William Laud

English archbishop

• Born: October 7, 1573
• Birthplace: Reading, Berkshire, England
• Died: January 10, 1645
• Place of death: London, England

As archbishop of Canterbury and as a martyr for his conception of the Church of England, Laud contributed powerfully to the Anglo-Catholic tradition in English religion. The severity of his anti-Puritan policies led directly to the exodus of many Puritans, including the Pilgrims, to the New World.

Early Life

The son of a clothier, William Laud (LAWD) was born in Reading, halfway between London and Oxford, and those two places, capital and university town, were to be the poles around which most of his life revolved. After an early education at Reading Grammar School, at age sixteen he went to what was then one of Oxford’s newer colleges, Saint John’s. It had been founded in 1555 by a wealthy Reading man who also funded a scholarship for Reading boys that benefited Laud. Laud received bachelor and master of arts degrees in 1594, a bachelor of divinity in 1604, and a doctor of divinity in 1608. He remained at Saint John’s, first as a fellow (faculty member) of the college and then as its president from 1611 to 1621. He later showed his love for Oxford and Saint John’s with magnificent gifts, including valuable manuscripts and a beautiful new quadrangle.

Although laymen were present in Elizabethan Oxford and Cambridge in growing numbers, the universities continued to be primarily concerned with educating men for careers in the church. Theology was the most important discipline, and the dominant theological outlook in the late Elizabethan church was not merely Protestant but Calvinist. Calvinists all over northern Europe were playing leading roles in the struggle to defend Protestantism against Roman Catholic efforts to regain lost souls and lands. Only a year before Laud went to Oxford, the Spanish had attempted an invasion of England, the centerpiece of a plan to snuff out the Protestant cause in England, France, and the Netherlands. In 1618, the Thirty Years’ War broke out in Bohemia, it eventually spread through most of central Europe. English Protestants were deeply worried that Catholic victory on the Continent would be followed by an assault upon England, and those fears over the survival of the Protestant religion and national independence formed the backdrop to Laud’s career and were the source of much of the opposition that he faced.

In his early days in Oxford, Laud associated himself with a small party of anti-Calvinists, men who rejected Calvin’s doctrine of predestination in favor of belief in the importance of free will in the process of salvation. In 1604, he further angered the Calvinist Party in Oxford by publicly maintaining the need for bishops in a true Christian church. This and similar episodes during his days in Oxford illustrate significant aspects of his character: He held his views strongly, stated them truculently, and clung to them regardless of the consequences.

Laud was a man of small stature with a round, florid face and closely clipped hair. His personal habits were austere; in an age in which men in high office frequently exploited those positions for private advantage, he was incorruptible. An intensely hard worker who insisted on efficiency and thoroughness, he was an able administrator, and he put all of his considerable energies into the achievement of his goals for the Church of England. Furthermore, in his mind an orderly church meant an orderly society in which people would obey the king as well as the bishops. Anyone who attacked episcopacy was also attacking monarchy.

Life’s Work

The key to Laud’s rise to power was the friendship that he formed with George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham . Buckingham, the favorite of both James I and his successor, Charles I , convinced James to make Laud bishop of Saint David’s in 1621. James had reservations about Laud, but Charles I admired him and promoted him rapidly: to dean of the Chapel Royal (1625), bishop of Bath and Wells (1626), bishop of London (1628), chancellor of the University of Oxford (1630), and archbishop of Canterbury (1633). Laud was, in fact, Charles’s principal adviser on religious matters from the beginning of the reign in 1625, as Charles had no use for the Calvinist archbishop he inherited from his father.

Laud saw to it that virtually all appointments to higher positions in the church went to anti-Calvinists (who were known as Arminians by the 1620’s). These clergymen quickly spoke up in support of Charles’s policies, urging Englishmen to pay the taxes that Parliament had refused to vote. Laud’s influence was not limited to clerical matters; he was a commissioner for the Treasury, a privy councillor, and a judge on the Court of Star Chamber. Because one of Laud’s goals was the restoration of churchmen to the kind of political power they had often exercised in the Middle Ages, he was pleased to have such duties. Many people, however, believed that churchmen should concentrate exclusively on religious tasks and be denied authority in civil matters.

Once in power, Laud endeavored to suppress theological controversy, and he was behind the royal order prohibiting preaching or writing about the doctrine of predestination (November, 1628). He worked hard to establish what he called “the beauty of holiness,” by which he meant that the outward worship of God should be conducted in complete conformity with the Book of Common Prayer by priests wearing the required vestments. Following in the footsteps of Lancelot Andrewes , bishop of Winchester, Laud was a great advocate of ceremonies. He believed that although the truest worship was inward, “the external worship of God in his church is the great witness to the world, that our heart stands right in the service of God.”

For many Calvinists, whether moderate or more zealous (such as the Puritans), Laud’s ban on disputation about predestination and his drive to restore ceremonies smacked of “popery.” Because Charles I’s French-born queen, Henrietta Maria , was encouraging conversion to Catholicism at court with some success, Laud’s activities were even more suspect. Puritans were infuriated by his policy of suspending and depriving their preachers because of their refusal to wear the surplice or otherwise abide by ceremonial requirements. Some went abroad to escape them, even as far as New England. Their quarrel with Laud was fundamentally simple, for they believed that the heart of worship was the hearing of the word of God read and preached. Laud said, however, that “the altar is… greater than the pulpit” because “a greater reverence” is due to God’s body than to God’s word. Thus, sacraments took precedence over preaching. For many of Laud’s enemies, the Protestant Reformation in England had not gone far enough; too many remnants of “popery” were not yet expunged.

