gate of St. Paul's,
declaring that the devil had let that house to him
for the saying of Mass and other abominations.
Another was fastened to the north gate, saying

RICHARD MONTAGUE. 7$

that the Church of England was like a candle in
a snuff, going out in a stench. These are con
temptible details, but they pleased the taste of the
times, and serve to show which way the tide of
popular feeling was running.

We must now return to an event which took
place towards the end of James's reign.

Richard Montague, B.D., Chaplain in Ordinary
to the King, who has been mentioned above, was
Fellow of Eton College, Canon of Windsor, and
Rector of Stanford-Rivers, in Essex. Near this
village stood a lonely grange in retired fields, long
deserted, which was at last taken by a mysterious
tenant, who never set foot outside its walls by
day, but came and went by night. Before long it
was found that there were several tenants, and it
soon transpired that it was the haunt of a number
of Jesuits, actively engaged in proselytizing in the
neighbouring country.

Montague, who was a man of an active and
argumentative mind, with strong High-Church
opinions, wishing to preserve his own parish from
these night-spirits, managed to communicate with
them. He proposed a trial of skill. If they could
logically convince him, he would at once join
them.

In a few days a little pamphlet, closely written,

76 GAGS THE JESUITS.

was dropped in the night into his study. It was
entitled, "A New Gag for an Old Gospel," and
contained a confutation out of the English Bible of
the Protestant position, — and a note was attached,
begging that he would answer it in detail.

On perusing the pamphlet, he found that it con
tained a refutation, not of the orthodox Protestant
position, but of a heterogeneous mass of Calvinistic
fancies, representing, perhaps, the extreme poles
of Puritan opinion, but thoroughly heterodox in
tone.

Montague wrote a careful reply, called the
" G agger," which was received with a storm of abuse
and recrimination from the Calvinists. It caused
the same sort of sensation that the publication of
" Essays and Reviews " caused in modern days. It
revealed to the Puritans generally how much
opinion there was among the higher dignitaries of
the Church that lay in close proximity to the
doctrines of the Church of Rome ; and the Church
of Rome was for them almost identical with the
kingdom of Satan. The Pope himself was Anti
christ — the king had said so.

But James had been broadening his views
since he had known the English theologians. He
held out a helping hand to Montague, and advised
him to publish a little book refuting- the chief of

7S CONDEMNED BY THE HOUSE. 7/

the accusations made against him. This book
shortly appeared, with the title of " Appello
Caesarem."

At this point the king died, somewhat unseason
ably, and, in the confusion that ensued, what with
Prince Charles's accession and his marriage, it
might have been hoped that Montague would
escape. But the Puritans had not forgotten.

He was cited before the House of Commons, and
condemned to a fine of £2000 and imprisonment.
Charles acted with characteristic promptitude and
spirit. He gave the House to understand that
Montague was one of his chaplains, and that he
did not like this high-handed method of procedure.
But the Commons were stubborn. They referred
the matter to the Committee of Religion then sit
ting, by whom Montague was solemnly condemned
as having attempted a reconciliation of the English
Church with Popery. The fine was not rescinded.

Just at this moment the see of Chichester fell
vacant, and, by Laud's advice, Montague was ap
pointed. He was now out of the reach of the
Commons. He took his seat as a peer, passing
through their midst. With him went Dr. Main-
waring, the new Bishop of St. David's, who had
fallen similarly under the displeasure of the Lower
House.

78 AN ABUSE OF PRIVILEGE.

Of course the Commons — hard godly Puritans,
stern and serious — were profoundly angry. It was
a victory which Laud and his supporters keenly en
joyed — to carry away the booty unharmed from out
of the very jaws of the enemy. Heylyn makes very
merry over it. He evidently feels that it was a well-
merited lesson ; that the House was taking upon
itself functions that lay quite outside its range.
They were there, he believes, to vote subsidies, not
to hold proceedings in controversial theology. He
has a very amusing passage, where he contends
that they caught the habit, like an epidemic, from
a session held in the Divinity School at Oxford.
He imagines it must have turned their heads. The
House of Commons enthroned in a Divinity School !
The Speaker in a Regius Professor's chair! A
vision, he insists, must have flashed across them of
supremacy, not only in politics, but in theology.
And he ends with a most humorous comparison to
Vibius Rufus, who, having married Cicero's widow
and bought Caesar's chair, felt himself in a fair way
to acquire the eloquence of one and the power of
the other.

In 1637 a measure of Laud's was passed in the
Star Chamber which, perhaps, aroused a wider and
more bitter hostility against him than any other
of his unpopular enactments. It was a severe cur-

LIBERTY OF PRESS CURTAILED. 79

tailment of the liberty of the press. The decree
was a singularly stringent one. It limited the
number of printers, and it forbade the printing or
reprinting of any book without a licence from the
Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London,
or the Chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge.
Laud held two of these dignities himself, and his
friend zndprott'gtf, the gentle and submissive Juxon,
was Bishop of London.

Thus the committee was a small one, and had a
very decided bias. It was a grievous mistake for
a man to make : but, on the other hand, it was a
very excusable one ; for a man accustomed to have
his way, and determined to have his way, and devoid
of the smallest intention of either interpreting or
humouring the prejudices or wishes of the people,
profoundly convinced that his duty was to govern
them, it was a natural mistake — so natural, indeed,
that it is impossible to conceive his acting other
wise.

The little pocket Bible, with foot-notes — the
Genevan edition — was one of the first publications
suppressed. Two whole editions were seized at the
Hague. They were cheap, convenient, well-printed
little books, and they were correct — while in the last
English editions of the Bible and Prayer Book over
a thousand errors had been detected ; for instance,

80 THE GENEVA BIBLE.

in the Commandments in Exodus, the seventh
stood as " Thou shalt commit adultery." For no
step has the Archbishop incurred more odium. It
has been called a piece of true prelatical oppression.
He is even supposed to have deliberately set his
face against the circulation of the Word of God.

But if we examine the character of this book,
we are compelled to decide that, in the first place,
Laud could not have done otherwise, and, in the
second place, that it was a vile and fanatical work.

The notes were abominable ; so wild are they,
that they are little short of ludicrous to us now.
They laid down the principles that kings might be
disobeyed and assassinated if they were idolaters ;
that promises were not binding if upon examination
they proved to run counter to the gospel ; that the
Presbytery was of Divine importance ; adding, as
a corollary established beyond the possibility of
doubt, in so many words, that Archbishops, Bishops,
and all holders of academical degrees were the
locusts of the Apocalypse that came up out of
the pit.

In his trial the Archbishop maintained that he
was not in the least sorry for having thus acted,
and that if he had the power he would do so
again ; and all rational people will be of his mind.

Whether he exerted his prerogative wisely in the

LAUD'S UNWISDOM. 8 1

case of other books may be doubted Probably
much was suppressed that would have condemned
itself; and more harm was done by the keeping
under of seditious nonsense than would ever have
been caused by its appearance.

<S2 ATTRACTION OF CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE.

CHAPTER VIII.

LAUD had evidently experienced that deep attrac
tion to cloistered contemplative life that thoughtful
men whose lines are cast in busy places are apt to
feel. He sighed, in the whirl and rush of official
work, for rest and study, peace and prayer. He
would not have been human if he had not. Just as
the wistful eremite looks back, in moments of reac
tion, half-heartedly, to all the stir and freshness
he has left, which reach him so faintly through
the gratings of his retreat ; — so Laud sighed for
retirement, well knowing that he would make no
sacrifices to win it, and that he would be unhappy
under it, were it forced by fate upon him.

And so he sought out devotional men and made
much of them. He promoted Cosin and Jeremy
Taylor. He came across the path of George Herbert
at the most critical moment of his life. Herbert
was at Wilton, with his cousin the Earl of Pem
broke, in an undecided mood, feeling drawn to the

GEORGE HERBERT. 83

religious life, but not assured of his call. Let us
recall the circumstances of the dilemma ; for few
decisions have ever conferred so much attractive
ness upon the Church as the decision which revealed
to Herbert his true vocation.

George Herbert was the younger brother of the
famous rationalist— Deist, as they called him then,
—Lord Herbert of Cherbury. He belonged to one
of the highest and most famous families of the
kingdom, had independent means, and delicate
student's tastes, and a strong perception of the
beauty of religion. The only faults his affectionate
tutor found in him were his love of dainty dress,
and his aloofness from any companionship which
had anything low or unrefined about it This
beautiful figure grew and expanded at Cambridge,
his character deepening and widening as thought
elevated him and suffering became his lot.

Yet, all this time, George Herbert's heart was not
wholly in his reading ; he hungered for the town,
for courtly talk and compliment, and all the arts of
graceful living. He writes —

" Whereas my birth and spirit rather took

The way that takes the town,
Thou didst betray me to a lingering book,
And wrap me in a gown."

At Wilton House Laud met him as he was thus

84 LAUD TURNS THE SCALE.

doubting, and they had a secret conversation, the
upshot of which was, that Herbert sent to Salisbury
at once for a tailor to cut out his canonical clothes,
and was privately ordained by the Archbishop.

We do not know exactly what passed : it may
have been nothing more than the magic influence
of a brisk decided mind upon a more wavering
one, crystallizing the thoughts still in solution into
sudden firmness ; but I cannot believe that this
was all.

If we consider in which direction Herbert's
temptations lay — to splendour and grace and
worldly magnificence, — knowing, as we do, that he
was withheld to a great degree by a certain dread
of degradation from adopting the profession of
the country parson, we cannot doubt what occurred.
Laud, no doubt, sketched out his great design so
as to dazzle the eyes of his hearer. He drew the
majestic Church in her royal state, moving on
through the ages. He spoke of her pomp, her
ceremonial, her princely claims, — not, I think, in an
unworthy way ; not as a bait to land a tempting
prey — for there is no doubt that George Herbert
was, from a worldly point of view, a convert well
worth securing — but as giving to this receptive
mind a true picture of the ancient splendours, of
the huge possibilities of the Church,

NICHOLAS FERRAR. 85

It was enough to turn the wavering scale. George
Herbert, attracted perhaps by the " Beautiful Gate
of the Temple," passed in, and became a true and
devoted poor servant of Christ.

Laud little knew what he was doincr when he

o

drew aside the slender graceful young courtier,
with his dreamy eyes and silky hair, into the gallery
at Wilton, and paced to and fro with him, speaking
in his sharp eager tones, with quick active gestures
as his manner was, of all the glorious inheritance
of the Church of Christ. He little knew that that
gentle student was to glorify his dearly loved
mistress far more effectually than he ever did him
self, and by a far more delicate weapon : he little
knew that George Herbert was to set on the Church
that mark of singular and solemn refinement that
has won to her so many high natures and sensitive
souls, — that refinement " so perfect," as has been
beautifully said, "that it requires an initiation to
comprehend it."

Laud was to come into spiritual contact with
another strange and characteristic figure, too.
Nicholas Ferrar, like George Herbert, was to be
his spiritual son.

A few miles from Huntingdon, passing out of
that comfortable little town, of which Laud himself
had been Archdeacon, by the Northern Road,leaving

86 LITTLE GIDDING.

Hinchinbrook, the seat of the Cromwells, now
Lord Sandwich's, on the right, the road, after wind
ing among broad flat water-meadows, at last runs
up into low hills, into country quiet from horizon
to horizon. After some little belts of woodland
and isolated spinneys, a farm-road dips down to
the left ; at the end of this stands a large, prosperous-
looking farmhouse, and to the left, below a space
of tumbled pasture-ground, on the skirts of and
backed by a little overgrown wood, a lonely chapel,
with a quaint Renaissance front of gray stone.
The whole place has an unutterable air of retire
ment and quiet about it : the birds in the woods,
the cries of children, the tinkle of sheep-bells in
the pastures on the opposite slope, the sound of
waggons grumbling along the rough farm-roads —
these are the only sounds audible.

This is the chapel of Little Gidding — this, and
the gray gravestones of Collets and Ferrars, are the
only relics of that community whose pure precise life
has been lately depicted with such sympathetic
accuracy in the pages of " John Inglesant." Manor
and groves and latticed walks are gone ; but stand
ing in the obscure light of the sanctuary, so seemly
and lovingly restored, or outside by the stream,
with the shadow of the chapel on the grass, it is
possible for us to pass in fancy back for a moment

THE LIFE OF DEVOTION. 87

or two to the ideal life that held rule there two
centuries ago. Ay, and it is good too ! though the
tendency of the age — and who will blame it ? — is
to say sadly that it was nothing more than a holy
error, a beautiful mistake.

The community was founded by Nicholas Ferrar,
a young man of burgher origin, trained to be a
physician, but of a retired devotional soul. After
some wanderings and much inclination towards the
Church of Rome, he came to the conclusion that
he need not step outside the English Church to
find the mystical sentiment for which he thirsted.

A character with a single-minded enthusiasm,
the offspring of his age, is sure to find a few devoted
followers. As could have been expected, his dis
ciples were for the most part women ; but the fame
and sweetness of the little world attracted many
to visit it — among others Crashaw, the religious
poet, afterwards a Roman Catholic and Canon of
Loretto, and George Herbert.

The object of the life was devotion. There was
to be a perpetual sacrifice of intercession : day and
night were divided into watches, and prayer went
up continually. There were offices at each of the
canonical hours, and full daily services. Besides
this, the children of the neighbourhood wereschooled,
the sick visited, and the distressed comforted. The

88 VISIT OF THE KING.

simple rustics were encouraged to come and tell
their tale of sorrow : food and clothing were dis
tributed.

The tendency of the house was ascetic. Nicholas
Ferrar stinted himself in food and sleep ; he slept
in a frieze gown, on the boards, and at midnight
arose to give thanks. The Collet and Ferrar
maidens — his cousins and friends whom he had
attracted to him, and who went by quaint titles,
emblematical of Christian virtues, such as the
Patient, the Submiss — watched likewise. The
pleasure, even rapture, they found in this utter
self-abnegation is unmistakable.

Mr. Shorthouse makes the recluses of Giddin^,

o '

with innocent curiosity, in their recreation hour,
ask John Inglesant all kinds of questions about the
Court, and especially about the king. It is a most
dramatic touch ; they slip off so naturally the
devotional cilice, and appear in their true characters
as little pitchers. They were soon to see him. On a
royal progress to Newmarket, the king and Court
turned aside to visit the place. " The King and
the Prince, the Palsgrave of Bohemia, the Duke of
Lennox, and divers other nobles staying a morning
there." There was an inspection of the whole place.
The young lords went into the buttery and there
found apple-pies and cheese-cakes, and came out

THE ESTABLISHMENT INSPECTED. 89

with pieces in their hands, laughing, to the prince :
44 Sir^ will your Highness taste?" Charles expressed
especial admiration at the neatness of the alms-
houses : " God's blessing upon the founder of it.
Time was," — to the poor roving Palsgrave, — "you
would have thought such a lodging not amiss."
The Palsgrave thought so too, and said as much.
The king took out five pieces of gold and gave
them for the poor widows' benefit : he had won
them, the night before, at cards. " It is all I have,
else they should have more ; tell them to pray for
me." At last they left reluctantly. " It is late ;
the sun is going down ; we must away." So their
horses were brought to the door. The king mount
ing, those of the family, men and women, all kneeled
down and heartily prayed God to bless and defend
him from all his enemies. " Pray — pray for my
speedy return," said his Majesty, taking off his hat.
The thought of those simple holy souls praying for
him affected him ; he was grave as he rode away.

Young Nicholas Ferrar, nephew of the elder
Nicholas, came up to Court after this with presents
for the king. Part of the industry at Gidding was
the making of diatessarons, or continuous gospel
narratives, selected from the four Evangelists, out
of two Testaments cut into pieces and pasted on
books, and afterwards deftly adorned with pictures

90 BOOKS FOR THE KING.

and bound, by the same skilful hands, in green or
purple velvet, with broad strings edged with gold
lace. " Glorious ! " "jewels ! " " precious stones ! "
" crystals ! " said the king, and paid many other
strange compliments. He even read and an
notated them in his own hand, as his custom was.

On this occasion the young Nicholas came up to
London, and went to Lambeth as directed. When
he was taken to the Archbishop he knelt down,
craved his blessing, and kissed his hand. " My
Lord embraced him very lovingly, took him up,
and after some salutes " proceeded to business : he
examined the books, now become an annual insti
tution, and expressed himself well pleased with
them. This was the Wednesday before Easter.
The next day, being Maundy Thursday, the Arch
bishop took him to Whitehall. The king was in a
presence chamber, standing by a fire, chatting to
some nobles. " What," he said to the Archbishop,
"have you brought with you those rarities and
jewels you told me of?" "Yes, here is the young
gentleman and his works." He led him by the hand
to the king. The case was opened and the volumes
displayed ; the chief was the Gospel in eight
languages, all young Nicholas's work. There were
courtly exclamations of astonishment and interest
on all sides. Charles kindly promised to send the

COURT GOSSIP. 91

lad to Oxford at his own expense, and the audience
was presently at an end ; Nicholas was taken away
to dine with the younger lords.

When young Nicholas had been ushered out,
"What a pity," said the king, " is that impediment
in his tongue ! " Laud characteristically said that
he could not agree ; had he had the full use of his
natural tongue, he would not have gained so many
written ones. The Earl of Holland recommended
the use of pebbles in the mouth. But the king had
tried that, and had found it no good ; singing was
the only cure — he must learn singing.

He had brought a book for the little Prince
Charles as well ; this was illustrated with painted
pictures which pleased the children. " Will you
not make me such another fine book ? " said the
little Duke of York; "do." Most certainly, his
Grace " should have one without fail." " But how
long will it be before I have it ? " " Very soon."
" Yes, but how long will that be ? Tell the ladies at
Gidding to be quick." Pretty childish gossip this.
One cannot help wondering what place in the
childish memories this scene took for the two
future kings.

When Nicholas set off next day from Lambeth,
the Archbishop had a touching interview with him.
He reminded him of the king's promise ; he told

92 PATHETIC FAREWELL.

him that his Majesty wished to have a polyglot
of the New Testament in twenty-four languages.
This was to be the lad's work ; he should have the
help of all the learning of the nation at his com
mand. " The youth, kneeling down, took the Arch
bishop by the hand, and kissed it. The Archbishop
took him up in his arms, and laid his hand upon
his cheek, and earnestly besought God Almighty
to bless him, and increase all graces in him, and fit
him every day more and more for an instrument of
His glory here upon earth, and a saint in heaven.
' God bless you ! God bless you ! I have told your
father what is to be done for you after the holidays.
God will provide for you better than your father
can. God bless you and help you ! ' '

And God did provide. Poor boy, he died in a
few months, called to some more unseen work,
more high than polyglots, though sanctioned by
the king's command. A more pathetic scene has
seldom so truly been told. Would we had more
of that human Laud, breaking through the dry
official crust ! If only he had shown this tenderness
oftener, how far more we should have loved him !

But it was not only to the votaries of the Church
on her aesthetic side that the sympathies of the
Primate were given : we must not forget that he
was brought into very close and intimate contact

LORD FALKLAND. 93

with that school of English Rationalists that sprang
to life so vigorously in his day.

Lucius Gary, Viscount Falkland, has been made
too famous and familiar by Mr. Matthew Arnold's
well-known essay, a model of biographical study-
writing, for me to enter into his life here.

It will be enough to say that he was one of the
most sympathetic thinkers of the age, the chosen
friend of all the more enlightened spirits whom he
grouped round him, not so much from his wit or
his grasp of thought, though his mind was quick
and subtle, as from his unique power, and still
more unique desire of entering, or trying to enter,
into what a man had to say.

At Great Tew, a manorhouse not far from
Oxford, he held his delightful sessions, Oxford
scholars coming and going as they would, unknown
to their host, who used his wealth, as it is so rarely
used, to secure hospitality at any moment and for
any number of unexpected comers, without the
usual accompaniment of any domestic confusion.

Here Chillingworth and the " Ever-memorable "
Hales were wont to come ; and it is the former
of these whose intimacy with Laud must be held
to be, considering their respective opinions and the
warmth with which they advanced them, a strong
testimony to large-mindedness on both sides.

9| THE RATIONALISTS.

Chillingworth, son of a mayor of Oxford, was
Laud's own godson. He was elected Fellow of
Trinity at the age of twenty-six. " No drudge at
his books," says Aubrey, " but a keen argumentative
scholar, fond of sharpening his wits at the expense
of any ' cod's head ' he could get to enter into
discussion with him."

