William Laud was a controversial figure from his student days in Oxford in the 1590s to his death on the scaffold in 1645, Laud rose to prominence in a period during which it became clear that the Church of England meant different things to different men. These were decades which witnessed theological wrangles between the Calvinists (who asserted that men were predestined to either salvation or reprobation) and the Arminians who believed in God's universal grace and the free will of man. They were years too of sharper disagreements over the liturgy between those who rejected and those who emphasised the ceremonies prescribed in the canons of the Church and the Book of Common Prayer. Laud's career reflected as well as affected the course of those wrangles and disputes. Not surprisingly he has remained the subject of controversy ever since.
To some a martyr for the Church of England, to others a crypto-Catholic who corrupted it, judgements on the archbishop have too often reflected religious preferences more than careful consideration of the evidence. Those who brought Laud to trial in 1644 charged him with innovation, Arminianism and popery. Recently, after centuries of disagreement, historians have come close to endorsing those charges: William Laud, the historical verdict now has it, was the prelate who introduced novel doctrines and elaborate ceremony, the archbishop who wrecked the Elizabethan and Jacobean compromise – in the words of Patrick Collinson, 'the greatest calamity ever visited upon the Church of England'. Some would argue that Laud thereby fostered an even greater calamity: by exciting fears that an Arminian was but the spawn of a papist, he fuelled the paranoia about popery which kindled the civil war.
Both the disagreements of contemporaries and the recent unanimity among historians would have puzzled Laud himself. For where he met with controversy, he eschewed it; in contrast to the charge of innovation he asserted his conservatism. How are we to explain this? Not least of the obstacles in the way of understanding is the nature of the evidence. Laud is too often depicted from the standpoint and propaganda of his enemies. His own letters and speeches, even more his sermons and treatises, remain inexplicably neglected. Yet Laud's own words cast a different light upon his intentions and better knowledge of his intentions in turn illuminates his actions.
It seems appropriate this month, three hundred and fifty years after his elevation to the see of Canterbury, to allow William Laud to speak for and explain himself. On the supposedly crucial questions of theology, however, he spoke and wrote little. Laud framed no new articles, nor crafted any new catechism for the Church. His silence is itself informative: Laud did not debate doctrine because it was not of great interest to him. Whilst, on royal orders, he entered reluctantly ('I am no controvertist') into theological debate with the Catholics, he never took up the theological cudgel against the puritans. Laud's personal doctrinal beliefs elude us – and probably never taxed him. At his trial, he denied that he was an Arminian and if there is any evidence to question the denial it escaped the searches of his indefatigable prosecutor, William Prynne. Even during the more comfort- able days of his ascendancy, Laud never attempted to create an Arminian clergy – either as Chancellor of Oxford or as Archbishop of Canterbury. Once again his position is perhaps best explained by his own words – to the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, who was composing a pro-Arminian treatise on predestination: 'I am yet where I was, that something about these controversies is unmasterable in this life'.
But because he campaigned for no doctrinal position, we should not assume that Laud was loyal to no church. Laud was devoted to the Church of England, that is to a church of apostolic antiquity, that part of the universal Catholic Church which had preserved the purity of the primitive church by casting off the corruptions and accretions of Roman superstition. While the Church of England insisted upon subscription to certain articles of faith, it did not, like the Roman Catholic Church, press what were only opinions or preferences by 'making them matters of necessary belief. When disputed questions arose, they were to be settled by the Head of the Church and the bishops. Concerning things indifferent men might hold what opinions they would in private, showing only such public obedience as was necessary for the peace of the Church.
For first and foremost, Laud sought peace and unity, urging that 'in and about things not necessary, there ought not to be a contention to a separation'. It was a philosophy which he practised as well as preached. Laud resolved 'in handling matters of religion to leave all gall out of my ink'. His support for royal proclamations forbidding disputes, his friendship and correspondence with Catholics and puritans, his patronage of divines with whom he probably disagreed are all evidence of the enactment of that resolution. In the one work of theology which he published that men 'may see and judge of my religion', Laud declared a faith in Christ 'as it was professed in the ancient Primitive Church and as it is professed in the present Church of England'. His greatest wish, he maintained, was that theological differences 'were not pursued with such heat and animosity'.
Laud's one work of theology, his Conference with Fisher the Jesuit , is not often read. It is ironic that one of the best defences of the Church of England against Rome was penned by a prelate charged with popery. When we read its pages, we are stuck by its moderation and ecumenism, not by denominational zeal or fanaticism. This was the work which together with Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and the works of Lancelot Andrewes, Charles I was to give to his daughter as the corpus of Anglicanism. In the preface to the second edition of 1639, Laud took up the subject which was central to his career as bishop, archbishop and Privy Councillor: a concern for order and decency. To Laud:
No one thing hath made conscientious men more wavering in their own minds, or more apt and easy to be drawn aside from the sincerity of religion professed in the Church of England than the want of uniform and decent order in too many churches of the Kingdom.
External worship was the outward witness and bulwark of the inner faith. And external worship was manifested in and through ceremonies. Ceremonies were not the essence of religion: men should not place 'the principal part of... piety in them'. But ceremonies were necessary as 'the hedge that fence the substance of religion from all the indignities...' While there was room within the Church for differences of belief and doctrine, the hedge of ceremony, in order to protect the Church, had to be uniform in all its parts: 'unity cannot long continue in the church where uniformity is shut out at the church door'. A belief in uniformity of ceremony as the essential prop of inner spirituality was not new: it had been the policy of Archbishops Parker, Whitgift and Bancroft and of Queen Elizabeth herself. And in the 1630s it was not the concern only of Archbishop Laud, but of Charles I himself.
