Is There a Case for Archbishop Laud?

There is certainly a case against Archbishop Laud. An impressive number of historians are agreed that he was one of Charles I’s worst appointments, both as Archbishop of Canterbury and as a leading government minister. Robert Ashton, for instance, argues that ‘If there is one person to whose actions and policies the fall of the Stuart monarchy can be attributed, that person is William Laud.’ According to Kevin Sharpe, historians almost unanimously describe Laud as ‘the evil counsellor whose influence on Charles cost the king his crown’. In particular, Laud’s alleged attempt to impose the Prayer Book on Scotland caused the Bishops’ Wars (1639-40) which necessitated the summoning of the Long Parliament and led directly to Charles’ defeat in the Civil War. As a result, both archbishop and king went to the scaffold. Patrick Collinson claims that Laud’s ecclesiastical leadership amounted to ‘the greatest calamity ever visited upon the Church of England’, while H.R. Trevor-Roper’s biography is so unsympathetic that, according to R.H. Tawney, it was ‘like a study of Wordsworth by an author who didn’t like poetry’. From Macaulay (‘ridiculous old bigot ... superstitious old driveller’) to Laud’s most recent biographer Charles Carlton, who is obsessed with his insecurity and psychological vulnerability, the verdict is the same: at best Laud needs pity.