At first he fell under the suspicion of having
acted as Laud's delator or informer at Oxford. It
is known that he sent him a weekly budget of
intelligence, reporting conversations, notable say
ings, anything in fact that indicated in which way
opinion moved. In one of these letters he prob
ably told him (though, as the document does not
exist, it is only conjecture) of some extravagant
expression about the Duke of Buckingham's
murder, in praise of Felton, that had fallen from
the lips of Alexander Gill, who was usher of St.
Paul's School, and had had the teaching of Milton.
These opinions had been stated in the course of a
confidential conversation, of rather a roystering
kind, with a few intimate friends in the cellar of
Trinity College. " He was sorry," he had said, " that
Felton had deprived him of the honour of doing
that brave act."

For this, Gill was condemned to be branded, lose
his place and his ears, and pay a heavy fine ; and

CHILLING IVOR Til. 9 5

though fine and corporal punishment were remitted
by the king, it is rather a revolting story : it argues
that if Chillingworth was nothing more than indis
creet in writing it, Laud was nothing less than
unscrupulous in using it.

The next act in Chillingworth's life was a stirring
one ; he became convinced by the arguments of
the Jesuit Fisher, whom Laud afterwards con
descended to refute in a lengthy and nearly un
readable folio, that there was a want of continuity
about the Protestant Church.* Chillingworth's was
a mere logical conversion. In 1630 he went to the
Jesuit College at Douay, where he was urged to
put in writing a kind of Apologia, to indicate the
line along which he had moved. This was a
singularly indiscreet attempt. They did not fore
see the result. In the course of the investigations
which it necessitated, Chillingworth was led to the
conclusion that it had been a hasty step ; and a
series of kindly letters from Laud led to his quitting
Douay for Oxford, where, in 1634, he published
a book containing his reasons for becoming a
Romanist, accompanied by an elaborate refuta
tion ; and at last, in 1637, appeared, with the

* Fisher, alias Percy, was a dangerous man ; he converted the
Countess of Buckingham, the duke's mother, to Rome, and very
nearly the duke himself.

96 "EVER-MEMORABLE" HALES.

sanction of the University Press, his most im
portant work, " The Religion of Protestants a Safe
Way to Salvation." It was originally an answer
to a Jesuit pamphlet, and suffers much from its
extraneous form. A second edition was called for
within five months ; and it was generally regarded
as a book of consummate ability.

He had scruples about subscription ; but Laud
overcame them, and made him Canon of Salisbury
and master of a hospital at Leicester. We hear
little more of him, except that, having accompanied
the king's forces as chaplain, he devised a siege-
engine, in the form of a testudo, before Gloucester ;
but before it was successfully tried the siege was
raised. Being left ill at Arundel, he fell into
the hands of the Roundheads on the fall of the
Castle, and died at Chichester, pestered to death,
it was said, by the Puritan officers, who insisted on
disputing with and exhorting him, when he was
far too ill for such treatment. At his funeral
a Puritan divine, named Cheynell, had the ex
quisitely bad taste to fling a copy of his great
book on to his coffin as the earth was thrown in,
expressing a fervent wish that " it might rot
with its author and see corruption."

With the " Ever-memorable " Hales, too, Fellow
of Eton, Laud came in contact. He was another of

SENT FOR TO LAMBETH. 97

the same school, and owed his title to his extreme
brilliancy as a conversationalist, and his sympathetic
listening powers.

His interview with the Archbishop is dramatic
and entertaining to the highest degree. Hales, for
the satisfaction of some weak-minded friend, wrote
out his views on schism, treating the whole subject
with a humorous contempt for Church authority.
This little tract got privately printed, and a copy
fell into Laud's hands (as, indeed, what dangerous
matter did not ?), which having read and marked, he
instantly sent for his recalcitrant subaltern, to be
rated and confuted and silenced. It is wonderfully
characteristic of Laud, both in the idea and in the
method of carrying it out. Mr. Hales came, says
Heylyn, about nine o'clock on a summer morning to
Lambeth, with considerable heart-sinking, no doubt.
The Archbishop had him out into the garden,
giving orders that they were on no account to be
disturbed. The bell rang for prayers, to which
they went by the garden door into the chapel, and
out again till dinner was ready, hammer and tongs
all the time; then they fell to again: but Lord
Conway and several other persons of distinction
having meantime arrived, the servants were obliged
to go and warn the disputants how the time was
going. It was now about four in the afternoon.

II

98 HALES BRIBED TO SILENCE.

" So in they came," says Heylyn, " highly coloured
and almost panting for want of breath ; enough to
shew that there had been some heats between them
not then fully cooled." The two little cassocked
figures (both were very small men), with their fresh
complexions, set off by tiny mustachios and im
perials, such as Churchmen wore, pacing up and
down under the high elms of the garden, and
arguing to the verge of exhaustion, is a wonderful
little picture.

Hales afterwards confessed to Heylyn that it had
been dreadful. " He had been ferreted," he said,
" from one hole to another, till he was resolved to
be orthodox and declare himself a true son of the
Church of England, both for doctrine and dis
cipline."

Laud evidently saw the mettle of the man with
whom he had to deal, and what a very dangerous
rational opponent he was ; so he made him his own
chaplain, and got the king to offer him a canonry
at Windsor, in such a way that refusal, much to
Hales' distaste, was out of the question, thus bind
ing him to silence in a manner that would make
further speech ungracious. " And so," said Hales,
quietly grumbling at his wealthy loss of inde
pendence, " I had a hundred and fifty more pounds
a year than I cared to spend."

HALES* RELIGIOUS POSITION. 99

It has been the fashion lately to speak of this
interview as if Hales had been merely fooling the
pompous chaplain. But though, of course, we
must not take the words too literally, especially
from such ironical lips, yet I have no doubt that,
from a logical point of view, Laud had the best
of the argument. Hales was certainly silenced ;
Principal Tulloch believes he was not convinced.

The real truth is, that he probably did not dare
to reveal how dissident his own position was from
Laud's. Hales had advanced further towards
scepticism than Chillingworth, and it is hardly
possible to conceive that a man who was a
Rationalist by thirty had gone no further by the
time he was fifty ; but I can well imagine him
shrinking from laying bare his wanderings before
the keen ear and the piercing tongue of his sturdy
and argumentative Metropolitan.

It is impossible to believe that, had Hales and
Chillingworth been born in these later days, they
would have ever taken upon themselves the ministry
of the Church ; it is hardly conceivable, indeed,
that they would have remained within her com
munion. They were the predecessors of the
Agnostic movement of the present time. When
Revelation was taken for granted as much as
geology is now, it was impossible to stray very far

100 LAUD UNDERRATED RATIONALISM.

from the fold ; even Lord Herbert of Cherbury,
and the Deists assailed Inspiration with no certain
hand. Hales and Chillingworth were really the
first who nibbled at the question of the limits of
the credible. Unfortunately, Science has thrown
such a sudden glare upon the question of Revelation
and its limitations, that the true vision has for a
time been drowned in excess of light. Hales and
Chillingworth had no external illumination, but
they were far too clear-sighted not to discern
directly the fact, that perfect truth is probably not
the exact property of any school or any age.

If there were reason to think that Laud saw the
direction in which their doubts tended, or the ulti
mate end of their reasonings, his position towards
them would do the greatest credit both to his
clearness of vision and to his tolerance. But it is
far more probable that he considered them to be
little more than a pronounced variation from the
true line, and much more capable of being ruled
straight again than the cross-grained headstrong
Puritan.

Thus, here as elsewhere, we are forced to the
conclusion that he feared and hated an unruly and
coarse earnestness far more genuinely than a silent,
subtle, but infinitely more deadly perversion.

The great instrument by which Laud made him-

THE HIGH COMMISSION. JO I

self felt was the Court of High Commission for
ecclesiastical causes, and the Star Chamber, so
called from the ornamented ceiling of the room in
which it met. This latter was a court of summary
jurisdiction, dealing with all offences against public
order, from libels down to Sunday pastimes. By
the former court, the preaching of all debated
doctrinal questions was limited to high dignitaries
of the Church. Clergymen were deprived for
gospel preaching; surplices, "whites" so-called,
and all ceremonies offensive to Puritan taste were
rigorously enforced. Among other systems, the
elaborate system of lecturers, devised to serve
Puritan ends, was crushed. Lecturers were a sort
of unattached clergy, with no cure of souls, who
preached, mostly in town parishes, the subjects so
dear to the hard-headed farmers and traders of the
day — so hateful to Laud. These were suppressed
by the High Commission under Laud's presidency;
or rather their subjects were taken away, and they
were forbidden to preach till they had read the
Service of the Church. The country gentlemen
came to the rescue, and took them in as chaplains :
Laud stepped forward and forbade chaplains to all
but noblemen. Then the Puritans tried to buy
livings for their favourites : Laud forbade the com
bined purchase of patronage. It is curious that,

102 CHIEF JUSTICE RICHARDSON.

with all this zeal for reform, it never occurred to
him to consider pluralities unsatisfactory. Bowing
to the altar on entering a church was recommended.
Kneeling was enforced at the Communion. Again,
the feeling of the country was setting in the direc
tion of a stricter observance of Sunday. The
Court was in favour of games and amusements.
Parliament, on the other hand, promulgated an
order against the profanation of the Sabbath.
The Chief Justice, Richardson, directed that this
should be read from the pulpit on a certain Sunday,
by every clergyman in England. Laud was furious
at this, and complained to the king, who sent a
message to Richardson requiring him to revoke the
order at the next assizes. This Richardson
merely disregarded. At the summer assizes he
received another requisition. He then revoked the
order, in a disrespectful speech, indicating that he
was acting under compulsion. He was immediately
summoned before a Committee of the Council,
where Laud rated him soundly for disobedience,
and forbade him ever to ride the western circuit
again. He left the room with tears in his eyes.
" I have been almost choked," he said, " by a pair
of lawn sleeves." Such scenes were not of un
common occurrence. Laud then issued a counter-
order that the decree in favour of Sunday pastimes

LADY ELEANOR DA VIES. 103

should be read, and deprived four hundred and
twenty clergy for disobeying this.

These dreary scenes of sifting unsatisfactory
evidence, censuring, and sentencing were occasion
ally relieved. A poor schoolmaster from Norfolk,
Brabourne by name, accused of Socinian opinions,
was so paternally exhorted by Laud, that he pro
fessed himself converted. Dame Eleanor Davies, a
religious maniac, furnished, perhaps, the most amus
ing incident of all. This lady, who has been
already alluded to in the Strafford correspondence,
uttered a prophecy that the Archbishop would not
outlive the 5th of November, 1633 ; for which, and
other wild statements, she was had before the
Commission.

The poor creature based her power of prophecy
upon the fact that the letters of her name made, in
an anagram, the words " REVEAL, O DANIEL." The
Bishops and divines present gravely began to
argue with her, and quote Scripture, and express
themselves shocked. All this time, Lamb, Dean
of Arches, was seen to be busy with his pen ; after
a few minutes he looked up. " Madam," he said, " I
see you build much on anagrams, and I have found
one which I think will fit you," and he read out
the words, " NEVER SO MAD A LADIE," and passed
her the paper. There was an outburst of laughter

104 7HE HISTRIOMASTIX.

from the whole court, and the poor lady retired in
such confusion that, as Heylyn says, she after
wards " grew wiser, or was less regarded."

I will mention here, as an instance of the pro
ceedings of the Star Chamber, an incident which
really belongs to a later date. Prynne, a Puritan
lawyer of good position, published a book called
" Histriomastix," a general attack on the stage
and its demoralizing effects on the nation. The
book to us is incredibly ludicrous and dispropor
tionate. Like Draco's Code, it uses up so distilled
an essence of invective on such practices as decking
houses at Christmas with evergreens, on hunting,
music, and false hair, that it can find nothing worse
to say about graver lapses. The mere extent and
detailedness of the criticism destroys the value of
the whole. But the queen was, if not mentioned
by name, at all events unmistakably included in
the condemnation. Charles sent the book to the
Star Chamber, who thought fit to inflict on Prynne
a hopelessly large fine, to pillory him, cut off
both his ears, burn his books, strike off his name
from the Inns of Court and the register of
Oxford. This was tyranny ; the book was far too
absurd to be taken so seriously. No rational
man could have approved of it. The effect of the
punishment was, that a great many rational men

PRYNNE DISPOSES OF EVIDENCE. 10$

looked grave over the acts of the counsellors of
the king.

In the following June Prynne seized the first
opportunity that presented itself, to write a
libellous letter to Laud, which Laud sent to the
Attorney-General, Noy.

Noy thereupon sent for Prynne, and asked him
whether the letter was in his handwriting or not.
Prynne answered that he could not tell unless he
could see the letter. As soon as it was put into
his hands, Noy happening to turn his back, he
tore it up, and threw it out of the window, saying
that it, at least, should never rise in judgment
against him.

Thus, the only proof of the misdemeanour being
destroyed, there was no remedy ; and Laud stepped
forward, and said that he did not wish to press the
matter. It apparently caused him genuine surprise
to find that Prynne felt no remorse for his previous
course of action, and that the punishment, instead
of producing a salutary effect, had hardened him.
So little did he know of men.

In the midst of this perpetual and absorbing work
Abbot had died, at Ford, in retirement. Where
upon Laud merely moved his books to Lambeth.
He had been too long the virtual Archbishop to
feel the change.

106 LAUD BECOMES ARCHBISHOP.

For a superstitious mind, his tenure did not begin
well ; his coach and horses were overturned in the
Lambeth ferry-boat, the coach remaining at the
bottom. He himself writes of a heaviness over
hanging him ever since his nomination to the place.
But there was no outward sign of dismay. The
last section described his negative policy with
respect to religion — the system that he strove to
eradicate. His action at Lambeth will give some
idea of the positive doctrine that he laboured to
introduce. The chapel, as he found it, was typical
of the state to which the science of worship had
been reduced by a gradual process since the
Reformation. It was a whitewashed room with
plain glazed windows. Abbot, by breaking down
the organ, had put the seal of Calvinism upon it.
" It did lie so nastily," said the new Archbishop,
" that I was much ashamed to see it, and could not
resort unto it without disdain." Under Laud's
hands the place blossomed afresh ; with his own
hands he pieced out the fragments of broken glass
that remained, and restored the rest. The stately
screen he erected is still in its place ; the very
altar rails are preserved in the chapel-screen at
Addington. Of course Laud's windows were broken
by the soldiers of the Commonwealth. But by a
furious freak of fate the present chapel windows,

REPAIRS THE CHAPEL. 1 07

with their mottoes from the Vulgate, are the precise
reproduction of Laud's. When the chapel was
restored ten years ago, it was remembered that
an exact description of the windows with their
legends was one of the articles of Laud's indict
ment that was still preserved ; and by this Hard-
man worked. Under Laud's reforming hand, the
organ and the choir came back ; the copes of the
chaplains, the arras worked with sacred scenes, the
credence, the consecrated vessels, the silver candle
sticks, the bowing at the name of Jesus, the stately
ritual, — all these were there.

In Prynne's so-called " Life of Laud " there is a
little plan of a chapel, purporting to be the chapel
at Abergwili.

It will be remembered that Laud's first act on
coming there was to build and consecrate a chapel.
That he dedicated it to St. John and consecrated
it on the day of the Decollation was detestable to
Pry n ne.

But the unprejudiced reader would, I think, be
surprised, on looking at the plan, to see two small
round vessels indicated as standing on a platform
or footpace, with a " musique table," in the centre
of the chapel, between the litany desk and the
lectern, and to see, on referring to the plan, that
these are respectively marked the censer, and

108 FARNHAM CHAPEL.

the navicula, or vessel for holding the frankin
cense.

Otherwise, the chapel is very ordinary : there is
the altar railed off, a credence, lectern, litany desk,
as I have said, and return stalls for the clergy.
There is 'subjoined a long list of copes and veils,
and very elaborate altar furniture of flagons, basons,
chalices, etc.

Laud's allusion to this, in his defence, is a very
curious one. He becomes ironical. He is glad
to learn, he says, that his estate was so plentiful
at that time, that he could have afforded such
sumptuous surroundings.

The truth is, that it is an excellent instance of
Prynne's shameless malevolence ; if it is mere care
lessness, it is carelessness so culpable in such a
matter as the trial of a public man as to be very
nearly as criminal as deliberate perjury. The fact
in reality being that Laud, when building his
chapel, wrote to Bishop Lancelot Andrews for a
description of the chapel at Farnham. One of
the chaplains drew out a rough plan, which was
enclosed. Thus the plan was the plan of the chapel
at Farnham, which, for nearly twenty years, had
been in different hands, and under a totally different
regime.

I confess that it is still surprising to hear that

LAUD OFFERED A CARDINAL'S HAT. 1 09

incense was in common use in Bishop Andrews's
chapel ; and it appears from the evidence that
wafers were used there instead of bread, which
will be to many an unfamiliar fact.

With these proclivities, however, it was no
wonder, in a land dry with Calvinism, that, as
Laud notes in his Diary immediately after his
nomination to Canterbury, " there came one
secretly to me by night, and proffered me, as with
authority, a Cardinal's hat, and the same offer was
shortly after repeated. To whom I made answer,
that I must first see Rome other than it was." And
the answer was a very genuine one. Laud was
hardly nearer Rome than he was to Calvinism.
He was far too real an Erastian at heart, far too
earnest a believer in the interdependence of Church
and State to lie down either with the Pope or
Luther. Nothing can be a greater mistake than
to believe Laud to have been a Romanist at heart,
restrained, by motives of timidity or prudence,
from declaring himself. Montague and Gardiner
were instances of that. Whatever his faults were,
Laud was no hypocrite. If he had believed the
Pope right, to the Pope he would have gone.
Perhaps he hated Protestantism the worse of the
two, for he loved neither the soul of it nor the
clothes it wore ; whereas, he was well satisfied with

I 10 THE JESUITS ON LAUD.

the trappings of Romanism : but its arrogance of
spirituality was quite outside his field of view.
Compare the feeling at Rome with which the news
of his death was received. They evidently did not
regard him as their friend.

John Evelyn was at Rome at the time, and in
the company of several of the English Romanists
and Jesuit fathers. The news arrived, and copies
of Laud's speech on the scaffold were circulated.
They received the news with satisfaction ; they
commented on the speech with contempt, and
evidently regarded his death as the removal of a
great obstacle out of their path, the suppression of
a dangerous rival. And yet his popish tendencies
were the only serious charges brought against him.
His definition of the Church of England would
doubtless have been very much what a High
Anglican of the present century would give — an
uncorrupt Apostolic section ; but he lacked the
sympathy and toleration for the profession of which
the better Anglicans are now so conspicuous.

JUXON HIGH TREASURER. I I I

CHAPTER IX.

ONE of the achievements of which Laud speaks
with the most profound satisfaction was the fact
that he induced Charles to make Juxon, Bishop of
London, Lord High Treasurer. If Laud had been
a little more clear-sighted he would have felt that
the little increase of secular dignity it gave to the
Church was much more than counterbalanced by
the natural jealousy of ecclesiastical interference
that it suggested, and the uneasy suspicion that
the Church was aiming at a civil tyranny. It only
gave additional fuel to the flames.

Charles sent suddenly for the white staff, in the
middle of a council, and delivered it to Juxon. It
evidently took the councillors by surprise, though
there had been a rumour to that effect circulating
a few days before. Charles made a short speech,
in which he explained his reasons : discretion
and foresight were the qualities he wanted, if
they could be found in a conscientious man. This

112 A SA TISFA CTOR Y APPOINTMENT.

combination he looked for among the clergy ; and
Juxon, as having no children, and thus with no
private motive to self-enrichment, was the best.

" No churchman," notes Laud, " has had it since
Henry the Seventh's time. I pray God to bless
him in it. Now if the Church will not hold
themselves up under God, I can do no more."

The elation to which Laud owns was general.
Mr. Garrard, Master of the Charterhouse, writes to
Stafford, " The Clergy are so high since the joining
of the white sleeves with the white staff, that there
is much talk of having a Secretary a Bishop, and a
Chancellor of the Exchequer a Bishop, Dr.
Bancroft. But this comes only from the Small Fry
of the Clergy : little credit is given to it ; but it is
observed that they swarm mightily at Court."

Laud had discovered, by inquiry, that a Treasurer
could honestly make £7000 a year without degrad
ing the Treasury or abusing his privileges ; that
lately Treasurers, from mean private fortunes, had
risen to the titles and estates of earls. If this was
the case, a man with absolutely no personal motive
would be a very useful servant for the king in his
very impoverished condition.