For Laud himself, the problem was that the Reformation had gone too far. In his view, greedy laymen had seized authority and property that rightfully belonged to the clergy, and his aim was to restore the clerical estate to its former glory. Laud had a particularly exalted notion of the calling of bishops, insisting, against Elizabethan tradition, that they held their authority by divine right. He employed the Court of Star Chamber to punish the opponents of episcopacy with fines, imprisonment, and even publicly inflicted mutilation. His most famous victim, a Puritan lawyer and pamphleteer named William Prynne, suffered branding on the cheeks and the loss of his ears.

Although always active in the effort to improve the Church’s financial resources, Laud tried to prevent laymen from having anything to say about how the money was spent. He forced the dissolution of the Feoffees for Impropriations, an organization established by Puritans to finance preaching, and confiscated the money they had raised. His program inevitably led to clashes with the common lawyers; they wanted to narrow the jurisdiction of church courts, whereas he wanted to increase it. When punishing a lawyer who had justified his destruction of a stained-glass window on the grounds that the parish vestry had approved, Laud commented: “Thus much let me say to Mr. Sherfield, and such of his profession as slight the ecclesiastical laws and persons, that there was a time when churchmen were as great in this kingdom as you are now; and let me be bold to prophesy, there will be a time when you will be as low as the church is now, if you go on to contemn the church.”

At least in the short run, Laud proved a poor prophet. His attempt to extend liturgical uniformity to Calvinist Scotland provoked a massive rebellion in 1637. Charles I, his efforts to quell the Scots having failed, was forced to call his first Parliament in eleven years in 1640. Although it was soon dismissed, its successor, the Long Parliament , was more durable. The majority of its members, convinced that Laud had been among the leaders of a plot to overthrow Protestantism and Parliament, voted to impeach the archbishop on December 18, 1640. Imprisoned in the Tower of London, Laud watched as the nation stumbled toward civil war and as laymen took over decision making in the church. His trial was delayed until 1644, and the prosecutor was William Prynne. Sentenced to death under an act of attainder, Laud was beheaded on Tower Hill on January 10, 1645.

Significance

Laud was not guilty of the charge that he had planned to subvert Protestantism in England, but he had pursued his goals of imposing a uniform and “High Church” style of ritual and restoring clerical authority and power in such a way as to make the charges against him credible to many members of the Long Parliament. To understand his fate, it is important to realize that to his contemporaries his program was innovative. He was trying to overthrow the Calvinist theological consensus and the “Low Church” liturgical style in which his enemies had been reared and which they wished to retain. Laud also was struggling to extirpate lay influence and authority that had come into the Church with the Reformation.

The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 brought episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer in its train, but the restored Church was a pale shadow of the politically powerful one that Laud had tried to build. Not until the Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century, which stressed the Church of England’s continuity with Catholic Christianity, did Laud and his ideas find admirers and advocates.

Bibliography

Collinson, Patrick. The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559-1625. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Building on the foundation of his important book on the Elizabethan Puritan movement, Collinson surveys the religious scene in England during James I’s reign.

Como, David. R. “Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London.” Historical Journal 46, no. 2 (June, 2003): 263. Examines the policies Laud pursued while he was bishop of London, focusing on how he enforced royal edicts against a discussion of predestination.

Fincham, Kenneth. “William Laud and the Exercise of Caroline Ecclesiastical Patronage.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51, no. 1 (January, 2000): 69. Describes Laud’s role in formulating ecclesiastical policy during the reign of Charles I.

Fincham, Kenneth, and Peter Lake. “The Ecclesiastical Policy of James I.” Journal of British Studies 20 (1986): 169-207. Shows how James shrewdly maintained a careful balance in church patronage by preferring moderates and excluding radicals from either side.

Hibbard, Caroline. Charles I and the Popish Plot. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. A carefully researched account of Catholic influence at the court of Charles I. Shows how Laud resisted that influence, but that the fears of Protestants were not unfounded.

Lake, Peter. “Calvinism and the English Church, 1570-1635.” Past and Present no. 114 (February, 1987): 32-76. Establishes a distinction between “credal” and “experimental” Calvinists that is helpful in understanding Laud’s opponents.

McGee, J. Sears. “William Laud and the Outward Face of Religion.” In Leaders of the Reformation, edited by Richard L. DeMolen. London: Associated University Presses, 1984. Offers a narrative account of Laud’s career with analysis of his program and the opposition to it. Includes a bibliographical essay.

Sharpe, Kevin. “Archbishop Laud and the University of Oxford.” In History and Imagination, edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden. London: Duckworth, 1981. Stresses Laud’s dislike for theological controversy and discusses the reasons for it.

Trevor-Roper, Hugh. Archbishop Laud. London: Macmillan, 1940. 2d ed. 1962. Reprint. London: Phoenix Press, 2000. The only modern biography, a pleasure to read. Better, however, on the political than the religious aspects of the subject.

Tyacke, N. R. N. Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590-1640. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Supplies an important dimension missing from Trevor-Roper’s biography: the theological and intellectual background and basis for Laud’s program. Tyacke also traces the influences and relationships among the anti-Calvinists.

White, Peter. Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. White disagrees with historians who maintain the English Civil War was the result of a Laudian and Arminian attack on Calvinism. He denies that Calvinism was predominant in England before the war, and maintains that theologians with contrasting beliefs contributed to the evolution of church doctrine.