To the King and his archbishop the external fabric and outward worship of the church were subjects of urgent concern. Churches with decaying roofs and broken windows, churchyards with wandering swine or open privies, no less services devoid of prescribed ceremonies and canonical vestments, invited the papist to scoff at and the sceptic to suspect a poverty of faith within. In the eyes of Charles I and Laud, those who had laid stress upon the preaching of God's word had exhibited too little care of his home. Laud did not wish to denigrate sermons: he believed them 'the most necessary expositions and applications of Holy Scripture'; he preached them regularly. But the Church embraced tradition as well as Scripture, the sacrament as well as the word. And so in the detailed articles of enquiry issued for Laud's metropolitical visitation, we find a painstaking concern for the condition of the church, the churchyard and the church furniture and for the diligence of the bishops, the clergy and the parish officers. Like the Statutes which as Chancellor he drew up for Oxford University, Laud's visitation articles, as Archbishop of Canterbury, were intended above all to secure order and discipline.
Order and discipline required effective authority within the Church. Because he believed the Church 'overgrown, not only with weeds within it, but with trees and bushes about it', Laud stressed the authority of the bishops and clergy as the gardeners who might best prune them. If he was concerned to repel the encroachments made by the laity upon the terraine of clerical jurisdiction, it was because only the clergy and episcopacy could enforce the order and uniformity which hedged the Church. Lay patronage to livings or the common lawyers' challenge to the church courts weakened the authority of the Church and undermined the uniformity which was its support. Charles I agreed: 'I will have no Priest have any necessity of a lay dependency'. Behind the attempts to bolster the fiscal independence, quality, power and prestige of the clergy lay their central purpose: the concern for decency and order in matters sacred.
It was a goal pursued with more moderation than fanaticism. Laud preferred persuasion to suppression, believing that the attractions of the 'beauty of holiness' would soon become self- evident. In answer to the charges of his enemies, Laud boasted that he had deprived fewer clergy than his predecessor, the latitudinarian Archbishop Abbot. There is much evidence to support the claim. Laud proceeded 'tenderly' with a mad lecturer at Leicester who had been expelled by the Dean of the Arches; with the foreign congregations at Canterbury, even in 1638, he believed it 'fitting to keep a moderate hand'. In visitation articles, he enjoined upon the clergy 'mildness and temperance' in order to win over recusants. With regard to receiving the communion at the altar rails, he left it as a matter of conscience, maintaining that 'the people will best be won by the decency of the thing itself. Laud made painstaking efforts to win over the refractory. Only those who could not be won, those who would not subscribe to the articles and ceremonies prescribed by the Prayer Book and canons, were forced from the church and, in some cases, the country. Concerning such refractory nonconformists, Charles I himself issued the orders: 'let him go; we are well rid of him'.
Throughout his archiepiscopacy Laud remained very much the King's man. A monarch obsessed with order and uniformity, in Church as in state, Charles I had elevated Laud not for his theology (he was no theologian) nor even primarily for his counsel (Charles knew his own mind) but for his concern with ceremony and his pertinancy as an administrator. Laud was not always 'master of this work, but a servant to it'. The King by letters, instructions, audiences, by marginal comment on visitation reports, chivvied the archbishop who in turn harried the episcopacy and clergy. Often Charles proved more intransigent than Laud. It was Charles I who, after hearing the St Gregory's case at the Council board, recommended the altar be set at the East end of the church; Laud enquired only whether it was placed in 'such convenient sort within the chancel or church as that the minister may be best heard', But on most matters the architect and his patron shared a common vision of the final edifice: a church built from the fabric of decency and ceremony, – the place for worship in peace and uniformity.
It is an irony that it was Archbishop Laud (and King Charles) with whom the puritans went to war. For both in his policies and in his personality, Laud had much in common with them. Like the puritans he sought an upright and well-educated clergy; like them he was virulent against popery, hard against clerical failings and intolerant of lay profligacy. Like the puritans he urged harsh measures against drunkenness and incontinency – be it in the counties or colleges of England. Personally too, Laud, like his royal master, was an intense, ascetic and self-disciplined figure. His diary, a record of dreams, omens, and insecurities, of the application of scriptural text to everyday life, has been aptly described as a puritan document. His portrait, a dark brooding figure, suggests a sombre demeanour and stern determination which even the flamboyant romanticism of Van Dyck failed, or never attempted, to soften. It was their tragedy – and that of the Church – that Laud and the puritans shared a mutual fear, a common paranoia. To him, the nonconformists, in undermining the uniformity of external worship, threatened the fabric of Church and State. To them, after years of laxity, an insistence upon ceremony and an emphasis upon the position of the clergy smacked of popery. By examining Laud's words, we have seen that had they known more of his intentions, the fears of the puritans might have been calmed. Those who knew Laud well neither feared nor suspected him. Philip Warwick, a gentleman of the bed- chamber, thought his 'grand design was no other than that of our first Reformation'. But it was that Reformation which others felt Laud might reverse. As Clarendon was astutely to reflect, he failed to make 'his designs and purposes appear as candid as they were'.
Further Reading
- Many of the older studies of Laud reflect too intrusively the theological persuasions of their authors. The best modern biography is H.R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud (Macmillan, 1962)
- The best case for the prosecution is N.R.N. Tyacke 'Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution' in Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (Macmillan, 1973), and Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (OUP, 1983)
- A more sympathetic appraisal is awaited, but see H.C. Porter, Reformation and Recreation in Tudor Cambridge (Hamden, Conn., 1972)
About the Author
Kevin Sharpe is a lecturer in history at the University of Southampton and is preparing a study of The Personal Rule of Charles I for Oxford University Press.