Juxon's was an admirable appointment. He
did his work quietly ; unlike Laud, was gentle and
courteous with all, and never became a party man.

LAUD'S WORK. 113

When he resigned it a few years later, he left it
with universal respect. Even Prynne allowed that
he had done fairly well.

Juxon was a protege of Laud's, one of the St.
John's men whom he had drawn up with him.
We know he had an enthusiastic admiration for
Laud. He succeeded him at Lambeth, and in the
guard-room their portraits hang side by side,—
Juxon's evidently painted so as to be the precise
counterpart of Laud's, the dress and pose pre
cisely similar, so that they might hang somewhere
side by side, or flank some central portrait — the
fact is unmistakable.

Laud's work was now prodigious ; he ruled the
Church with a rod of iron. No recalcitrant was
unknown to him ; no schismatic writings made
their appearance but he read and marked them.
He was President of the Court of High Commis
sion, First Minister of the Crown, a member of the
Treasury Commission and the Foreign Council.
Such was his amazing energy, that the very
merchants who memorialized him owned him
their master in his grasp of Economic problems.
He was Chancellor of Oxford and Dublin Univer
sities. His correspondence with the Vice-Chancellor
and Senate of the former fills a large folio volume.
Of the detailedness of his scrutiny we have some

I

1 14 SCOTLAND.

idea when we remember that in one letter he pre
scribes the dress of the undergraduates of noble
birth, and in another desires the abolition of the
Westminster dinner. He administered his own
diocese without a suffragan ; he corresponded with
Strafford in Ireland ; he entertained largely ; he
was much at Court ; he preached frequently. And
all this work is both comprehensive and detailed :
he did not sketch bold lines of organization and
leave the filling-in to others ; he devised, organized,
and executed, single-handed and indomitable.

The Pope, it used to be said, had longer arms
than any prince in Christendom. The fingers of
the Archbishop, which had long been groping un
comfortably from Land's End to John o' Groat's,
at last crept into Scotland. On the whole the
Scots had taken Episcopacy with a good grace.
But there arose a sinister murmuring when vacancy
after vacancy on the Scottish Bench began to be
filled with English Laudian prelates; and it became
still louder when Charles began to emphasize their
political importance by calling them to the Council
Board of Scotland, and appointing them to high
offices of State. Spottiswoode, of St. Andrew's,
was made Lord Chancellor. Perhaps if he had
stopped there all might have been well. But he
went farther : instigated by Laud, whose disgust

SCOTTISH PR A YE R- BOOK. 1 1 5

had been stirred on his two Scottish visits, with
James and Charles respectively, by the repulsive
aspect of the Churches, the king turned his thoughts
to the restitution of a decent worship in Scotland.
James had told Laud roughly that he did not know
the temper of the people. Charles did not care
about that. Laud had already informed the Scotch
that the Reformation in Scotland had been little
better than a deformation. Charles resolved to
give them a good Prayer Book. It was drawn up
by Laud ; printed and reprinted till it reached
typographical excellence. The last copy, still in
the Lambeth library, received the final annotations
of Laud. His additions are even more pronounced
than those of the English ritual : e.g. he reinstated
the eastward position. A decree was despatched
ordering two copies to be purchased for every
parish.

On the 24th of July, 1638, the book was to come
into use. The attempt was not successful. At
Edinburgh not only were the windows broken and
the entire service made inaudible by groans and
cries, but the Dean had a three-legged stool thrown
at his head by one Jenny Geddes, and the Bishop
had to be guarded home by the military. Then
Charles's true nature came out. No attempt was
made to discover why the book was so obnoxious.

Il6 THE COVENANT.

It did not occur to Charles that the advantages of
a seemly ritual were more than counterbalanced
by the opposition and hatred which the innovation
produced. To make concessions to a popular out
cry, especially when it had expressed itself by
brutal and rebellious acts, was alien to his nature.
Edinburgh must be punished, and a peremptory
order was despatched removing the Council and
Courts of Session to Glasgow.

The effect was prodigious : it meant the entire
collapse of the place. Edinburgh was not a trading
town ; its industries depended on its position as
capital. That a nation should be outraged by the
capricious whim of a distant sovereign and a Pope
of Canterbury, was too great a blow. A remon
strance was forwarded to Charles, but without
effect. Into the progress of the dispute we cannot
enter in detail. It is enough to say that the imme
diate result was the signing of the Scottish Cove
nant ; the signing of the Scottish Covenant was
the spark that kindled the rebellion. The action
of the king, the action of Laud are unpardonable.
The fact was, that they did not realize that they
had anything to do but to govern ; they did not
understand that the democracy had but just become
conscious, blindly but surely, of its thews and
sinews. This was their fundamental mistake ; on
this rock they made shipwreck.

REBELLION IN THE AIR. I 1 7

The candid historian is compelled to interpret
this as an instance of the strange want of political
sagacity and sympathetic foresight in Laud. Not
so his Catholic supporters. " Happy is the servant,"
they say, " who is interrupted at such a task, going
so intently about the Father's business."

One of the most piteous and humiliating spec
tacles of Charles's reign is the perpetual and un
availing cry for money that characterized it all
along. Pledging the crown jewels, the sale of
royal plate — these had been the first expedients,
soon exhausted ; enforced knighthood, meaning
fees to the exchequer and fines for defaulters, heavy
taxation of Roman Catholic residents in Great
Britain, ship-money, are the later stages of the
disorder. Into this political turmoil it is impossible
to enter ; we have to confine ourselves to the eccle
siastical aspect of affairs. With the Scottish
Rebellion, Church politics, Church bickerings are
drowned in the growing rumour of civil war.
Under all this Laud worked quietly, blindly,
ejecting recalcitrant curates, enjoining altar rails,
silencing lecturers. It is a strange thing to find
Laud thus busily at work, never dreaming of what
was over him, with rebellion knocking at the doors.
He had one or two warnings. A mob of five hundred
besieged Lambeth for two hours at midnight. He
had been informed of it, and had fortified the

1 1 8 LIBELS.

house so that no harm was done; and one of the
ringleaders was hung, drawn, and quartered, a few
days after, at Southwark. A flood of libels poured
in upon him ; they were even placed in his book
at chapel, and pinned on to his clothes at night.
The titles of these would be ridiculous, did they
not stand for so much real obloquy and hatred.
" Beelzebub's triumphant Arch to adorn his vic
tories," and so forth. Laud's comments on these
papers is pathetic : he notes many of them in his
Diary ; they are to be found among the Lambeth
papers, annotated in his own hand. He is genuinely
unable to understand the cause or the extent of
his extreme unpopularity. The thought that he
has been oppressive, tyrannical, or even unsympa
thetic never crosses his mind ; he speaks like a man
convinced of rectitude, sincerely troubled at being
misunderstood, bearing his reproach quietly because
he feels it to be the human reward for duty done.
Hard and dull he may be thought ; but it is im
possible not to feel, in the later pages of his Diary,
that he was good.

In November, 1640, the Long Parliament gathered
at Westminster. One by one the illegal acts of the
tyranny were cancelled. Prynne and his fellow
martyrs were released in triumph : the storm had
broken at last.

LAUD IMPEACHED. 1 19

Then StrafTord fell. His fall emboldened all
the rising party. The king delayed all day,
asked many an opinion, and finally signed the
warrant with tears of rage and despair. Laud,
asking for a short recess, apparently invariably
granted to the two Houses during the meeting
of Convocation, was told in the House of Lords
that the presence of the Bishops was not
necessary to their deliberations ; whereupon he
rejoined that he had merely asked it of courtesy.
It was grudgingly granted. But in the House of
Commons there was more of a scene. Episcopacy
was solemnly condemned. On the day on which
Stafford's articles of impeachment were read,
Charles sitting on the throne to hear them, Laud's
impeachment was voted in the House of Commons.
A week before he had found, on entering his study,
as he records, quite unsuspicious of the danger, his
own portrait — the portrait that I have already
described — with the string broken, lying on its face
on the ground. " I pray God it portend no evil."
A month later, December i8th, he was impeached
of high treason before the Upper House by the
Scottish Commissioners, as an incendiary, under
which general term were included all whose action
was supposed in any way to have engendered revo
lution. "I was presently committed to the Gentle-

120 LEAVES LAMBETH FOR EVER.

man Usher," he writes ; " but was permitted to go
in his company to my house at Lambeth, for a book
or two to read in, and such papers as pertained to
my defence. I stayed at Lambeth till the evening,
to avoid the gazing of the people. I went to
evening prayer in my chapel. The Psalms of the
day, xciii. and xciv., and chap. 1. of Isaiah, gave me
great comfort. God make me worthy of it and fit
to receive it ! As I went to my barge hundreds of
my poor neighbours stood there and prayed for
my safety and return to my house. For which I
bless God and them." I know of few authentic
scenes which combine such tragic and pathetic
elements — the long, restless day spent in the well-
known house, musing over the sudden snapping off
of all designs and treasured conceptions. It is not
probable that he anticipated death, but it is certain
that he expected to be sequestrated from his Arch
bishopric. We may stop to wonder a little over
the thoughts of the busy self-willed man at such a
crisis — so sure that he had been doing God's work,
and yet so irresistibly arrested ; and then the fami
liar household routine not even interrupted; the
anxious wonderings and confabulations of chaplains,
secretaries, and domestics; the silence in the corridors,
and evening chapel as the day closed in ; and the
little active figure, the centre of so much life, moving

OPPORTUNITIES FOR ESCAPING. 121

to his place for the last time, almost broken down ;
then the barge ordered as usual, and the crowd
gathering at the gates — perhaps the only people in
England who felt a spark of love for the hard
lonely man.

Laud was sixty-seven when he was committed
to prison — at first to a private house, but later to
the Tower, for the severity of his gaolers increased.
At the same time, he himself says that opportunities
were constantly given him to make his escape ; and
he hints that his escape, and his appearance in the
character of a recreant, would have aided their
cause. As it was, he was a troublesome prisoner ;
they were nearly bound to put him to death, but
they were aware that it could bear no construction
except that of a political assassination. Charles's
death might be excused on the ground of the
bloodshed of which he was the direct cause ; but
Laud was so very indirect a cause, and was, besides,
a man of such blameless life, so devoted a son and
Father of the Church, that the responsibility of
ordering his execution was felt to be a serious one.
His imprisonment made a great sensation on the
Continent. He received a secret message from
Grotius begging him to effect his escape ; to which
he returned an affectionate but decided answer.
Certainly he had not a touch of physical fear.

122 DEA7H OF STR AFFORD.

True souls do not seek martyrdom, but they do not
decline it. All this time there came to him news
of the violence done to Lambeth — his house rifled,
his chapel desecrated. It was turned into a dining-
room and a stable, its windows broken down. All
this time, though his powers were put in commis
sion, the Parliament treated him as Archbishop,
sending him peremptory orders to appoint such-
and-such men to vacancies that occurred ; to which
courteous refusals were returned. He had free
communication, too, with the king.

Then came the memorable scene when the day
came for Straffbrd to suffer, and, desiring to have
speech with Laud, was refused, but begged for his
blessing as he went past to die. Stern, unflinching
friends they had been, these two, since they had
first been drawn together in the councils of the
king. And a terrible interview it was. Laud, through
the barred window, gave his blessing as the pro
cession moved on, and then fell to the ground in
animi deliquio, as Heylyn says. The only place
where Laud becomes almost passionate in his
denials is where he confutes the calumny that
Stafford, on his last day, had cursed the Archbishop
as the cause of all his troubles and ruin.

PREPARING THE EVIDENCE. 123

CHAPTER X.

BEFORE long it was determined to amass some
testimony, if possible, against Laud ; it was thought
that his papers would incriminate him in some
treasonous correspondence — with the Church of
Rome, it was hoped. The manner of the search
was as brutal as it was unsuccessful. Prynne, as
the accredited agent of the Parliament, came
to the Tower at night with a file of musqueteers,
entered Laud's room when he was in bed, and
produced his warrant, wherein it was expressly said
that his pockets should be searched, which was
accordingly done. Prynne took away twenty-one
bundles of letters prepared by Laud for his defence ;
the Scottish Service-book, his Diary, and, last of all,
his book of private devotions. " Nor could I get
him," says Laud, "to leave the last, but he must
needs see what passed between God and me : a
thing, I think, scarce ever offered to any Christian.
Among the papers," he continues, "he found a bundle

124 LAUD'S PERSON SEARCHED.

of gloves. This bundle he was so careful to open
as that he caused each glove to be looked into.
Upon this I tendered him one pair of the gloves,
which he refusing, I told him he might take them
and fear no bribe, for he had already done me all
the mischief he could, and I asked no favour of
him. So he thanked me, took the gloves, bound
up my papers, and went his way."

The sentence which Laud, as the representative
of the Star Chamber, had pronounced, makes
excusable a certain amount of energetic hatred on
Prynne's part. But nothing can excuse or condone
his subsequent proceedings. He sorted the letters,
burning those that might be supposed to tell in
Laud's favour. He cut with a knife and blotted
out many entries of the same character in the
Diary. In one place five pages are removed ; in
another there is a great crescent-shaped burn, that
extends over many pages, that looks as if it had
been inflicted by a red-hot iron. This he called
preparing the evidence. Finally, he published
a selection, with notes, explaining, according to
his own taste, the secret initials and ciphers in the
book. It is needless to say that he understood
these to mean gross immoralities in nearly every
case. On the eighteenth, and last day of hearing,
the Archbishop saw every Lord present with a new

SCO TTISH PR A YER~ BOOK. 1 2 5

thin book in folio, in a blue coat. This was the
published Diary.

The charges were frivolous. That of intended
subversion of the laws of the kingdom, had a vague
and ominous sound ; but it was merely supported
by general assertions dealing with his method of
administering justice, and his deliberate and evi
dent purpose to support the king in whatever
courses he adopted. The bringing in of popish
superstition upon the Protestant religion was based
upon the fact that he had been offered a Cardinal's
hat, and upon a number of names of persons,
supposed friends of Laud's, who had become
Romanists, and upon whom he had cither not
used his influence so as to dissuade them, or used
it in vain. This last charge he condescended to
answer in detail.

The following may serve as specimens of the
kind of facts, gravely alleged as criminal — nay,
capital misdemeanours. Prynne first proceeds to
describe what he gracefully calls his " kennel "
at Lambeth. He stated that he had a Bible with
a device of five wounds upon it, in his study, the
gift of a devout lady ; that he had profane and
popish pictures, such as the four doctrines of
the Church, with a dove diffusing light — this
picture is now the chief ornament of the great

126 POPISH TENDENCIES.

drawing-room at Lambeth ; that he had a mass-
book in his library, with popish pictures ; that he
had set a silver crucifix among the regalia at the
Coronation ; that he had repaired the stained glass
at Lambeth.

The testimony was all incredibly loose. Richard
Pember, a glazier, deposed that there was a picture
of an old man, with a glory, in one window ; he
supposed it was meant for God the Father. Laud
meekly shows that it was St. Matthias. Again,
another witness stated that in one window there
was represented an old man with a " budget " by
his side, from which he was pulling Adam and
Eve— a representation of the Creation, he sup
posed. The testimony is apparently genuinely
given by a simple sort of person, and shows very
curiously how people can persuade themselves of
ocular facts by mere imagination.

Of course there was no such thing. And Laud
almost laughingly shows the ludicrous impossibility
of putting up such a conception of the scene.

Several of the charges relate to sharp offensive
speech. A Mr. Vassal was called " Sirrah " by
his Grace on one occasion. Laud cannot re
member ; he knows it is his custom to call
gentlemen, such as Mr. Vassal, " Sir."

Again, they alleged that at the Coronation Laud,

PRYNNE ON CHURCH CONSECRATION. I2/

acting as deputy for the Dean of Westminster, had
done his best to make the ceremony popish. He
had secretly introduced a silver crucifix upon the
altar, among the regalia. Laud himself could not
remember whether he had or not. He had caused
to be revived and used a prayer of Romish ten
dencies, which had been in disuse since the time
of Henry VI., and in which the following passage
occurred : " Let him obtain favour for his people,
like Aaron in the tabernacle, Elisha in the waters,
Zacharias in the temple ; give him Peter's key of
discipline, Paul's doctrine."

The following, a most curious and interesting
document for its insane malice and grotesque
exaggeration, is worthy of insertion here. It is
Prynne's account of the Consecration of St. Kathe-
rine Cree Church, in the city of London, on the
1 6th of January, 1630.

" The Bishop of London, Dr. Laud, came in the
morning about nine of the clock, in a pompous
manner, to Cree Church, accompanied by many
High Commisioners and Civilians : there being a
very great concourse of people to behold this
novelty. The Church doors were guarded with
many Halberdiers. At the Bishop's approaching
near the West Door of the Church, the Bishop's
hangbies [attendants] cried out in a loud voice,

128 ST. KATHERINE CREE.

1 Open, open, ye everlasting doors, that the King
of glory may come in ; ' and presently (as by
miracle) the doors flew open, and the Bishop and
three or four great Doctors entered in.

"As soon as they were in the Church, the
Bishop fell down upon his knees with his eyes
lifted up and his hands and armes spread abroad,
uttering many words, and saying, 'The place is
holy and this ground is holy. In nomine, etc.,
I pronounce it holy : ' and then he took up some
of the earth or dust and threw it up into the aire
(as the frantic persecuting Jews did, when they
were raging mad against Paul). This was done
several times. When they approached near to the
Lord's table, the Bishop lowly ducked and bowed
towards it some five or six times : and returning
went about the Church in Procession on the inside
thereof. . . . Then was read aloud 23 of Genesis
. . . then another prayer, taken almost verbatim
out of the Roman Pontifical. . . . After all this,
the Bishop betook himself to sit under a Cloth of
State in an aisle of the Chancel near the Com
munion table, and taking a written book in his
hand (in imitation of the Roman Pontifical and
the Council of Trent's decree) he pronounced
many curses upon all that should prophane that
holy place, ... he then pronounced the like

REVERENCE TO THE ELEMENTS. 1 29

number of blessings to all those that had any hand
in the culture, framing1, or building of that holy
and beautiful Church.

" After the Sermon, which was short, the Bishop
and two fat Doctors consecrated and administered
the Sacrament, with a number of bowings, duck
ings, and cringeings in manner following :—

" At first, when the Bishop approached neare the
Communion Table he bowed with his nose very
neare the ground some 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, third, and fourth corners, bowing at each
corner three times [which shows incidentally that
the table must have been set out from the wall,
as he evidently passed round, and so behind it].
But when he came to the side of the Table where
the bread and wine was, 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 by him on their knees
in Surplices, Hoods and Tippets), he himself came
near the Bread which was cut and laid in a fine
napkin, and peeped into it till he saw the bread (like
a boy that peeped after a bird's nest in a bush) and
presently clapped it down again and flew back
a step or two, and then bowed very low three

K

130 CONDUCT OF THE TRIAL.

times to it and the Table ; then he came near and
opened the napkin again, and behaved as before :
then he laid his hand upon the Gilt cup which was
full of wine with a cover upon 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
and flew nimbly back and bowed as before. After
these and many other Apish Antic gestures, he
himself received, and then gave the Sacrament to
some principal men only, they kneeling devoutly
near the table ; after which, more prayers being
said, this scene and interlude ended."

Laud condescended to answer this tract in
detail, but no serious attention was paid to the
defence.

The whole conduct of the trial reflects the
greatest disgrace upon the Puritans. Each day
began by the charge being made ; this lasted till
two o'clock. The Archbishop was then allowed
only two hours to prepare his defence — hardly time,
in some cases, to peruse the evidence ; and no
counsel were admitted to him till after his answer.
His witnesses were not allowed to be sworn ; and
one or more of the committee generally interrupted

EVEN PRYNNE ADMIRES LAUD'S COURAGE. 131

him, or asked him fresh questions. At half-past
seven the proceedings of the day terminated. It
was in the heat of summer ; and with his clothes
drenched with perspiration, as he tells us, he was
sent back in the evening to the Tower. Yet, weak
as his health had always been, he never succumbed.
Once or twice his voice and chest suffered, but he
notes himself, " I humbly thank God He so pre
served my health that I never had so much as
half an hour's headache or other infirmity all
the time of this comfortless and tedious trial."
Tedious indeed it was ; it fills 223 pages of the
folio "Troubles and Tryal." From the I2th of
March it dragged along, with occasional intervals,
till the end of July. Even Prynne was constrained
to admit the bravery of the old man's defence.

