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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 HOOKMOZLE 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 S u . 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 L a 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 L d 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, framing 1 , 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(Z y 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 GENTLEMAN 1 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 v 1 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 R l Honourable George, L d 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 L d 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 XPW IV * ^ 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) Evoicfac- 

" 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 fiSoa 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*$. Chi>lm u> the Ki 
of l>x^vlc<v in Lincoln C 
of HvmiinvKvn in 

lV*n of OknKstr 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 Cnirbar>\ 



AM> Axx^s u>rr\ 



BENSCN, A. C. BX 

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