" To give him his due," he says, " he made as full,
as gallant, and as pithy defence of so bad a cause
as it was possible for the wit of man to invent, and
that with so much art, sophistry, vivacity, oratory,
audacity, and confidence, without the least blush
or acknowledgment of guilt in anything, as argued
him rather obstinate than innocent."

He goes on to hint that the bold and ingenious
character of the defence proves his allegiance to
the Church of Rome, as being more characteristic
of that Church than of the English.

132 TREASON BY ACCUMULATION.

Once only did the Archbishop's patience desert
him. Mr. Nicolas, one of the chief prosecutors,
took occasion to address him several times as the
" pander to the whore of Babylon."

Laud said with great spirit that if such language
was used to him again he would drop his defence ;
he claimed at least to be treated as a Christian.

The Lords, aware that without a defence he would
forfeit even the semblance of criminality, desired
the speaker to confine himself to the evidence,
and to have done with his rhetoric.

At last it became evident that there was not a
single treasonous act, or even a trace of treasonable
tendency in all the tenour of his life. Whereupon
Serjeant Wilde said, with much legal acumen, that
all the misdemeanours amounted to treason by a
process of accumulation. "As if you were to
say," said Hearne in the defence, " that two hundred
black rabbits made one black horse." But it was
a valuable phrase — treason by accumulation, — and
on November ist the Archbishop was ordered to
the bar of the House of Commons. Here he spoke
pathetically of "the slow hand, the heavy heart,
and the old decayed memory," and condescended
to plead.

On the 1 6th the Earl of Pembroke, Laud's suc
cessor in the Chancellorship of Oxford, made a

THE SENTENCE. 133

violent speech in favour of the attainder in the
House of Lords. The judges, when consulted,
gave as their unanimous opinion that none of the
charges proved against him amounted to treason
by any known or established law.

On the 4th of January six Peers met and voted
that he should suffer the punishment of a traitor.
With some difficulty the Archbishop got the sen
tence of hanging commuted into beheading. The
Commons ungraciously consented. It is curious
that he should have been so anxious about it ; the
death of a felon seemed to have offended his per
sonal dignity — as a Peer he was privileged to
decapitation.

When the tidings reached him that the attainder
was passed, Laud's own manuscript breaks off.

Upon this the king sent him secretly from
Oxford a full pardon, sealed with the Great Seal,
which he received with very great joy, as a testi
mony of the king's continued affection.

134 TOWER HILL.

CHAPTER XL

THE place where he suffered is probably more
familiar to foreigners than to ourselves, though it
is at our doors. Some of us may have visited the
Tower in childhood — few of us visit it in later life.

The Tower abuts upon a great space now called
Trinity Square, from the Trinity House which
occupies the upper end of it. It is separated from
it by the moat. The whole place is called Tower
Hill. It is a low incline above the river. The
view of the water and shipping is blocked by tall
warehouses and wharves. Opposite the Tower is
the Church of All- Hallows, Barking, a Gothic church
spared by the fire of London, the interior quaintly
fitted by Sir Christopher Wren. Its surname of
Barking it owes to the fact that it was anciently
a small dependency, technically a cell of the Abbey
of Barking, in Essex. It is a living of which the
Archbishop of Canterbury has long been patron.
Laud was buried there first, before the body was
transferred to Oxford.

THE LAST SCENE. 135

The centre of the square is planted with trees
and occupied by a quiet garden. The place where
the scaffold stood is indicated by a dark pave
ment. On the Sunday when I first saw it, the
whole place had a singularly peaceful, almost
deserted look, as if it belonged to a past order of
things, and had outlived the tragic memories and
dismal scenes enacted within its limits. The air
was pure and clear ; there was no sound of traffic ;
it seemed to stand away even from the life of the
mighty city that lay all about it. But all the week
it is far different ; — crowded with vehicles and
thronged with passers-by, it lies at the very centre
of the huge trading world. Here Laud suffered.

And here Heylyn rises into a strain so noble
and so moving that I cannot forbear from giving
the whole of his account : for, once read, it does not
seem possible that any other should be written.
It is of the very essence of high tragedy. There
is no moralizing, no regret, no personal factor. A
record in grave grand English of the words and
deeds of the last great scene. About the whole
of it there is no sadness, but a note of quiet
triumph : the railing interruptions and pestering
questions, the utter weariness of the sufferer and
his intense desire to be gone ; and yet a mag
nificent collcctedness, so that he is himself to

1 36 CONSTANT PR A YER.

the last, with his quaint turns of expression and
characteristic mode of speech, till the busy life was
still. Whatever the life had been, it is one of the
great deaths of history.

" Meanwhile, the manner of his death troubled
the good Archbishop not a little ; and with a
deeply Christian magnanimity and largeness of
heart, whatever some poor, unworthy minds have
thought or said about it, he was not above petition
ing his malicious enemies, that, considering he was
a Bishop in the Church, he might die by beheading
rather than by the gibbet. Which request the
Commons at first violently refused, but did after
wards assent unto.

" The passing of the Ordinance being signified to
him by the then Lieutenant of the Tower, he
neither entertained the news with a stoical apathy,
nor wailed his fate with weak and womanish
lamentations (to which extremes most men are
carried in this case), but heard it with so even and
so smooth a temper, as shewed he neither was
ashamed to live, nor afraid to die. The time be
tween the sentence and execution he spent in
prayers and supplications to the Lord his God ;
having obtained, though not without some difficulty,
his chaplain, Dr. Sterne, who afterwards sat in the
Chair of York, to attend upon him. His chaplains,

THE EVENING BEFORE. 137

Dr. Heywood and Dr. Martin, he much wished
might be with him. But it seems it was too much
for him to ask. So instead, two violent Presby
terians, Marshall and Palmer, were ordered by
Parliament to give him religious consolations
which consolations his Grace quietly declined. In
deed, little preparation was needed to receive that
blow, which could not but be welcome, because
long expected. For so well was he studied in the
art of dying, especially in the last and strictest
part of his imprisonment, that by continual fast
ings, watchings, prayers, and such like acts of
Christian humiliation, his flesh was rarified into
spirit, and the whole man so fitted for eternal
glories, that he was more than half in heaven
before death brought his bloody but triumphant
chariot to convey him thither. He, that had so
long been a Confessor, could not but think it a
release of miseries to be made a Martyr.

" On the evening of the 9th, Sheriff Chambers, of
London, brought the warrant for his execution.
In preparation to so sad a work, he betook himself
to his own, and desired also the prayers of others,
and particularly of Dr. Holdsworth, fellow-prisoner
in that place for a year and a half; though all that
time there had not been the least converse betwixt
them. This evening before his passover, the night

138 ST. WILLIAM'S DAY.

before the dismal combat betwixt him and death,
after he had refreshed his spirits with a moderate
supper, he betook himself unto his rest, and slept
very soundly till the time came in which his
servants were appointed to attend his rising. A
most assured sign of a soul prepared.

"The loth of January came, on which the Arch
bishop completed his life of seventy-one years,
thirteen weeks, and four days. His death was the
more remarkable, in falling on St. William's day,
as if it did design him to an equal place in the
English Calendar with that which William, Arch
bishop of Bourges, had obtained in the French :
who (being as great a zealot in his time against
the spreading and increase of the Albigenses, as
Laud was thought to be against those of the
Puritan faction and the Scottish Covenanters) hath
ever since been honoured as a Saint and Confessor
in the Gallican Church ; the loth of January being
destined for the solemnities of his commemoration,
on which day our Laud ascended from the scaffold
to a throne of glory.

"In the morning he was early at his prayers ; at
which he continued till Pennington, Lieutenant of
the Tower, and other public officers, came to con
duct him to the scaffold ; which he ascended with
so brave a courage, such a cheerful countenance,

READS HIS SPEECH. 139

as if he had mounted rather to behold a triumph,
than be made a sacrifice ; and came not there to
die, but to be translated. And though some rude
and uncivil people reviled him, as he passed along,
with opprobrious language, as loth to let him go to
the grave in peace, yet it never discomposed his
thoughts, nor disturbed his patience. For he had
profited so well in the school of Christ, that ' when
he was reviled, he reviled not again ; when he
suffered, he threatened not ; but committed his
cause to Him that judgeth righteously.'

" And, as he did not fear the frowns, so neither
did he covet the applause of the people ; and there
fore rather chose to read what he had to speak,
than to affect the ostentation either of memory or
wit in that dreadful agony ; whether with greater
magnanimity than prudence can hardly be said.
And here it followeth from the copy, presented
very solemnly by Dr. Sterne to his sorrowing
master, the good King Charles, at Oxford.

"THE ARCHBISHOP'S SPEECH UPON
THE SCAFFOLD.

" ' Good People, this is an uncomfortable time to
preach ; yet I shall begin with a text of Scripture,
Hebrews xii. 2. " Let us run with patience the
race which is set before us ; looking unto Jesus,

140 THE BITTER HERBS.

the Author and Finisher of our faith, Who for the
joy that was set before Him endured the Cross,
despising the shame, and is set down at the right
hand of the throne of God."

" ' I have been long in my race ; and how I have
looked unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of my
faith, He best knows. I am now come to the end
of my race, and here I find the Cross, a death of
shame. But the shame must be despised, or no
coming to the right hand of God. Jesus despised
the shame for me, and God forbid that I should
not despise the shame for Him.

" ' I am going apace, as you see, towards the Red
Sea, and my feet are upon the very brink of it :
an argument, I hope, that God is bringing me into
the Land of Promise ; for that was the way through
which He led His people.

" ' But before they came to it, He instituted a
passover for them. A lamb it was ; but it must be
eaten with sour herbs. I shall obey, and labour to
digest the sour herbs, as well as the lamb. And
I shall remember it is the Lord's passover. I shall
not think of the herbs, nor be angry with the hands
that gather them ; but look up only to Him who
instituted that, and governs these : for men can
have no more power over me than what is given
them from above.

THE PASSAGE VERY TERRIBLE. 14!

'"'I am not in love with this passage through the
Red Sea, for I have the weakness and infirmity of
flesh and blood plentifully in me. And I have
prayed with my Saviour, Ut transiret calix iste, that
this cup of red wine might pass from me. But if
not, God's will, not mine, be done. And I shall
most willingly drink of this cup as deep as He
pleases, and enter into this sea, yea, and pass
through it, in the way that He shall lead me.

" ' But I would have it remembered, good people,
that when God's servants were in this boisterous
sea, and Aaron among them, the Egyptians which
persecuted them, and did in a manner drive them
into that sea, were drowned in the same waters,
while they were in pursuit of them.

" * I know my God, Whom I serve, is as able to
deliver me from this sea of blood, as He was to
deliver the Three Children from the furnace. And
(I most humbly thank my Saviour for it) my reso
lution is as theirs was : they would not worship
the image which the king had set up, nor will
I the imaginations which the people are setting up.
Nor will I forsake the temple and the truth of
God, to follow the bleating of Jeroboam's calves in
Dan and in Bethel.

" ' And as for this people, they are at this day
miserably misled : God in His mercy open their

142 CONSCIOUSNESS OF INNOCENCE.

eyes, that they may see the right way. For at this
day the blind lead the blind ; and if they go on,
both will certainly fall into the ditch.

" ' For myself, I am (and I acknowledge it in all
humility) a most grievous sinner many ways — by
thought, word, and deed ; and yet I cannot doubt
but that God hath mercy in store for rne, a poor
penitent, as well as for other sinners. I have now,
upon this sad occasion, ransacked every corner of
my heart ; and yet I thank God I have not found
among the many, any one sin which deserves death
by any known law of this kingdom.

" ' And yet hereby I charge nothing upon my
judges : for if they proceed upon proof by valuable
witnesses, I or any other innocent may be justly
condemned. And I thank God, though the weight
of the sentence lie heavy upon me, I am as quiet
within as ever I was in my life.

" ' And though I am not only the first Archbishop,
but the first man, that ever died by an Ordinance
in Parliament, yet some of my predecessors have
gone this way, though not by this means : for
Elphegus * was hurried away and lost his head by

* St. Elphegus or Alphege, as our Calendar calls him, was
martyred for refusing to pay the precise sum at which the Danes
assessed his ransom. The late Archdeacon Churton, to an un
published paper of whose I have had access, vindicates Laud's right
to the title of martyr on the ground that it has never been denied

THE EXAMPLE OF SAINTS. 143

the Danes ; Simon Sudbury in the fury of Wat
Tyler and his fellows. Before these, St. John the
Baptist had his head danced off by a lewd woman ;
and St. Cyprian, Archbishop of Carthage, sub
mitted his head to a persecuting sword. Many
examples great and good ; and they teach me
patience. For I hope my cause in heaven will
look of another dye, than the colour that is put
upon it here.

" * And some comfort it is to me, not only that I
go the way of these great men in their several
generations, but also that my charge, as foul as it
is made, looks like that of the Jews against St.
Paul (Acts xxv. 8); for he was accused for the
law and the temple, i.e. religion ; and like that of
St. Stephen (Acts vi. 14) for breaking the ordin
ances which Moses gave, i.e. law and religion, the
holy place and the law (verse 13).

" ' But you will say, Do I then compare myself
with the integrity of St. Paul and St. Stephen ?
No : far be that from me. I only raise a comfort
to myself, that these great saints and servants of

to Alphege. He quotes a saying of Anselm on the same point.
" Nay," said Anselm, "Alphege died rather than he would allow
his dependants to be distressed by losing their property for him.
He who would rather lose his life than offend God by a small
offence, would much more certainly die than provoke Him by a
greater sin." The defence is ingenious, if a little sophistical.

144 VEN1ENT ROMANL

God were laid at in their times, as I am now. And
it is memorable that St. Paul, who helped on this
accusation against St. Stephen, did after fall under
the very same himself.

" ' Yes, but here is a great clamour that I would
have brought in Popery. I shall answer that more
fully by and by. In the mean time, you know
what the Pharisees laid against Christ Himself, ' If
we let Him alone, all men will believe on Him,
et venient Romani, and the Romans will come, and
take away both our place and nation.' Here was
a causeless cry against Christ, that the Romans
would come : and see how just the judgment of
God was. They crucified Christ for fear lest the
Romans should come ; and His death was it which
brought in the Romans upon them, God punishing
them with that which they most feared. And I
pray God this clamour of venient Romani (of which
I have given no cause) help not to bring them in.
For the Pope never had such an harvest in Eng
land since the Reformation, as he hath now upon
the sects and divisions that are amongst us. In
the mean time, ' by honour and dishonour, by good
report and evil report, as a deceiver and yet true/
am I passing through this world.

" ' Some particulars also I think it not amiss to
speak of.

THE GROWTH OF DEMOCRATIC POWER. 145

"' i. And first, this I shall be bold to speak of
the King-, our gracious Sovereign. He hath been
much traduced also for bringing in of Popery ; but
on my conscience (of which I shall give God a
present account), I know him to be as free from
this charge as any man living. And I hold him
to be as sound a Protestant, according to the
religion by law established, as any man in the
kingdom ; and that he will venture his life as far
and as freely for it. And I think I do or should
know both his affection to religion, and his grounds
for it, as fully as any man in England.

" ' 2. The second particular is concerning this
great and populous city (which God bless). Here
hath been of late a fashion taken up to gather
hands, and then go to the great court of the
kingdom, the Parliament, and clamour for justice ;
as if that great and wise court, before whom the
causes come which are unknown to the many, could
not or would not do justice but at their appoint
ment ; a way which may endanger many an inno
cent man, and pluck his blood upon their own
heads, and perhaps upon the city's also.

" ' And this hath been lately practised against
myself; the magistrates standing still, and suffering
them openly to proceed from parish to parish with
out check. God forgive the setters of this ; with

L

146 INQUISITION FOR BLOOD.

all my heart I beg it : but many well-meaning
people are caught by it.

" * In St. Stephen's case, when nothing else would
serve, they stirred up the people against him (Acts
vi. 12). And Herod went the same way: when
he had killed St. James, yet he would not venture
upon St. Peter, till he found how the other pleased
the people (Acts xii. 3).

" ' But take heed of having your hands full of
blood (Isai. i. 15); for there is a time best known
to Himself, when God, above other sins, makes
inquisition for blood. And when that inquisition
is on foot, the Psalmist tells us that God re
members ; but that is not all : He remembers, and
forgets not the complaint of the poor, i.e. whose
blood is shed by oppression.

" * Take heed of this : " It is a fearful thing to fall
into the hands of the living God ; " but then espe
cially when He is making inquisition for blood.
And with my prayers to avert it, I do heartily
desire this city to remember the prophecy that is
expressed in Jer. xxvi. 15.

" ' 3. The third particular is, the poor Church of
England. It hath flourished, and been a shelter
to other neighbouring Churches, when storms have
driven upon them. But, alas ! now it is in a storm
itself and God only knows whether or how it shall

HIS OWN POSITION.

get out. And, which is worse than a storm from
without, it is become like an oak cleft to shivers
with wedges made out of its own body ; and at
every cleft, profaneness and irreligion is entering
in. While (as Prosper says) men that introduce
profaneness are cloked over with the name religionis
iinaginari(Zy of imaginary religion ; for we have
lost the substance, and dwell too much in opinion.
And that Church, which all the Jesuits' machina
tions could not ruin, is fallen into danger by her
own.

"'4. The last particular (for I am not willing to
be too long) is myself. I was born and baptized in
the bosom of the Church of England, established
by law : in that profession I have ever since lived,
and in that I come now to die.

" ' What clamours and slanders I have endured
for labouring to keep an uniformity in the external
service of God, according to the doctrine and dis
cipline of this Church, all men know, and I have
abundantly felt. Now at last I am accused of
high treason in Parliament, a crime which my soul
ever abhorred. This treason was charged to con
sist of two parts — an endeavour to subvert the laws
of the land ; and a like endeavour to overthrow the
true Protestant religion, established by law.

" ' Besides my answers to the several charges, I

148 NO CONSCIOUSNESS OF WRONG.

protested mine innocency in both Houses. It was
said, Prisoners' protestations at the bar must not
be taken. I must, therefore, come now to it upon
my death, being instantly to give God an account
for the truth of it.

" ' I do therefore here, in the presence of God and
His holy Angels, take it upon my death, that I
never endeavoured the subversion either of law or
religion. And I desire you all to remember this
protest of mine for my innocency in this, and from
all treasons whatsoever.

" ' I have been accused likewise as an enemy of
Parliaments. No ; I understand them, and the
benefit that comes by them, too well to be so. But
I did dislike the misgovernments of some Parlia
ments many ways, and I had good reason for it ;
for corruptio optimi est pessima. And that being
the highest court, over which no other hath juris
diction, when it is misinformed or misgoverned, the
subject is left without all remedy.

" ' But I have done. I forgive all the world, all
and every of those bitter enemies which have per
secuted me ; and humbly desire to be forgiven of
God first, and then of every man. And so I
heartily desire you to join in prayer with me.

" * O eternal God and merciful Father, look down
upon me in mercy, in the riches and fulness of all

PRAYS FOR PEACE IN THE CHURCH. 149

Thy mercies. Look upon me, but not till Thou
hast nailed my sins to the Cross of Christ, not till
Thou hast bathed me in the blood of Christ, not
till I have hid myself in the wounds of Christ ;
that so the punishment due unto my sins may
pass over me. And since Thou art pleased to try
me to the uttermost, I most humbly beseech Thee,
give me now, in this great instant, full patience,
proportionable comfort, and a heart ready to die
for Thine honour, the King's happiness, and this
Church's preservation. And my zeal to these (far
from arrogancy be it spoken) is all the sin (human
frailty excepted, and all incidents thereto) which
is yet known to me in this particular, for which I
come now to suffer; I say, in this particular of
treason. But otherwise, my sins are many and
great. Lord, pardon them all, and those especially
(whatever they are) which have drawn down this
present judgment upon me. And when Thou hast
given me strength to bear it, do with me as seems
best in Thine own eyes. Amen.

" * And that there may be a stop of this issue of
blood in this more than miserable kingdom, O
Lord, I beseech Thee give grace of repentance
to all blood-thirsty people. But if they will not
repent, O Lord, confound all their devices, defeat
and frustrate all their designs and endeavours upon

150 AND QUIETNESS IN THE STATE.

them, which are or shall be contrary to the glory
of Thy great Name, the truth and sincerity of
religion, the establishment of the King, and his
posterity after him, in their just rights and privi
leges ; the honour and conservation of Parliaments
in their just power ; the preservation of this poor
Church in her truth, peace, and patrimony; and the
settlement of this distracted and distressed people,
under their ancient laws, and in their native liber
ties. And when Thou hast done all this in mere
mercy for them, O Lord, fill their hearts with
thankfulness, and with religious dutiful obedience
to Thee and Thy commandments all their days.
So, Amen, Lord Jesu, amen. And receive my soul
into Thy bosom. Amen.

" ' Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be
Thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done
in earth, As it is in heaven. Give us this day our
daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, As we
forgive them that trespass against us. And lead
us not into temptation ; But deliver us from evil :
For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the
glory, For ever and ever. Amen.'

"After these devotions, the Martyr rose, and gave
his papers to Dr. Sterne, his chaplain, who went
with him to his martyrdom, saying, ' Doctor, I give
you this, that you may shew it to your fellow-

BEGS TO BE FAITHFULLY REPORTED. 151

chaplains, that they may see how I went out of the
world ; and God's blessing and mercy be upon you
and them.' Then turning to a person named
Hinde, whom he perceived busy writing the words
of his address, he said, * Friend, I beseech you,
hear me. I cannot say I have spoken every word
as it is in my paper, but I have gone very near it,
to help my memory as well as I could ; but I
beseech you, let me have no wrong done me : '
intimating that he ought not to publish an imper
fect copy. 'Sir/ replied Hinde, 'you shall not.
If I do so, let it fall upon my own head. I pray
God have mercy upon your soul.' ' I thank you,'
answered the holy Martyr ; ' I did not speak with
any jealousy as if you would do so, but only, as a
poor man going out of the world, it is not possible
for me to keep to the words of my paper, and
a phrase might do me wrong.'

" This said, he next applied himself to the fatal
block, as to the haven of his rest. But finding the
way full of people, who had placed themselves
upon the theatre to behold the tragedy, he said,
' I thought there would have been an empty
scaffold, that I might have had room to die. I
beseech you, let me have an end of this misery,
for I have endured it long.' Hereupon room was
made for him to die. While he was preparing

152 RAILING INTERRUPTIONS.

himself for the axe, he said, ' I will put off my
doublets, and God's will be done. I am willing to
go out of the world ; no man can be more willing
to send me out, than I am willing to be gone.'

"But there were broad chinks between the boards
of the scaffold ; and he saw that some people were
got under the very place where the block was
seated. So he desired either that the people might
be removed, or dust brought to fill up the crevices,
' Lest,' said he, ' my innocent blood should fall upon
the heads of the people.'

" The holy Martyr was now ready for death, and
very calmly waiting for his crown. It was like a
scene out of primitive times. His face was fresh
and ruddy, and of a cheerful countenance. But
there stood, to look on and rail, one Sir John
Clotworthy, an Irishman, and follower of the Earl
of Warwick. He was a violent and wrong-headed
man, an enthusiast, and very furious as a dema
gogue. Being irritated that the revilings of the
people moved not the strong quiet of the holy
Martyr, or sharpened him into any show of passion,
he would needs put in and try what he could do
with his sponge and vinegar. So he propounded
questions to him, not as if to learn, but rudely and
out of ill nature, and to expose him to his asso
ciates. 'What,' asked he, 'is the comfortablest

TO DEPART, AND BE WITH CHRIST. 153

saying which a dying man would have in his
mouth ? ' To which the holy Martyr with very
much meekness answered, ' Cupio dissolvi et esse
cum Christo? ' That is a good desire/ said the
other; 'but there must be a foundation for that
divine assurance.' 'No man can express it/
replied the Martyr ; 'it is to be found within.'
The busy man still pursued him, and said, ' It is
founded upon a word, nevertheless, and that word
should be known.' ' That word/ said the Martyr,
' is the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and that alone.'
But he saw that this was but an indecent interrup
tion, and that there would be no end to the trouble,
and so he turned away from him to the executioner,
as the gentler and discreeter person ; and, putting
some money into his hand, without the least dis
temper or change of countenance, he said, ' Here,
honest friend, God forgive thee, and do thine office
upon me in mercy/ Then did he go upon his
knees, and the executioner said that he should give
a sign for the blow to come ; to which he answered,
' I will, but first let me fit myself/ After that he
prayed.

154 THE

"THE ARCHBISHOP'S PRAYER AS HE
KNEELED BY THE BLOCK.

" ' Lord, I am coming as fast as I can. I know I
must pass through the shadow of death, before
I can come to see Thee. But it is but umbra
mortis, a mere shadow of death, a little darkness
upon nature : but Thou by Thy merits and
passions hast broke through the jaws of death.
So, Lord, receive my soul, and have mercy upon
me ; and bless this kingdom with peace and plenty,
and with brotherly love and charity, that there may
not be this effusion of Christian blood amongst
them, for Jesus Christ His sake, if it be Thy will.'

"Then he bowed his head upon the block,
and prayed silently awhile. No man heard what
it was he prayed in that last prayer. After that
he said out loud, ' Lord, receive my soul,' which
was the sign to the executioner, and at one blow
he was beheaded.

" There was no malice which was too great for his
miserable enemies. They said he had purposely
painted his face, to fortify his cheeks against dis
covery of fear in the paleness of his complexion.
But, as if for the confutation of this poor malice,
his face, ruddy in the last moment, instantly after
the blow turned white as ashes.

BURIAL AND WILL. 155

" Multitudes of people went with his body to the
grave, which was borne in a leaden coffin to the
church of All Hallows, Barking, a church of his
own patronage and jurisdiction. It was noted of
many as extraordinary, that, although the Liturgy
had been by human law abolished, he, the great
champion of the Church and her Ceremonies, was
buried by his brave friends according to the old
ritual, which it was high treason to use. So that it
went to its grave with him. Both only for a while.

" ' For my faith/ saith the holy Martyr, in his last
Will and Testament, ' I die as I have lived, in the
true orthodox profession of the Catholic Faith of
Christ, foreshewed by the Prophets, and preached
to the world by Christ Himself, His blessed
Apostles, and their successors ; and a true member
of His Catholic Church, within the Communion of
a living part thereof, the present Church of England,
as it stands established by law.

" ' I leave my body to the earth, whence it was
taken, in full assurance of the resurrection of it
from the grave at the last day. This resurrection
I constantly believe my dear Saviour Jesus Christ
will make happy unto me, His poor and weary
servant. And for my burial, though I stand not
much upon the place, yet if it conveniently may
be, I desire to be buried in the Chapel of St. John

156 TRANSFERRED TO ST. JOHN'S.

Baptist's College in Oxford, underneath the Altar
or Communion Table there. And should I be so
unhappy as to die a prisoner, yet my earnest desire
is, I may not be buried in the Tower. But where
soever my burial shall be, I will have it private,
that it may not waste any of the poor means which
I leave behind me to better uses.'

" So, on the 24th of July, being St. James's Eve,
1663, the remains of the holy Martyr. were trans
lated to Oxford, and laid in one of the four brick
vaults beneath the Altar of St. John's. And he
has no monument, except his own city of Oxford,
and the present English Church.

" ' So the dead which he slew at his death were
more than they which he slew in his life.' "

NOTE. — The entry of Laud's burial in the register of All-Hallows
Church is interesting ; after his name, a word has been written and
erased by a later hand. This word is either ' ' traitor " or " martyr ; "
it is almost impossible to decide which. Laud's nephew, Layfield,
was then rector of the church.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 157

CHAPTER XII.

IN the personal appearance of the Archbishop
there was little that was stately or commanding.
His only dignity was gained from the sensation of
restless energy that he inspired ; he was impressive
because he knew his own mind, and had none of
that uncertainty of speech and motion which are
so fatal to true dignity. He was of almost diminu
tive mould, his face plump and rosy, but his frame
if anything attenuated — he himself tells us this.
The Little Vermin, the Urchin, the Little Great
Man, Little Hocus Pocus are some of the names
given him in treasonous correspondence. Of quick
gestures and impetuous eager motions, he was
restless and paced about as he thought or talked :
more than once he strained and broke sinews in
his legs from his fondness for this habit, and
the hasty jerks he made in turning. He wore
his hair cut very close, most unlike the court
fashion of the day, though he retained the tiny

158 DRESS.

moustache and imperial ; and he affected a very
plain dress, the rochet, scarf, and square cap in
which he is painted, in great contrast to the gor
geous robes which the Primate of all England was
able and had been accustomed to assume. It must
be remembered that the idea of Bishops' robes, the
lawn sleeves and satin chimere being assumed for
public ceremonies and then laid aside, is a com
paratively modern one. They are not even sacer
dotal, or appropriate to consecrated buildings in
any sense ; that the Bishops wear their rochets in
the House of Lords is a proof of this. A Roman
Cardinal now often wears a cotta or short surplice
over his scarlet.

The linen rochet, then, — a garment like a short
surplice with small sleeves gathered in at the wrist,
worn over a cassock, — and a scarf worn over the
rochet, was Laud's ordinary dress : in this he dined,
walked and went to Court, perhaps laying it aside
in his own study, or when taking the little recrea
tion which he thought it necessary to take.

He encouraged very rigorously plainness of dress
among the clergy. One of the few rebukes recorded
as having been addressed to him which he received
with patience was on this subject. As Bishop of
London he was holding a visitation in Essex, and
took occasion publicly to reprove a clergyman

LIFE AT LAMBETH. 159

whose dress seemed to him too magnificent and
expensive, bidding him compare it with the plain
habit which he was himself contented with. " My
Lord," was the ready answer, " you have better
clothes at home, and I have worse."

At Lambeth, the day began early ; the Arch
bishop rose often before light, and spent an hour
or more in prayer and quiet reading. Then his
chaplains and secretaries went to him, and he had
a simple breakfast of bread and water. Ale was
usually drunk at this time. Enslaved as we are to
tea, this is peculiarly repugnant to our notions ; we
value clear-headedness particularly in the early
hours of the day : but, perhaps, by use, intoxicating
liquors made no perceptible difference. Laud, how
ever, eschewed ale, his tastes being simple, even
ascetic, in the matter of food.

At about ten came the chapel service, attended by
the household, consisting of over a hundred persons,
all men. After this, dinner in the hall — a meal
of somewhat indiscriminate hospitality, members of
the Court being often present — the Archbishop and
the more dignified guests sitting at the cross-table,
which ran parallel to the upper end of the room.
After this, he went to the Council in his barge,
attended by his pikebearers, the pikes being still
preserved at Lambeth ; gave audiences or had

l6o LOVE OF MUSIC.

private interviews, generally in garden or gallery,
pacing about for the sake of the exercise ; then, at
four or five, evensong in the chapel, more study, and
bed after a light supper which he took in private.
It was a mere collegiate life, all in public, no
domesticity about it. Even at Croydon, the country
seat, where his palace, long disused and given up to
baser uses, still exists, it was just the same. It is
strangely unlike the modern episcopal life, where
the quiet household so invariably exists, with all
its rest and sympathy. Here the only solitude
was the solitude of a crowd ; griefs and troubles
had to be carried alone ; triumphs received no
private impress of joy.

The only trace of recreation that we find in
Laud's life is to be discerned in his love of music.
That he should have put an organ into all the
houses he inhabited is, with his liturgical views, not
surprising; but his will speaks of " a harp, a chest
of viols, and a harpsico in his parlour at Lam
beth," on which, perhaps, Orlando Gibbons, organist
of Westminster,* and reckoned " the sweetest finger
of the age," may have played.

On the whole we may say, though it has not been
the fashion to say so, that he was a humane man,
tender to poverty and distress. Those who read the

* Laud was for some years a prebendary.

HUMANE DISPOSITION. l6l

sentences of the Star Chamber, which it fell to
him as President to pronounce, will be inclined to
doubt this ; but we must remember that the shear
ing away of ears was in the style of the time, and
did not seem to be any violation of the principles
of humanity. In fact, when Prynne was sentenced
to solitary confinement without books or writing
materials, he interfered : " Nay," he said, " I have
never known what it is to lack books and papers."

Again, he said to his chaplain, when Dr. Osbaldi-
stone, Master of Westminster School, was con
demned to lose his ears for heresy, " I would go
down on my knees before the king to prevent the
execution of this cruel punishment." This is not
the speech of an inhuman man.

Once, indeed, in a moment of petulance, he acted
unworthily — he struck the weak. Archie Armstrong,
the last Court fool, a crack-brained jester gifted
with that shrewd clearness of thought that deficient
wits seem not unfrequently to confer, crossed his
path ; he indulged in that licence of mocking
speech conceded to his position.

The attempt to force the Liturgy on the Scotch
had just broken down, and the news arrived on the
nth of March. His Grace was going in to the
Council at Whitehall — in considerable irritation, no
doubt, at his favourite project having been so tur-

M

1 62 THE LAST COURT FOOL.

bulently shattered, even when backed by royal
authority. Archie met him in a passage of the
palace. " News from Scotland, your Grace," he said.
" Who's the fool now ? " This was too much for
Laud's patience. He went in and made a formal
complaint to the Council, and poor Archie was
condemned to lose his motley and be banished
from Court. It is rather like crushing a fly.
Archie's only raison d'etre was his liberty to sting.

Laud was very impatient in his manner; hated to
think that he was wasting time ; forgetting some
times that he was perhaps serving his Church best
and doing his rank more credit by giving slow and
simple persons a patient hearing, though conscious
of a thousand other things of importance pressing
upon him, than by cutting them short, as he did
the poor gentleman from Wiltshire, mentioned
below, thus alienating the very class from which
the Church has always drawn her staunchest sup
porters — the honest slow-headed gentlemen, of
strong but not enthusiastic principles, the backbone
of the country.

This is well illustrated by the following episode.
The future Lord Clarendon, then Edward Hyde, a
young and rising barrister, was one of Laud's pro
teges, and owed practically everything to him. He
came to the conclusion that Laud was increasing

ABRUPT AND IRRITABLE BEARING. 163

his unpopularity in the country and damaging
himself very seriously, even with the well-disposed,
by certain tricks of manner, or rather of bearing
and behaviour, by an abruptness of speech, by a
want of restraint in language, and by a general
disregard of those amenities of courtesy that are
worth so little in themselves, but so much to men
of high position, whose refusals should never be
ungracious, and whose rebukes should be adminis
tered with a gentle dignity and be obviously free
from all suspicion of personal animosity.

Mr. Hyde came to the conclusion that his Grace
had no one to tell him this, and that he could not
probably make a better return for all he owed to
Laud than by being perfectly candid and open
with him.

Professor Mozley, by representing Hyde as con
sequential and officious, has obscured, I think, the
true spirit of the interview. He represents Hyde
as finding it a congenial and delightful task, and
entering upon it with feelings of solemn happi
ness, as one who had a high and gracious duty to
perform. But I think it is clear that he shrank
very much from the task, and only went through
with it from a feeling of strict duty : though there is
a touch of natural complacency about the record,
it is rarely a pleasant thing to tell a man an un-

164 HYDE REMONSTRATES.

pleasant truth about himself. There are some
natural pedagogues and self-made dominies in the
world — but not among the young ; and surely a
successful young man like Hyde is very unlikely
to have been already censorious. When, too, we
reflect that the individual to be enlightened was
his guide, philosopher, and friend, the benefactor to
whom he owed everything, we need not hesitate to
decide that it was a disagreeable duty, the kind of
duty of which a man thinks with strong distaste
when he wakes in the morning of the appointed day.

He went early to Lambeth, and found that the
Archbishop was getting a little walk in the garden.
He was received very kindly, as he always was ;
invited to take a turn with him. " What good
news from the country, Mr. Hyde?" said his Grace,
unconsciously giving him a chance.

Mr. Hyde answered that there was none good :
the people were universally discontented, and (which
troubled him most) that many people spoke extreme
ill of his Grace, as the cause of all that was amiss.

The Archbishop replied that he was sorry for it ;
he knew he did not deserve it ; and that he must
not give over serving the king and Church to please
the people.

Mr. Hyde told him he thought he need not lessen
his zeal for either, and that it grieved him to find

THE POOR GENTLEMAN1 FROM WILTSHIRE. 165

people of the best conditions, who loved both king
and Church, exceedingly undevoted, complaining
of his manner of treating them when they had
occasion to resort to him, — and then named two
persons of most interest and credit in Wiltshire,
who had that summer attended the council board ;
adding that all the Lords present used them with
great courtesy, and that he alone spake sharply to
them ; and one of them, supposing that somebody
had done him ill offices, and spoken slanderously of
him to his Grace, went the next morning to Lambeth
to present his service to him, and to discover, if he
could, what misrepresentation had been made of
him ; that, after he had attended very long, he was
admitted to speak with his Grace, who, scarce hear
ing him, sharply answered him that " he had no time
for compliments!' which put the other much out of
countenance : and that this kind of behaviour was
the discourse of companies of all persons of quality.
The Archbishop heard the relation very patiently
and attentively, and discoursed over every particular
with all imaginable condescension, and said, with
evident show of trouble, that he was very unfortu
nate to be so ill understood ; that he meant very
well ; that by an imperfection of nature, which, he
said, often troubled him, he might deliver the reso
lution of the Council in such a tone and with a

1 66 GRATEFUL FOR FRANKNESS.

sharpness of voice that made men believe he was
angry when he was no such thing.

That he did well remember that one of them
(who was a person of honour) came afterwards to
him, at a time when he was shut up about an affair
of importance which required his full thoughts ;
but that, as soon as he heard of the other's being
without, he sent for him, himself going into the
next room, and received him very kindly, as he
thought; and supposing he came about business,
asked him what the business was ; and the other,
answering that he had no business, but continuing
his address with some ceremony, he had indeed
said that he had no time for compliments, but he
did not think he went out of the room in that
manner.

He added that he was pleased with Mr. Hyde
for speaking frankly, and would be glad to hear
anything which he had to say.

Whereupon Mr. Hyde observed that the gentle
men had too much reason for the report they made,
and he did not wonder they had been much troubled
with his carriage toward them ; that he did exceed
ingly wish he would more reserve his passion, and
would treat persons of quality and honour and
interest in the country with more courtesy and
condescension.

167

His Grace said, smiling, that he could only under
take for his heart — that he meant very well ; as for
his tongue, he could not undertake not sometimes
to speak more heartily and sharply than he should
do (which oftentimes he was sorry and reprehended
himself for), and in a tone which might be liable to
misinterpretation with them which were not well
acquainted with him.

After this free discourse, Mr. Hyde ever found
himself more graciously received by him, and treated
with more familiarity, from which he concluded
that if the Archbishop had had any true friend
who could in proper seasons have dealt frankly
with him, he would not only have received it very
well, but have profited by it.

Laud was wise enough not to undervalue this
plain speech, so difficult for persons in high autho
rity, especially when they are not of at all a confi
dential nature, to get at, — and great enough, too, to
feel no sort of resentment against the teller of
home truths : it is so common in such cases to profit
by the advice, and not to forgive the adviser.

Personally, it must be remembered, Laud was a
very shy man ; he had evidently few really genial
impulses. It was not his idea of happiness to be
surrounded by cheerful acquaintances ; he had not
the true instinct for hospitality, so important a

1 68 MORBID SENSIBILITY.

qualification for a Bishop from the earliest times.
The union of a business-like liturgical temperament
with this shyness is not uncommon ; and his brisk,
authoritative manner was, as it so often is, a refuge
from the feeling of personal uneasiness in the
presence of strangers.

His extreme, almost morbid, sensibility to libels
and hostile public demonstrations is very remark
able. I have had occasion to allude to it inciden
tally more than once ; but the following pathetic
interview with Heylyn, never, I think, before quoted,
is a good instance of this, besides being, to my
mind, the best testimony to his absolute sincerity
of feeling with regard to the Church of Rome that
we possess.

"In the November of this year (1639) I received
a message from him to attend him the next day,
at two o'clock in the Afternoon. The key being
turned which opened the way into his Study, I
found him sitting in a Chair, holding a paper in
both hands, and his eyes so fixed upon the Paper
that he observed me not at my coming in. Finding
him in that Posture, I thought it fit in manners to
retire again ; but the noise I made by my retreat
bringing him back unto himself, he recalled me to
him, and told me, after some short pause, that
he well remembered he had sent for me, but could

ACCUSED OF ROMISH TENDENCY. l6g

not tell for his life what it was about. After which
he was pleased to say (not without tears in his
eyes) that he had then newly received a letter
acquainting him with the revolt of a person of
quality in N. Wales to the Church of Rome : that
he knew the increase of Popery by such frequent
revolts would be imputed unto him and his
brethren Bishops, who were least guilty of the
same : that for his part he had done his utmost, so
far as it might consist with the Rules of Prudence
and the preservation of the Church, to suppress
that party and to bring the chief sticklers in it
to condign punishment. To the truth whereof
(lifting up his wet eyes to Heaven) he took God to
witness : conjuring me (as I would answer it to God
at the Day of Judgement) that if ever I should come
to any of those places which he and his Brethren
by reason of their great age were not likely to hold
long, I would employ all such abilities as God had
given me, in suppressing the Romish party, who
by their open undertakings and secret practices
were like to be the ruin of this flourishing Church."

If further testimony is required, subjoined is a
celebrated letter of Laud's to Sir Kenelm Digby, on
the conversion of the latter to Roman Catholicism.

Sir Kenelm Digby, eldest son of Sir Everard
Digby who suffered for his share in the Gunpowder

SIR KENELM DIGBY.

Plot, was a man who once enjoyed the reputation
of a philosopher. He certainly took the fancy of
the time, and was, for a little, one of the best-
known men in England.

His exact connection in early life with Laud is
not easy to discover, but it is stated that he was
brought up under Laud's direction, when Dean
of Gloucester. This would mean, educated in his
house, and thus might stand for a very close,
almost paternal relation.

He first came before the world as the inventor
or rather propagator of an astounding medical
fiction, named " Sympathetic Powder," by which
wounds were to be healed in the absence of the
patient. Perhaps, according to modern lights,
this kind of healing is not so incredible as would
appear.

He got a reputation by his gallant conduct at
the siege of Algiers, in 1628, where he seems to
have fought like a Viking ; and in 1636 he excited
a very general interest by becoming a convert
to the Church of Rome. The letter subjoined,
which is interesting both on public and private
grounds, was written by Laud on this occasion.

He was a prisoner under the Commonwealth
and was cited as a witness in Laud's trial, on the
subject of the offer of the Cardinal's hat, when he

HIS CONVERSION TO ROME. I? I

stated his firm belief in Laud's staunch Protestant
ism. He was set at liberty by the special request
of the Court of France, and transferred himself to
that country, where he met Descartes, and in
collaboration with him produced some curious
philosophical treatises. He died in 1665.

His handsome presence and great powers of
conversation, or rather monologue, seem to have
made him a celebrity, and his life certainly com
bines the elements of romantic interest in the
highest degree.

ARCHBISHOP LAUD'S LETTER TO SIR
KENELM DIGBY.

" Sahitem in CJiristo.

"WORTHY SIR,

" I am sorry for all the contents of your
Letter, save that which expresses your love to me.
And I was not a little troubled at the very first
words of it. For you begin, that my Lord
Ambassador told you I was not pleased to hear
you had made a defection from the Church of
England. It is most true, I was informed so ; and
thereupon I writ to my Lord Ambassador, to know
what he heard of it there. But it is true likewise,
that I writ to yourself; and Mr. Secretary Cook

1 72 OUTSPOKEN AFFECTION.

sent my Letters very carefully. Now seeing your
Letters mentioned my Lord Ambassador's speech
with you, without any notice taken of my writing ;
I could not but fear these Letters of mine came
not to your hands. Out of this fear, your second
Letters took me ; for they acknowledged the
receipt of mine, and your kind acceptance of them.
Had they miscarried, I should have held it a great
misfortune. For you must needs have condemned
me deeply in your own thoughts, if in such a near
and tender business, I should have solicited my
Lord Ambassador, and not written to yourself.

" In the next place I thank you, and take it for
a great testimony of your love to me, that you
have been pleased to give me so open and clear
account of your proceedings with yourself in this
matter of religion. In which, as I cannot but
commend the strict reckoning, to which you have
called yourself ; so I could have wished, before
you had absolutely settled the foot of that account,
you would have called in some friend, and made
use of his eyes as a bye-stander, who oftentimes
sees more than he that plays the game. You
write, I confess, that after you had fallen upon
these troublesome thoughts, you were nigh two
years in the diligent discussion of this matter ; and
that you omitted no industry, either of conversing

ONESIDED INFLUENCE. 1/3

with learned men, or of reading the best authors,
to beget in you a right intelligence of this subject.
I believe all this, and you did wisely to do it.
But I have some questions, out of the freedom of
a friend, to ask about it. Were not all the learned
men, you conversed with for this particular, of the
Roman party ? Were not the best authors, you
mention, of the same side ? If both men and
authors were the same way, can they beget any
righter intelligence in you, than is in themselves ?
If they were men and authors on both sides, with
whom you conversed ; why was I (whom you are
pleased to style one of your best friends) omitted ?
True, it may be, you could not reckon me among
those learned men and able for direction, with
whom you conversed : suppose that ; yet yourself
accounts me among your friends. And is it not
many times as useful, when thoughts are distracted,
to make use of the freedom and openness of a
friend not altogether ignorant, as of those which
are thought more learned, but not so free, nor
perhaps so indifferent ?

" But the result, you say, that first began to
settle you, was, that you discerned by this your
diligent conversation, and studious reading, that
there were great mistakings on both sides, and
that passion and affection to a party transported

174 CHANGING SIDES.

too many of those that entered into the lists in
this quarrel. Suppose this also to be true, I am
heartily sorry, and have been ever since I was of
any understanding in matters of religion, to hear
of sides in the Church. And I make no doubt,
but it will one day fall heavy upon all that wilfully
make, or purposely continue, sidings in that body.
But when sides are made and continued, remember
you confess there are great mistakings on both
sides. And how, then, can you go from one side
to the other, but you must go from one great mis
taking to another ? And if so, then by changing
the side, you do but change the mistaking, not
quit yourself from mistakes. And if you do quit
yourself from them, by .God's goodness, and your
own strength ; yet why might not that have been
done without changing the side, since mistakes are
on both sides ? As for the passion and transpor
tation of many that enter the lists of this quarrel,
I am sure you mean not to make their passion
your guide ; for that would make you mistake
indeed. And why, then, should their passion work
upon your judgment ? especially, since the passion
as well as the mistakes are confessed to be on both
sides.

" After this follows the main part of your Letters,
and that which principally resolved you to enter

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. 175

again the communion of the Church of Rome, in
which you had been born and bred, against that
semblance of good reason, which formerly had
made you adhere to the Church of England.

" And first you say, you now perceive that you
may preserve yourself in that Church, without
having your belief bound up in several particulars,
the dislike whereof had been a motive to you to
free yourself from the jurisdiction which you con
ceived did impose them. It is true all Churches
have some particulars free. But doth that Church
leave you free to believe, or not believe, any thing
determined in it ? And did not your former dis
like arise from some things determined in and by
that Church ? And if so, what freedom see you
now, that you saw not then ? And you cannot
well say that your dislike arose from any thing not
determined ; for in those, the jurisdiction of that
Church imposes not.

"You add, that your greatest difficulties were
solved, when you could distinguish between the
opinions of some new men raised upon some
wrested inferences, and the plain and solid articles
of faith delivered at the first. Why, but I cannot
but be confident you could distinguish these long
since, and long before you joined yourself to the
Church of England. And that therefore your

176 ARTICLES OF FAITH.

greatest difficulties (if these were they) were as
fully and fairly solved then, as now they are, or
can be. Besides, if by these plain and solid Articles
you mean none but the Creed (and certainly no
other were delivered at the first), you seem to inti
mate by comparing this and the former passage,
that so you believe these plain and first Articles,
you may preserve yourself in that Church, from
having your belief bound up to other particulars ;
which I think few will believe, besides yourself, if
you can believe it. And the opinions of new men,
and the wrested inferences upon these, are some
of those great mistakes which you say are on both
sides, and therefore needed not to have caused
your change.

" To these first Articles you say, The Church in
no succeeding age hath power to add (as such) the
least tittle of new doctrine. Be it so ; and I be
lieve it heartily (not as such), especially if you
mean the Articles of the Creed. But yet if that
Church do maintain, that all her decisions in a
General Council, are Articles Fidei Catholicce, and
that all Christians are bound to believe all and
every one of them, eadem Fide, qua Fidei A rticulos ;
and that he is an heretic which believes them not
all ; where is then your freedom, or your not being
bound up in several particulars ? And if you reply,

CATHOLIC LIBERTY. 1/7

you dislike no determination which that Church
hath made ; then why did you formerly leave it, to
free yourself from that jurisdiction that you con
ceived imposed them ? For if the things which
troubled you were particulars not determined, they
were not imposed upon your belief. And if they
were determined, and so imposed, how are you
now set free more than then ?

"You say again, You see now, that to be a
Catholic, doth not deprive them of the forenamed
liberty, who have abilities to examine the things
you formerly stuck at, and drive them up to their
first principles. But first then ; what shall become
of their liberty, who are not able to examine?
shall they enthral their consciences ? Next, what
shall secure them, who think themselves, and are
perhaps thought by others, able to examine, yet
indeed are not ? Thirdly ; what assurance is there
in cases not demonstrable (as few things in religion
are), that they which are able to examine, have
either no affection to blind their judgment, or may
not mistake themselves and their way in driving a
doubtful point to its first principles ? Lastly ; how
much doth this differ from leaning upon a private
spirit, so much cried out against by that side,
when men, under pretence of their ability, shall
examine the tenets of the Church, and assume a

N

CHURCH OBLIGATIONS.

liberty to themselves under colour of not being
bound ?

" But, you say, this is not the breaking of any
obligation that the Church lays upon you ; but
only an exact understanding of the just and utmost
obligations that side ties men to. I must here
question again. For, first, what shall become of
their freedom, that cannot reach to this exact
understanding ? And next, do not you make
yourself, as a private man, judge of the Church's
obligations upon you ? And is it not as great an
usurpation upon the Church's power and right, to
be judge of her obligations, as of her tenets ? For
if the points be left free, there is no obligation ; nor
can you, or need any other, have any scruple. But
if the points be binding by the predetermination of
the Church, can you any way be judge of her
obligation, but you must be judge also of the point
to which she obliges ? Now, I think, that the
Church will hardly give liberty to any private man
to be so far her judge, since she scarce allows so
much to any, as judicium discretionis, in things
determined by her.

"These utmost obligations, to which that side
ties men, you believe many men (and not of the
meanest note) pass over in gross, without ever
thoroughly entering into the due consideration

THE ORIGINAL CHURCH.

thereof. And truly I believe so too, that among
too many men on both sides, neither the points nor
the obligations to them are weighed as they ought.
But that is no warrant (pardon my freedom) that
yourself hath considered them in all circumstances,
or that you have considered them better now than
you did before, when the dislike of that imposing
jurisdiction was your first motive to free yourself
from it by joining to the Church of England.

" And whereas you say, that you have returned
into that Communion, who from your birth had
right of possession in you, and therefore ought to
continue it, unless clear and evident proof (which
you say surely cannot be found) should have
evicted you from it : truly, Sir, I think this had
been spoken with more advantage to you and your
cause, before your adhering to the Church of Eng
land, than now ; for then right of possession could
not have been thought little. But now, since you
deserted that Communion, either you did it upon
clear and evident proof, or upon apparent only.
If you did it then upon clear and evident proof,
why say you now no such can be found? If you
did it but upon apparent and seeming proof (a
semblance of very good reason, as yourself calls it),
why did you then come off from that Communion,
till your proof were clear and evident ? And v1 y

180 OUR UNHAPPY DIVISIONS.

may not that, which now seems clear and evident,
be but apparent, as well as that, which then seemed
clear unto you, be but semblance now ? Nor would
I have you say, that clear and evident proof cannot
be found for a man, in this case of religion, to
forego the Communion which had right of posses
sion in him from his birth ; for the proposition is
an universal negative, and of hard proof. And
therefore, though I think I know you and your
judgment so well, that I may not without manifest
wrong charge you, that you did in this great action,
and so nearly concerning you, ad pauca respicere,
which our great Master tells us breeds facile and
easy, rather than safe and warrantable determina
tions, yet it will be upon you not only in honour
without, but also in conscience within, to be able to
assure yourself that you did ad plurinia, if not ad
omnia respicere.

" The thing being so weighty in itself, and the
miserable division of Christendom (never sufficiently
to be lamented) making the doubt so great, that
you who have been on both sides, must needs be
under the dispute of both sides, whether this last
act of yours, be not in you rather a relapse into a
former sickness, than a recovery from a former fall.
" But against this, the temper of your mind (you
say) arms you against all censures, no slight air of

SECRECY OF THE CONVERSION. l8l

reputation being able to move you. In this, I must
needs say, you are happy ; for he that can be
moved from himself by the changeable breath of
men, lives more out of than in himself; and (which
is a misery beyond all expression) must in all
doubts go to other men for resolution ; not to him
self; as if he had no soul within him. But yetpost
conscientiam fama. And though I would not desire
to live by reputation ; yet would I leave no good
means untried, rather than live without it. And
how far you have brought yourself in question,
which of these two, conscience or reputation, you
have shaken by this double change, I leave your
self to judge ; because you say your first was with
a semblance of very good reason. And though
you say again, that it now appears you were then
misled ; yet you will have much ado to make the
world think so.

" The way you took in concealing this your
resolution of returning into that Communion, and
the reasons which you give why you so privately
carried it here, I cannot but approve. They are
full of all ingenuity, tender and civil respects, fitted
to avoid discontent in your friends, and scandal
that might be taken by others, or contumely that
might be returned upon yourself. And as are
these reasons, so is the whole frame of your Letter

I 82 WHY DID HE NOT TRUST HIS FRIENDS?

(setting aside that I cannot concur in judgment)
full of discretion and temper, and so like yourself,
that I cannot but love even that which I dislike in
it. And though I shall never be other than I have
been to the worth of Sir Kenelm Digby ; yet most
heartily sorry I am, that a man whose discourse did
so much content me, should thus slide away from me,
before I had so much as suspicion to awaken me, and
suggest that he was going. Had you put me into a
dispensation, and communicated your thoughts to
me before they had grown up into resolutions, I am
a priest, and would have put on what secresy you
should have commanded. A little knowledge I have
(God knows, a little), I would have ventured it with
you in that serious debate you have had with your
self. I have ever honoured you, since I knew your
worth, and I would have done all offices of a friend
to keep you nearer than now you are. But since
you are gone, and settled another way, before you
would let me know it, I know not now what to say
to a man of judgment ; and so resolved : for to
what end should I treat, when a resolution is set
already ? So set, as that you say no clear and
evident proof can be found against it : nor can I
tell how to press such a man as you to ring the
changes in religion. In your power it was not to
change ; in mine it is not to make you change

HAS TOLD THE KING. 183

again. Therefore to the moderation of your own
heart, under the grace of God, I must and do now
leave you for matter of religion ; but retaining still
with me, and entirely, all the love and friendliness
which your worth won from me ; well knowing, that
all differences in opinion shake not the foundations
of religion.

" Now to your Postscript, and then I have done.
That I am the first and the only person to whom
you have written thus freely : I thank you heartily
for it. For I cannot conceive any thing thereby,
but your great respect to me, which hath abun
dantly spread itself all over your Letter. And had
you written this to me, with a restraint of making
it further known, I should have performed that
trust : but since you have submitted it to me, what
further knowledge of it I shall think fit to give to
any other person ; I have, as I took myself bound,
acquainted his Majesty with it, who gave a great
deal of very good expression concerning you, and
is not a little sorry to lose the service of so able a
subject I have likewise made it known in private
to Mr. Secretary Cook, who was as confident of
you as myself. I could hardly believe your own
Letters, and he as hardly my relation. To my
Secretary I must needs trust it, having not time to
write it again out of my scribbled copy ; but I dare

1 84 WILL STILL BE HIS FRIEND.

trust the secresy in which I have bound him. To
others I am silent, and shall so continue, till the
thing open itself ; and I shall do it out of reasons,
very like to those which you give, why yourself
would not divulge it here. In the last place, you
promise yourself, that the condition you are in will
not hinder me from continuing to be the best friend
you have. To this I can say no more, than that
I could never arrogate myself to be your best
friend ; but a poor, yet respected friend of yours
I have been, ever since I knew you ; and it is not
your change, that can change me, who never yet
left, but where I was first forsaken ; and not always
there. So praying for God's blessing upon you,
and in that way which He knows most necessary
for you, I rest,

" Your very loving friend,

" To serve you in Domino,

"W: CANT:
" LAMBETH, March 27, 1636.

" I have writ this Letter freely; I shall look upon
all the trust that ever you mean to carry with me,
that you shew it not, nor deliver any copy to any
man. Nor will I look for any answer to the queries
I have herein made. If they do you any good,
I am glad ; if not, yet I have satisfied myself. But
leisure I have none, to write such Letters ; nor

COULD QUOTE IF NECESSARY. 185

will I entertain a quarrel in this wrangling age ;
and now my strength is past. For all things of
moment in this Letter, I have pregnant places in
the Council of Trent, Thomas, Bellarmin, Stapleton,
Valentia, etc. But I did not mean to make a volume
of a Letter.

" Endorsed this with the Archbishop's own hand.
March 27, 1636."

1 86 PREFERS CELIBACY.

CHAPTER XIII.

His preference in favour of a celibate clergy
was very strong. " Ceteris paribus" he once
said before the king at Woodstock, "he intended,
in the exercise of his patronage, to prefer the
single to the married." This statement was mis
interpreted, but he dexterously contrived to avert
the virulence of the misrepresentation by presiding
a very short time after, at the marriage of a
chaplain of his, Thomas Turner, in the Chapel of
London House, to a daughter of Sir Francis
Windebank, afterwards Secretary of State upon
Laud's own recommendation. And to a certain
extent he was undoubtedly right. No doubt a
married clergy has preserved us from other evils
so great as to demand any sacrifice ; but, on the
other hand, it is certain that a man who is
bound not only to secure a living for himself
but a provision for his family out of the Church
revenues will not be likely, unless he has private

POSITION OF A MARRIED CLERGY. l8/

sources of income, to spend the revenues of the
Church in a single-hearted way. No one can
find fault with the ancient system of putting vast
sacred revenues into the hands of pious single
men. They were expected to be munificently
disposed of in a grand public way. It is only
necessary to refer to the names William of Wyke-
ham, Waynflete, and innumerable others to be
assured of this ; and great exception may justly
be taken to the placing of these great trusts into
the hands of family men. The huge fortunes
wrung out of the Church into private hands, so
characteristic of the last century, will have to be
atoned for some time, and Laud's position is by
no means an unreasonable one.

Everything at Lambeth was arranged on this
principle. No womankind were allowed in the
great establishment. And Laud himself seems
to have carried it still further — he had no friend
ship with women ; he had no natural inclination for
feminine gentleness and the sweetness they add to
life. Mrs. Maxwell, wife of the Black Rod, in
whose house he was kept for nearly a year, con
fided to her gossips that he was the most pious
soul she had ever seen, but that he was a silly
fellow to talk to a woman.

Curiously enough this custom was maintained

1 88 LAUD'S LIBERALITY.

at Lambeth till a late date. The wife and family
of the Archbishop resided at a house outside the
palace, known as " Mrs. Moore's " or " Mrs. Manners
Button's lodging." In the time of the latter the
young ladies of the family were conducted there
by footmen with flambeaux every night, after
having paid a respectful adieu to their parent by
kissing his hand, and returned to breakfast in
the morning.

Laud had a bountiful mind. His munificence
was princely. He had no kind of taint of niggard
liness or selfish saving in his composition. The
Church had lavished her worldly gifts upon him,
and he distributed them royally. It had invariably
been his custom when inducted into a living, — and
he had held many, — to set aside a fixed proportion
of the stipend as an annual pension for twelve
poor persons in the parish ; to reserve one-fifth for
charity ; to rebuild or repair the parsonage house.
Wherever he went, at Abergwili, at St. John's, at
Lambeth, at Reading, he built and restored screens
and windows, organs and sacred vessels. Upon
these he lavished wealth. He gave the University
of Oxford over a thousand manuscripts ; he en
dowed the Arabic professorship there. The only
complaint of the kind made against him was by
the Kentish gentry and clergy, who complained

HIS WILL. 189

that the old diocesan entertainments had given
place to a general hospitality. They contrasted
him unfavourably with Abbot. " His servants,"
they said, "hung about Westminster Hall, St.
Paul's, and the Royal Exchange, with tickets of
invitation in their hands, to catch persons of
quality " ; this they grudged. He died a moderately
wealthy man. His will is still extant — there are
innumerable legacies to old servants and relations.
He bequeaths seven magnificent rings. The fol
lowing entries are worth noting : —

" I take the boldness to give to my Deare and
Dread Sovereign King Charles (whom God blesse)
i,ooo/., and I doe forgive him the Debt which hee
owes me, being 2,000!., and require that the two
tallies for it be delivered up.

" I give to the Rl Honourable George, Ld Duke
of Buckingham, his grace, my chalice and patens
of Gold ; and theis I desire the young Duke to
accept and use in his Chapell, as the memorial of
him who had a faithfull heart to love, and the
honour to be beloved of his father. Soe God
bless him with wise and good counsells, and a
heart to follow them."

In his life he never fell into the least degree of
nepotism, so common and so excusable a fault
of the age. It was said that he relieved his friends,

OLD ST. PAUL'S.

but would not raise them. He had a near kins
man, Fuller tells us, at Oxford, a good scholar, but
of a wild and indolent disposition, and inclined to
trust to his relationship with the great man. This
lad he utterly refused to help or advance till he
should altogether reform himself. " Breed up your
children well," he is recorded to have said to a
needy relative, "and I will do what I can and
ought to raise them."

As might have been expected, one of the pro
jects into which he flung himself with the greatest
enthusiasm was the restoration of St. Paul's.

Old St. Paul's, one of the least respectable of
historical monuments, was a structure of immense
length and height, but ill-built and inconvenient
to the highest degree. It had an ugly wooden
vaulting throughout. The nave had become a kind
of Burlington Arcade ; it was lined with shops, and
was a fashionable promenade, — literally a "den
of thieves." It was a noted place for criminal
assignations. The whole edifice was leaky and
shaky, the foundations having subsided in the most
alarming manner. The vast spire had fallen down,
struck by lightning, and was replaced by a low
pediment.

King James took up the task, and contributed
a large sum. Inigo Jones was set to work, and

THE SMOKY CHIMNEY. 191

succeeded in producing one of the most horrible
and incongruous enormities that have ever dis
graced the earth. It was not even quaint.

The tower was adorned with four gigantic Ionic
volutes in place of flying buttresses, and an Ionic
portico was added at the west, together with such
other additions as the growing classical taste sug
gested. Houses were pulled down about it, so as
to afford a clear view of one of the most amazing
of structures.

Laud, with a zeal for collecting that would have
done credit to the nineteenth century, begged right
and left ; he got portions of the effects of intestate
persons diverted to it. One story is worth quoting.
A brewer near Lambeth had a chimney which
vomited an offensive smoke over the gardens. One
day when Laud was walking there with Noy, the
Attorney-General, it was particularly noticeable.
Noy offered to have it suppressed as a nuisance.
Laud said that he preferred enduring the smoke
to interfering with an honest man. When Noy
was gone he sent for the brewer, told him what had
occurred, adding that if he would atone for it by
a gift of £20 to St. Paul's no more should be said.
The man offered £10. Laud refused to bargain,
and the law took its course ; the chimney was
condemned.

BRISK, BUT IRRITABLE.

He was fond of talking to specialists, especially
on Political or Economic questions, and astonished
them by the depth and lucidity of his grasp of
their subject and his extreme quickness at seizing
points. His diligence, when Commissioner of the
Treasury, in inquiring into the details of the
Custom House, especially with regard to tobacco,
was unfavourably commented upon by the Puritans.

" He might have spent his time," they said,
" better, and more for his grace, in the Pulpit, than
sharking and raking in the Tobacco shop."

Of the chief nobility and gentry he kept a secret
catalogue, in which he entered notable facts, and
analysed their dispositions and tendencies.

He had a high, harsh, and irritable voice — full of
that kind of unconscious irritability that nervous
energy and uneasy health are apt to give. His
tendency to offend people unintentionally has been
already alluded to, but his unconciliatory attitude
shows itself, perhaps, most markedly in the extreme
odium he incurred among the chief advisers of the
Crown. Here and there came an uncompromising
advocate of the antique loyalty, like Strafford, whose
respect for the office carried him over the initial
dislike to the man, and his sharp imperious manner,
that so many felt. But, as a rule, they hated
his bluntness and incorruptibility ; they writhed

THE KINGS PARK. 193

beneath his cold just criticisms ; they felt no sort of
enthusiasm for the cause which he served so de
votedly. And, at the same time, he was a terrible
antagonist ; his character was so impersonal, so
independent, so pure, that it was ludicrous to allege
double-dealing, self-interest, or slackness against
him. They went a different way to work. Weston,
the Lord Treasurer, fabricated untruths consistently,
but Lord Cottington, Chancellor of the Exchequer,
set to work on far more subtle lines.

The following incident will afford the best possible
illustration of this. Charles, who inherited from
his father a passionate love of hunting, determined,
with that unreasonable tenacity that has seemed
to some so regal an attribute, to construct a gigantic
park, between Richmond and Hampton Court, for
red and fallow-deer, and to have it walled in — the
circuit being somewhat over ten miles — at national
expense.

The time was not a happy one. The Exchequer
was low ; the calls for money had been already
far too vehement. To gratify a private whim at
such a time was one of those unhappy mistakes
which Charles was always committing. And his
temper on these points was fatal ; he imagined it
to be inconsistent with his dignity or his duty to
make any concessions.

O

194 CHARLES WILL NOT HEAR REASON.

It was not merely walling-in of waste grounds ;
there were commons to be compensated for, farmers
to be bribed, gentlemen to be bought out of lands
held as freehold or on Crown leases. The king
offered royal terms because he was utterly unable
to afford it. Many yielded ; some refused. One
obstinate Naboth, with the largest estate of all,
gave people in general to understand that tyranny
was beginning in earnest ; that private property
was no longer safe from the rapacity of the Crown.

Lord Cottington received a number of petitions,
and interviewed many complainants, and taking
the whole business very much to heart, tried, by
much importunity and all sorts of legal delays, to
divert the king's purpose. At last Charles' sense of
dignity took fire. He told Cottington, who had
come for an audience, with a number of patent
petty reasons, that he was resolved to go through
with it, and had already caused " brick to be
burned, and much of the wall to be built on his
own land." Upon which Cottington gathered up
his papers, and went, in much discontent and dis
tress. He had honestly tried to serve the king in
delaying this selfish and irritating project ; and his
interference was merely considered impertinent.

Before long this unpopular scheme of the king's
became common talk. Laud made up his mind

COTTINGTON DISLIKES LAUD. 195

that he must remonstrate ; much as he disliked the
process, and much as he disapproved of standing
in opposition to the Anointed Sovereign, yet that
the king should be dear in the hearts of his people

was a stronger motive.

He spoke, and received an indifferent, indecisive
answer; he concluded, indeed, from it that the
king's mind was made up, but that his resolution
had been formed in consequence of insufficient
information of the mischief it was causing. Where
upon he went to Cottington, having heard by
rumour that he had made some opposition to it,
and urgently, and with great warmth, pressed him
to give the king good counsel in the matter.

Whether Cottington was seized with sudden
irritation at the patronizing way in which this was
done, and at the unwarrantable interference of the
Archbishop, or whether it was part of a deep
malevolent plan to bring Laud into discredit, is not
certain. Whichever it was, it shows Laud's un
happy touch in dealing with official pride, and his
inaptitude for delicate diplomacy. At all events
Cottington, in his gravest manner, stated that in
his opinion the king's wishes were perfectly reason
able, as the place was so convenient for his winter
exercise, that no one who wished him to be well
could conscientiously dissuade him.

196 AND FOOLS HIM.

Whereupon Laud took fire. Ugly words came
from him. He spoke of ruin and false coun
sellors, alienation of subjects from their king, and
the doom of treachery. Cottington, delighted to
see the conflagration flourish, proceeded to say
that to dissuade the king from his project could
only proceed from a want of affection to his
person, — was not sure, indeed, that it could not be
called treason. Laud, too angry to see through this
solemn but transparent fooling, asked his meaning ;
upon which Cottington replied that, " as the king's
health depended upon his recreation, it was essen
tial that the step should be taken." Laud, irritated
beyond endurance by these flimsy sophistries, and
blinded to their absurdity, flung from the room and
went straight to the king to inveigh against Cot
tington, taking some pains to make his statements
conclusive, and to discredit the Chancellor's pleas.

"My lord," said Charles, "you are deceived.
Cottington is too hard for you. Upon my word,
he hath not only dissuaded me more, and given
more reasons against this business than all the
men in England have done, but hath really ob
structed the work by not doing his duty as I com
manded him, for which I have been very much
displeased with him. You see how unjustly your
passion has transported you."

AN UNPARDONABLE OFFENCE. 1 97

It is probable that Charles was too dependent
on Laud, and too much moved by the evident
warmth and enthusiasm for himself which had
prompted these representations, to do more than
administer the dignified rebuke above given. But
it did not mend matters at Court — to have flung
into the king's presence on a wild-goose chase, and
to find that the man who fooled him was, after all,
seriously on his side, was the kind of action that
rankled in Laud's mind. He had no idea of
people in high positions acting from spite or with
double-facedness ; insincerity in the service of
God and the king was unpardonable. And so
he extended his disapproval to Cottington. In
another man it would have been hatred. But
Laud was not mean enough to hate ; he never
condescended so far — it was too personal an
action ; he merely disapproved on public grounds.

His style, both in speaking and writing, is terse
and emphatic ; but it is not a good style. Occa
sionally it is too homely and humorous, as
when, in one of his sermons at the Opening of
Parliament, he says, speaking of some sinister
prophecies about the future of the Church,
" I cannot tell whether this be Balaam that pro-
phesieth, or the Beast he rode on." He was not
satisfied with his writing himself; he published his

198 STYLE TERSE BUT HOMELY.

sermons unwillingly, and by his will ordered many
to be destroyed. Of his published speeches there
are very few ; the best known is that delivered at
the Star Chamber, on the occasion of Bastwick's
censure. I subjoin a few extracts : —

" Reformers," he says, " are tolerable, if we are
sure that they are patriots ; if not, if there is
any self-seeking motive, there is no species so
detestable.

" Quis tulerit Gracchos ? for it is apparent that
the intention of these men is to raise a schism,
being themselves as great incendiaries in the State
as they have been in the Church.

" Worship," he says, " is set at nought."
" For my own part, I think myself bound to wor
ship with Body as well as in Soul whenever I come
where God is worshipped. And were this kingdom
such as would allow no Holy Table standing in its
proper place, yet I would worship God when I
came into His house, and were the times such as
should beat down churches, and all the curious
and carven work thereof with axes and hammers,
as in Ps. Ixxiv. 6 — and such times have been — yet
would I worship in what place soever I came to
pray, tho' there were not so much as a stone
laid for Bethel. But this is the misery — 'tis super
stition nowadays for any man to come with more

SERMONS. 199

reverence into a church than a Tinker and his
Bitch come into an Alehouse ; the Comparison is
too homely, but my just indignation at the temper
of the times makes me speak it.

" Reverence is due towards His altar, as the
greatest place of God's residence here upon Earth.
I say the greatest, yea, greater than the Pulpit,
for there 'tis Hoc est Corpus memn ; but in the
Pulpit 'tis at most Hoc est Verbum mcum, and a
greater reverence no doubt is due to the Body
than to the Word of God. And so in relation
answerably to the Throne, where his Body is
usually present, than to the Seat whence his Word
useth to be proclaimed."

The sermons that remain to us, such as the little
volume published in '1651, are curiously difficult
reading ; they are closely argued, emphatically stated,
but have not the quality of permanence. I know
of no reading where the attention so persistently
wanders and is so rarely enchained. The whole
matter and style of controversy is utterly alien from
our own. They are mainly on unity, on the pre
rogatives of authority, and kindred subjects, crab-
bedly discussed. It is not nowadays sufficient, to
recommend political principles, that they should
be found to stand on an Old Testament basis ; a
verse of the Psalms is not sufficient to stamp

200 THE MODERNNESS OF GREATNESS,

a Parliamentary enactment as sound. But this
was different when the House of Commons was
not the "honourable" but the "godly" House, and
when members spoke with Bibles in their hands
and made a copious commentary of texts.

His speech in reply to a harangue of " sour
divinity " from Lord Saye and Sele on the abolition
of Episcopacy, and his controversy with Fisher,
the Jesuit, belong to the same class of literature.
They are justly forgotten.

For Laud was not one of those minds that win
an influence over all generations by the breadth of
their grasp, by their aloofness from all local and
temporary considerations ; he rather owed his
strength to his concentratedness, to his exact
adaptation to the position he held. Minds are of
two classes, general and special. As the historical
student comes across traces of the general mind,
his immediate feeling is, " How modern all this is ! "
This modernness has been attained by width of
view, by the largeness which is not at the mercy
of any surrounding circumstances or tendencies ;
and though such writings as these, and the thoughts
which they reflect, have an absorbing interest, yet
the actual life of such characters is apt to be
less interesting. They were too great, too liberal,
to abandon themselves to the controversies of a

LAUD'S PROVINCIAL REPORTS. 2OI

particular age ; from petty differences they turned
with weariness, because they had gazed upon truth
in its bewildering height and clearness.

Now the lives of those who fitted very closely
into the history of their own epoch, are apt to lose
interest if isolated from their immediate surround
ings. Thus those of Laud's writings which deal
with general subjects have forfeited nearly all their
value. It is when he comes into close contact with
the great movements and great personages of the
time that he instantly absorbs our attention.

Among the most interesting of the Laudian papers
at Lambeth are a number of annual Reports on the
ecclesiastical condition of his province, addressed
to the king. They are written in various hand
writings, never in the Archbishop's own, but always
signed by him. They begin on January 2, 1633.

Interesting for two reasons — Firstly, on account
of the trivialities with which they deal Any one
would expect a report of this nature to be detailed ;
but these, from their shortness, cannot be exhaustive,
though they treat of recalcitrant lecturers, non-
residence of bishops, ruinous churches, criminous
clerks, and much other small business. They are
very business-like documents, very different from
the reports sent in by Laud's predecessor, the
dreary paragraphs of which all begin with the same

202 THE KIN&S ANNOTATIONS,

formula, " For aught I know." That was not Laud's
line ; there was nothing in his province that he did
not either know or feel himself bound to know.

But the real interest of the collection centres in
the fact that every one of these reports has been
oculis sitbmissa fidelibus. The king read them
all, and, what is more, annotated them. In his tall
fine hand, with his exceedingly erratic spelling, he
has scribbled upon these documents and initialled
them.

For instance, in Laud's report of Lichfield and
Coventry, the following entry occurs : —

" The Lecturer went from Village to Village, and
at the end of the week proclaimed where they
should hear him next, that his Disciples might
follow : they say that this Lecturer is ordained to
illuminate the Dark Corners of the Diocese."

Against this the king has written (I give the
original spelling)—

" If tJier bee darke Corners in this Dioces, it were
fitt a trew light should illuminat it, and not by this
that is f alee and imcertaine. — C. R."
And again — •

" What the H. C. [High Commission] cannot doe
in this, I shall supply in a more powerful way"
And—

" Lett him goe, wee ar well ridd of him"

CHARACTERISTIC COMMENTS. 2O3

And-

" Try your way for some time''
And-

" It is most fifty
And-

" Herein I shall not fail to do my part '."
And-

" / shall doe so. Call for them:'

" Demande their helpe ; if they refuse I shall make
tJiem assist you"
At the end of one he writes —

" I hope it is to be under stoode that what is not
certeficd not to be amiss is right, inching the obser
vation of my instructions : that granted tJds is no
ill Certificat.

"Feb. i6J$. C- R"

These are such characteristic comments, so self-
willed and authoritative ; and it was so charac
teristic of the king to annotate — he did it on all his
books and papers. It is wonderfully interesting
to turn over these originals, to see the actual papers
that stood for so much, and the traces of the
thoughts of busy minds. I do not think that
anything in my researches gave me such a thrill of
pleasure as this little discovery : it confirms so
admirably the impression of the detailed and

204 THE DIARY.

paternal working of the whole institution ; it recalls
the days when kings had the disposition and the
leisure to busy themselves about unlicensed lecturers
at Coventry, and the position of the altar, and the
sale of Puritan tracts. We can hardly wonder
that Laud, backed with these marks of royal con
fidence and esteem, held his fatal progress with
scarcely a misgiving. That his Dread Sovereign,
like himself, was doomed to fall, was a dream too
fantastic to visit even that foreboding brain.

But of all Laud's remains the famous Diary is
by far the most interesting. It is quite by an
accident that it was made public. There is no
doubt, I think, that he would have made away
with it if he had known that it was to be handled
and selected by Prynne ; even, I believe, if he had
suspected that it was ever to see the light. And for
this very reason it deserves a very tender handling.
It is a collection of miscellaneous jottings of all
kinds ; anythingwhich struck him as being of interest
he appears to have entered — memoranda of public
events, very private entries, even mere unintelli
gible facts about his health, his dreams, his adven
tures of every kind — but all meant for his own
perusal, and for no other eye. That was not the
age when a public man might look forward, as is
the deplorable fashion now, with tolerable certainty

THE MYSTERIOUS INITIALS. 2O5

to the editing of his diaries and letters with copious
notes.

It is hard indeed to see any motive in such a
compilation, for it is evidently not put together
for purposes of business — it is far too miscellaneous
and casual ; he must have scribbled down some
what whimsically anything that struck him. It is,
as a consequence, full of mannerisms, and gives the
best possible picture, because it is so unconscious,
of the man.

Thus it is a strange book, of wonderful interest,
as the secret record of a very enigmatic mind.
It was an age of ciphers. The notorious " thorough "
which is so frequently found in his letters to
Strafford and in Stafford's replies is a sign of
this. " Thorough " stood, as has been said, for
some sweeping policy which they had discussed
together and bound themselves to carry out. But,
besides this, in the Diary there are constantly
occurring mysterious initials, the key to which
has never been found. Prynne's interpretation is
characteristic ; he professes to see in them the
record of clandestine and immoral intimacies.
This is, of course, nothing more than a defamation.

So far is clear. He seems to note his first meet
ing with certain people, and the various stages of
their intimacy. "There I first knew what E. H.

206 SUPERSTITIOUS HABIT.

thought of me." " Hope was given to me of A. H.,
Jan. I, which afterwards proved my great happiness.
I begin to hope it, Jan. 21. My next infortunate-
ness was with E. B., Dec. 30. A stay in this.
My great business with E. B. began Jan. 22. It
settled as it could, March 5. It hath had many
changes, and what will become of it God knoweth."

It is strangely superstitious too. He remarks
how often he is falling upon the day of " Decolla
tion of St. John Baptist." He notes such facts as
two robins flying into his study, his nose bleeding
(a rare occurrence), his picture slipping from the
wall, and many other trivial incidents — why, we
cannot quite divine, — perhaps it was an early habit
unconsciously contracted and never overcome, of
thinking of little events as portents. The well-
known parallel of Dr. Johnson will occur to every
mind ; he rebukes himself for mentioning such
things, and excuses himself humorously on the
ground that he has been accustomed to do so.

Those writers whose enthusiasm for Laud is
highest have dwelt much upon the devotional side
of his character. They speak of the buried life of
prayer as being his real life, that in which he moved
most easily, that to which he gratefully returned
in the intervals of business, as a jewel which he
took out to gaze upon in secret.

PRIVATE DEVOTION. 2O/

This rests upon some rather exaggerated ex
pression of remorse in the Diary, some hints of
his great delight in the Church Service, his book
of private devotions, and little more. But in the
Diary the devotional expressions bear a most
microscopic proportion to the secular entries ; and
any candid student must confess that the Devotions
are far more liturgical than devotional. It is not
the mystic who writes his prayers out in a book.
The precision of such an arrangement is thoroughly
antagonistic to the vaguer and more spontaneous
impulses of contemplation. No ! the man who
has his volume of private prayer is rather the soul
who feels the need of the frequent cleansing of
prayer, and at the same time is conscious of the
difficulty of attaining his end without some ex
traneous help and appointed form.

I do not think we are justified in saying more
than that he was a prayerful man, but more
liturgically prayerful than contemplatively. I do
not think that he went to his prayers for light and
leading (the one extract that I have given, p. 12,
is of too practical a kind), but that he looked
upon them as a bounden duty and as a source of
comfort. I am sure that his secular life was far
more real to him than the meditative life could
possibly have been.

208 DREAMS.

Lastly, his dreams. Of these he makes constant
mention. " Dreamed that all the teeth of my lower
jaw fell out save one, which I had much ado to
hold in with both my hands." " Dreamed that my
mother shewed me a certain old man ; he seemed
to lie upon the ground — merry enough, but with a
wrinkled countenance. His name was Grove." At
one time it was always about Williams. " Dreamed
that the Ld K. [Keeper], was dead : that I passed by
one of his men that was about a monument for
him : that I heard him say that his lower lip was
infinitely swelled and fallen, and he rotten already.
This dream did trouble me." " In my sleep his
Majesty King J. appeared to me [this was after
his death]. I saw him only passing by swiftly.
He was of a pleasant and serene countenance.
In passing he saw me and beckoned to me,
smiled, and was immediately withdrawn from my
sight.

" Sep. 26, Sunday. That night I dreamed of the
marriage of I know not whom at Oxford. All
that were present were clothed in flourishing green
garments. I knew none of them, but Thomas
Flaxnye. Immediately after, without any inter
mission of sleep (that I know of), I thought I saw
the Bishop of Worcester, his head and shoulders
covered with linen. He advised and invited me

THE RESTLESS BRAIN. 2OQ

kindly to dwell with them, marking out a place
where the Court of Marches of Wales was then
held. But not staying for my answer, he sub
joined, that he knew I could not live so meanly, etc.

" My dream of my Blessed Lord and Saviour,
J. C, one of the most comfortable passages that
I ever had in my life."

These are not important facts, but they are
characteristic. In constructing historical portraits,
we cannot afford to sacrifice any point, however
small. They only confirm the notion of the busy
mind, never resting even during sleep, turning over
and over in that grotesque image-land the capital
it has gained in the day.

210 RITUALISM.

CHAPTER XIV.

THERE is one question closely connected with
the life and principles of Laud which deserves
especial consideration, bearing as it does so nearly
upon the controversy which, consciously or uncon
sciously, is at the root of so much of the religious
dissidence of modern days.

The most ardent religious reformers of the present
time are perhaps to be found in the school that
attaches the highest possible value to the form and
ritual of worship. The Ritualists have established
their claim to serious consideration by the notable
success which attends their evangelistic efforts.
Among the poorest populations of large towns, that
class which political philosophers tell us contains
the already germinating seeds of our future rulers,
the Democracy, they labour unceasingly, and
their labours are not in vain. It seems at present
as if the only great successes which have been
recorded in the attempts to evangelize the masses

DISSENT. 2 1 1

have been attained by one or the other of two great
movements — the internal and the external.

The internal movement has been that of Dissent.
General Booth, whose sympathetic knowledge of
the wants of these bewildering millions has been
won by an inner acquaintance, through birth and
training, with these needs, represents perhaps most
adequately the most vigorous attempt that has been
made, so to speak, within the lower classes to raise
themselves spiritually. Mr. Moody has done the
same for the middle class. They have had, and con
tinue to have, their successes ; their converts are
numbered by tens of thousands.

The external movement has been numerically
even more successful, though conducted in a wider
and less concentrated manner. The Ritualists have
engaged successfully in the great war against the
lower nature of mankind when forced into its most
depraved luxuriance by the poisonous atmosphere
of our great cities.

The Socialists who have attempted the same
task have failed, because they have supposed that
a material solution of these problems is possible.
It is clear to any one who has seen and studied the
axioms of the case that nothing is possible but
a spiritual elevation.

The Ritualists have come to the conflict armed

212 WEAK CONFOUNDS STRONG.

with despised, but none the less potent weapons.
They have thought no influence too high for the
task. They have brought to the very poorest, forms
of mysterious antiquity, suggestions of truth couched
in the most mystical terms, ancient treasures of
art and music, movement and culture ; and these
things have been effective.

And yet these practices are of a kind which are
said to make the ordinary English layman " stamp "
with impatience when he witnesses them or hears
them described, at their extravagance, their petti
ness, their pretension. He cannot bring himself
to believe that a system which is based upon so
much that is antique and mannerized, that clings
so close to precedent and rule, that is so precise
and formal, can be anything but ludicrous and
unworthy of the Christian simplicity. And yet,
if he will look patiently at results, he must resist
that contemptuous impulse. He may say, of
course, that it is not the ritual, but the character
of the men that is effectual : but this is only trans
ferring the problem to another ground. It must
be made clear why men of such essential purity
and goodness cling so close to and regard as so
vital and potent these ceremonial appliances.

All attempts to bridge the gulf have failed. Broad
rational systems have melted into air. The

FORMALISM. 2 I 3

teaching of Maurice and Kingsley, once so
gloriously hopeful, is recognized to be hopelessly
unsatisfying. Unitarianism, even under Dr. Mar-
tineau, only attacks the balanced intellect, and
effects few conquests there. Positivism is con
fined to a few refined thinkers. The constant
outcry to liberalize Church dogma has done
nothing. There is no media via possible.

On the one hand there is the vehement accusa
tion that truth is clouded over with forms ; that
it is not life but Formalism ; that the essentials
have been overlaid with adventitious by-play ;
that justice has disappeared in the tithing of mint,
and truth is confused with anise. What spirituality,
it is said, can be found in a Creed which maintains
in the face of Science the resurrection of the body,
and holds the institution of Episcopacy to be nearly
Divine ?

On the other hand it is retorted that if the
symbolic form be lost the truth perishes too ; that
human nature is so weak that it needs material
reminders : that if they are Formalists, Christ was
a Formalist too ; that He laid down close rules of
ecclesiastical procedure, and guided with His Spirit
the nascent Church that developed them into an
organization.

Laud's position was the latter. He had no

214 OUTWARD REVERENCE.

patience with iconoclasts. He enjoined the abso
lute necessity of outward reverence upon humanity.
Compounded as we are, he said, of gross material
and spiritual insight, the flesh must prostrate
itself at the bidding of the spirit when it finds
itself in the presence of the great One of the
spiritual kingdom. But it cannot be doubted that
he held so fast to the form that the spirit was
partly blurred. If we could trace in his work the
spirit of ardent social reform, of absorbing anxiety
for the communication of spiritual truth, we might
have forgiven him ; but this we cannot discern.

It seems strange that he should have imagined
himself, without misgiving, to be treading closely
in the steps of that Master Who took His sacraments
from the commonest and most ordinary acts of
material life — eating and washing, — Who spoke of
the coming dissolution of all local worship, " not
at Jerusalem nor in this mountain," of the cere
monial freedom which awaited men. No rational
thinker can help feeling that the institution of a
ceremonial tyranny in that Name, to do that more
than human spirit honour, is one of the cruellest
ironies that has ever befallen the human race. No
one can read the gospel with unbiassed eyes and
not avow this.

" Should not the life be the sacrifice ? " was

PUBLIC WORSHIP. 215

asked by an eager unsatisfied searcher after truth,
of one of the greatest living exponents of Christian
truth. " Yes," was the answer ; " but where is
the hymn and the incense ? where are the white
garments of the priest ? "

May I be excused for here inserting a letter on
this immediate text, from a living Churchman, who
will be allowed by most to speak with authority
upon the subject? It seems to me to represent
so nearly what Laud would have wished to say,
had he possessed the idealizing power, the gift of
poetical expression, that I cannot feel it to be
beside the mark

" As to public worship, I think that there is real
depth in what Mr. - - said in his enigmatic
way. Besides the Life and Self (which cannot be
offered perhaps in a real sense except by union
with outward elements — just as Our Lord placed
His humanity in union with our life and the life
of our species for this among other purposes)—
besides Life and Self we surely ought to present
not only what we are, but what we have for a time—
the things which in this world our spirit or self is
allowed to possess, uq XPWIV* ^or use' and wmch
it will have to lay down. Of all these, the results
and the instruments of Art are the avOoe, the flower,
and those results which exist and pass, are born

2l6 THE CONSECRATION OF ALL GIFTS.

and die, are the subtlest and most delicate and
perfect. And those also which have an image of
eternity about them are at the other pole of per-
fectness. Form, colour, order, movement have
somehow to be offered as well as thought. Even
that which is ours only instantaneously — Time
—must have its consecration too, through the
dedicating of certain intervals to the Service
of God.

" Drop that for a minute.

" The yearning (which is so undeniable in all men)
for God requires speech. The roughest and rudest
come together to speak to God. In their plainest
way He speaks to them, and they know it.

" When they are delivered, or are being delivered
from material terms with regard to Him, only the
best persevere (those in whom the yearning is, as
I say, for God and not for comfort) in following
out what they find — namely, that the listening to
the records of His revelation through ages, and
the substance of it, and the speaking in common
to Him, and exhorting one another about the
hindrances in getting to Him, and the seeking His
hand in difficulties, affect their lives more than
anything else does. This simplest, plainest worship
in common strengthens as well as reminds them to
rededicate their lives and spirits to Him. Nothing

THE SENSUOUS REGION.

can eradicate the conviction — the experimental
conviction they all entertain — that it is not the
exercise of the worship, but an undoubted answer
made to their worship which is the strength. They
sought a Presence, and they have found it. Surely
they are not wrong in gathering that what obtains
so gracious an answer is acceptable to the Answerer
— a sweet-smelling savour — CKT/ZT) Ev§oicfac-

" Now, as Life becomes more beautiful in this
sensuous region, the question comes, ' Is this a new
world we have found for ourselves ? Is it a region
into which we shall enter, and do without God there ?
Or is it capable of being sanctified like all else we
have known in plainer ways ? ' There is a trembling
about the question. But surely it has been rightly
answered, and the dedication of all those perfect-
nesses is lawful and right. And the glory of Art
goes up to Him from those who have it for use, t<<;
yjpf\(j(v, and the appropriateness, the fi»So»a'a of it,
is in the very nature of things.

" But now, I own, I have for years past looked
on pleased but anxious to see our worship all over
England getting ornamental. The white garments
and the chanting and the windows trouble me with
a strange trouble while I hope all is well. I can
explain by an almost ridiculous thing. I can't
endure to use a Psalter with notes to every syllable.

2l8 PSALLAM ET MENTE.

I become as if I were chanting Vedas. I fear that
I shall come to think that we don't know that what
we do is acceptable, except that we can't find out
what else to do than what is actually in man to do.
" For ourselves, I believe the only thing is to
throw consciousness into all ; to fling up, before
each attempt at an elaborate piece of service,
before even each change of chant, before each
sitting down even to practise at the organ, the
thought, ' This is Thine, O Lord : of Thee, in Thee :
O make it also for Thee.' "

WHAT IS CLAIMED FOR LAUD. 2ig

CHAPTER XV.

IN reviewing shortly the problems suggested by
such a life and death, we must first consider what
claims are made for him and the value of his work
by his most ardent admirers. "The English
Church," they say, " is, in its Catholic aspect, a
memorial of Laud." This is a considerable claim.
When we ask how this is supported, they begin by
saying that we owe the retention of Episcopacy in
the Church to him. The causal connection, if there
be one, is intricate. Episcopacy was abolished in
Laud's lifetime, and was resumed as a matter of
course when the monarchical and Tory reaction
against Puritanism set in. But I venture to main
tain that it was not by any means Laud's memory
which consecrated the thought of Episcopacy to its
restorers, as Charles's memory undoubtedly conse
crated monarchy. On the contrary, I believe that
it was almost entirely due to Laud's personal un
popularity that Episcopacy was so summarily

220 EPISCOPACY— THE PRAYER BOOK.

abolished ; I believe it might have continued intact
through the Rebellion but for him. Let us press
Laud's supporters a little further. We ask if there
is anything else that we owe to Laud. They
answer, the Prayer Book. That assertion I again
conceive to rest on very much the same basis of
proof. It cannot be established. Last of all they
fall back triumphantly upon the position of the
altar in our churches. I confess that, though I
should deplore the alteration of that arrangement,
I cannot bring myself to be enthusiastic about it ;
it does not seem to be identical with the Catholic
aspect of the English Church. In fact, to attribute
to Laud the existence of that aspect, is as absurd
as to say that we owe our present monarchy to
Charles I. The manner of Charles's death created,
I think, a very enthusiastic detestation of the prin
ciples which sanctioned it, and so may be said to
have had an indirect effect ; but I do not believe
that even this can be asserted about Laud.

The fact is, we do not like to speak lightly about
a man who sealed his principles with his blood.
There is an unconscious reverence for devotion
that will flinch at nothing, not even the last passage,
of which we cannot and would not rid ourselves.
And when that devotion is founded on a mistaken
conception, such a death becomes one of the most

FAILURE OF LAUD'S IDEAL. 221

tragic and pathetic sketches that we can well see,
but it is not necessarily inspiring : it arouses sym
pathy for the sufferer, none for the cause in which
he is suffering.

And Laud's cause was not a true one. His ideal of
the Church which he upheld falls far short of truth.
He did not believe the Church to be an all-em
bracing society for holy living, the possessor of cer
tain gracious thoughts and Divine influences, which
cannot be exactly felt or received outside her
bounding line. The freedom of the gospel was lost
upon him. He chose to regard her as an essentially
political organization, sister of the State. Her
ecclesiastics were to be courtiers too ; she was to
have her pageants and her days of observation,
her high festivals and solemnities. In these he
conceived some essence of her being to lie ; he
did not look upon them as mere adjuncts of a
huge human organization, which in the ideal society
would find no place.

" I set upon the repair of the Material and
Spiritual Church together," as Laud wrote to
Strafford. This was his ideal for the Church. This
is the question that keeps pressing itself home
upon us as we look at the character of the efforts
in which he so ceaselessly engaged. We see lecturers
deprived, fonts repaired, altars railed off, surplices

THE REALITY OF PURITANISM.

enforced ; we find immense noisy activity : in the
centre there is a bustling eager figure, signing,
writing, scolding, confuting ; — and all the time a
terrible suspicion is creeping on us : " To what
purpose ? " Clumsy and ugly as the Puritan methods
were, forfeiting as they did so much of their due
genuine influences by their contempt for externals,
yet these grim tiresome figures had conduct at heart.
And had Laud ? He would have affirmed it, un
doubtedly ; but, looking at his work, can we feel
that his secret aspirations turned in that direction ?
Not honestly, I think. He worshipped externals ;
he was a Formalist. The Puritans were weakened
by their want of forms, for human nature must
have forms ; it desires them so eagerly : but a still
greater danger is waiting at the other end. It is
dangerous to be without them, but it is still more
dangerous to depend on them.

Let us hear what Heylyn, Laud's most uncritical
friend and admirer, has to say of the progress and
ideals of the Church under him.

" If we look," he says, " into the Church as it
stood under his Direction, we shall find the Prelates
generally more intent upon the work committed
to them, the Clergy joining together to advance the
work of Uniformity recommended to them, the
Liturgy more punctually executed in all the parts

PROGRESS OF THE CHURCH. 22$

and offices of it. The Word more diligently
preached, the Sacraments more reverently adminis
tered than in some score of years before ; the
people more Conformable to those Reverend Ges
tures in the House of God, which, though pre
scribed before, were but little practised ; more cost
laid out upon the beautifying and adorning of
Parochial Churches, in furnishing and repairing
Parsonage Houses than in all the times since the
Reformation ; the Clergy grown to such esteem, for
parts and power, that the gentry thought none of
their Daughters to be better disposed of, than such
as they had lodged in the Arms of a Churchman ;
and the Nobility grown so well affected to the
state of the Church, that some of them designed
their younger sons to the Order of Priesthood to
make them capable of rising in the same Ascen
dant." What a climax ! Then follows a passage
on Doctrine, praising " the Uniformity of teaching,
and the Piety and learning of her defenders." The
word " piety" is but once mentioned in the passage.
It is too much like the reports on which we build
our ideas of Church progress nowadays — so many
churches built, so many communicants, so much
money subscribed. Of course vast subscription lists
are indicative of a spirit of much willingness to sac
rifice material goods to secure the Church's material

224 MAINLY MATERIAL.

prosperity ; but if these are the lines which her
chief pastors lay down for her advance, is not the
flock deluded after all ? And is not Laud's life an
instance of this ? Look at his most private
thoughts. If the heart be set en character-ideals,
on the simplification of the issues of life, and accepts
the material organization as a convenient substratum
of possibilities, then the true hopes will break out
somewhere — in letters, in sermons, in recorded
speech. This does not appear in Laud. On the
Church's material greatness his mind was set ; to
this his secret aspirations turned ; after this the
fervent longings of his spirit went out. State and
Church, two fair sisters hand-in-hand, were to re
lieve the nation of all independent thought, of all
individual wishes, of all private ventures after
happiness : public happiness was to be secured on
a large public scale. Government, Rule — not self-
government, the will of the people — were his sacred
words. Authority, Tradition — these the people were
to follow, paying such due reverence at the shrines,
as God had appointed, and as the historical issues
of worship had modified. This was Laud's dream.
It was a splendid vision ; only do not let us make
the mistake of thinking or calling it a religious
one.

By zeal for this great institution, by passionate

SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS. 22$

love for her traditions, by blind prejudice for her
methods, Laud rose and fell ; not a single thought
of self mingled with the devotion with which he
served her. If the three mysterious temptations
of our Saviour correspond to the stages of trial
through which human leaders pass, Laud may be
said to have passed safely through the first two,
but to have succumbed to the last. He did not
use the power within him to gratify luxurious
tastes ; he did not use it to surround himself with
an atmosphere of peculiar honour ; but, when con
fronted with the temptation to have recourse to
lower earthly weapons for the establishment of a
spiritual kingdom, he was blinded there and fell.

To be a hero it is not enough to be true — a man
must also be tender : to have no taint of self, or
selfish aims, is not enough. There must be a de
liberate extension of sympathy to others. Laud's
ideal was a high one, but it was too hardly, too
militantly, too unsympathetically held. He never
thought it a duty to examine the treasured ideals
of others ; he never for an instant had even the
curiosity to regard life from another point of view.
In ordinary life it was the same. He had no
friends. He had some faithful dependants who
served him well — Heylyn and Hyde ; some strong
political allies who admired — as who does not ? —

Q

226 LACK OF TENDERNESS.

the tremendous fibre and force of such a nature :
but of the depth and delicacy that attract and re
tain equal outspoken friendships, he had none. Of
all great churchmen he is the only one who had
not even female admirers.

And therefore we reluctantly confess that, in an
age of heroes, a stage crowded with heroic figures,
Laud is not among them. Pym and Strafford,
Buckingham and Cromwell, these are men indeed.
Not so Laud, not his luckless master. As head of
a great Christian society, he was so strangely un-
Christlike : ready enough with the scourge of small
cords, he showed no mercy to those who made their
gains out of the sanctuary ; but neither had he love
for the poor crowds outside. He could pull down,
but not build up.

The great mistake, indeed, that the three martyrs
made was this : they were not great enough to
grasp the beauty of feeling with the popular mind,
nor enlightened enough to see the necessity for it.
They misunderstood and miscalculated the force
of the democracy. They clapped the valves down,
so that when roaring and tumultuous the irre
pressible strength streamed out, wantoning in all
the consciousness of newly discovered might, the
three champions of repression were struck down.

If they were sincere, it is well with them ; they

YET TRUTH IS MANY-SIDED. 22/

were blest if they did it faithfully. For we must
remember that seekers after truth are but as men
wandering on a sphere ; though they strike away
from some, from any point, with faces averted and
backs rigidly turned, let them only move straight
forward and they will meet again upon some un
known pole.

A LIST OF 1JVULVS PRKKKRMKN'TS.

Kdlow of Su JohnV.

ChAitain to the Karl of

Vicar of Stanlivx

Rcctvvr vVf North KUwvvrth lLwesimhirc>, AUV\ oh*am to

No*th KUwxvrth cxchAi^vt (vvt \Vcst Tillnu, in K
of

in the s*nve yx^A^ (kvr Vi

of Su John*$. Ch»i>l»m u> the Ki
of l>x^vlc<v in Lincoln C
of Hvmiin§vKvn» in

lV*n of OknK«st«r« rt^^cvl West Tilbury,
Vicaur of IWtwk (Leioc^crshiif): rct^cvl Norton.

of St» Davids ; rt?5^\c\l IV^ivlent^hip of St. John**.
VkMir

Rfehop of London*
ArchNshv of C»ni«rbar>\

AM> Axx^s u>»rr«\

BENSCN, A. C. BX

William Laud sometime Archbishop 5196*
^f Canterbiiry. .13