CHAPTER III

ARCHBISHOP LAUD AND THE RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

DURING the period of personal government, Charles I did many things which irritated the people of England. He fined men who, though holding by military tenure lands worth £40 a year, had not been knighted, thus reviving a practice which men believed to be obsolete. He levied ship money to build up his navy, and to replenish his treasury resorted to many other schemes which stirred up a bitter opposition from those on whom the burdens fell. To these sources of discontent another was added in the appointment of Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury. In his own words, Laud "labored nothing more than that the external public worship of God, too much slighted in most parts of the kingdom might be preserved, and that with as much decency and uniformity as might be." Here were an ideal and a determination clearly athwart the temper of the growing Puritan party. The student, therefore, seeking the forces at work in the constitutional struggle must closely examine the policy and actions of Archbishop Laud.

§ 1. The Character of Archbishop Laud1

Soberness of judgment in matters of doctrine, combined with an undue reverence for external forms, an entire want of imaginative sympathy, and a quick and irritable temper, made Laud one of the worst rulers who could at this crisis have been imposed upon the English Church. For it was a time when, in the midst of diverging tendencies of thought, many things were certain to be said and done which would appear extravagant to his mind; and

1 Gardiner, History of England, 1603-1642, Vol. VII, pp. 301 ff. By permission of Longmans, Green, & Company, Publishers.

when the bond of unity which he sought to preserve was to be found rather in identity of moral aim than in exact conformity with any special standard. The remedy for the diseases of the time, in short, was to be sought in liberty, and of the value of liberty Laud was as ignorant as the narrowest Puritan or the most bigoted Roman Catholic.

Those who are most prone to misunderstand others are themselves most liable to be misunderstood. The foreign ecclesiastic, if such he was, who offered Laud a cardinal's hat, did not stand alone in his interpretation of the tendencies of the new archbishop. One Ludowick Bowyer, a young man of good family, who may have been mad, and was certainly a thief and a swindler, went about spreading rumors that Laud had been detected in raising a revenue for the pope, and had been sent to the Tower as a traitor. The Star Chamber imprisoned him for life, fined him £3000, ordered him to be set three times in the pillory, to lose his ears, and to be branded on the forehead with the letters L and R, as a liar and a rogue. "His censure is upon record," wrote Laud coolly

in his diary, "and God forgive him.

The sharpness and irritability with which Laud was commonly charged were not inconsistent with a readiness to use persuasion rather than force as long as mildness promised a more successful issue. When once he discovered that an opponent was not to be gained over, he lost all patience with him. He had no sense of humor to qualify the harshness of his judgment. Small offences assumed in his eyes the character of great crimes. If in the Star Chamber, any voice was raised for a penalty out of all proportion to the magnitude of the fault, that voice was sure to be the archbishop's.

2. Laud and Ecclesiastical Discipline

Almost immediately after his promotion Laud received a letter from the king which was doubtless written at his own instigation. In this letter he was directed to see that the bishops observed the canon which restricted their ordinations to persons who, unless they held certain exceptional positions, were able to show that they were about to undertake the cure of souls. In this way the door of the ministry would be barred against two classes of men which were regarded by the archbishop with an evil eye, and at which he had already struck in the king's instructions issued four years before. No man would now be able to take orders with the intention of passing his life as a lecturer, in the hope that he would

thus escape the obligation of using the whole of the services in the Prayer Book. Nor would any man be able to take orders with the hope of obtaining a chaplaincy in a private family, where he would be bound to no restrictions except those which his patron was pleased to lay upon him. Only peers and other persons of high rank were now to be permitted to keep chaplains at all.

Undoubtedly the system thus attacked was an evil system. The separation between the lecturer who preached and the conforming minister who read the service was admirably contrived to raise feelings of partisanship in a congregation and a division amongst the clergy themselves. The lecturer who sat in the vestry till the prayers were over, and then mounted the pulpit as a being infinitely superior to the mere reader of prayers who had preceded him, was not very likely to promote the peace of the Church. The system of chaplaincies was fraught with evils of another kind. The chaplain of a wealthy patron might indeed be admitted as the honored friend of the house, the counsellor in spiritual difficulties, the guide and companion of the younger members of the family; but in too many instances the clergyman who accepted such a position would sink into the dependent hanger-on of a rich master, expected to flatter his virtues and to be very lenient to his faults, to do his errands and to be the butt of his jests. Promoters of ecclesiastical discipline like Laud, and dramatic writers who cared nothing for ecclesiastical discipline at all, were of one mind in condemning a system which brought the ministers of the gospel into a position in which they might easily be treated with less consideration than a groom.

Laud's intense concentration upon the immediate present hindered him from perceiving the ultimate consequence of his acts. His strong confidence in the power of external discipline to subdue the most reluctant minds encouraged him to seize the happy moment when the king, and, as he firmly believed, the law, was on his side. Deeper questions about the suitability of that law to human nature in general or to English nature in particular he passed over as irrelevant. He did not look to the king to carry out some ideal which the law knew nothing of. He had "ever been of opinion that the king and his people" were "so joined together in one civil and politic body, as that it" was "not possible for any man to be true to the king that shall be found treacherous to the State established by law, and work to the subversion of the people." In his eyes, no doubt the king possessed legal powers which the medieval churchman would have regarded as tyrannical

usurpation. As the king administered justice by his judges, and announced his political resolutions by his privy council, so he exercised his ecclesiastical authority through his bishops or his Court of High Commission. Though the bishops might give him advice which he would not find elsewhere, and though they might owe their power to act to a special divine appointment, yet all their jurisdiction came from the sovereign, as clearly as the jurisdiction of the King's Bench and the Exchequer came from him. Hence Laud cared as little for the spiritual independence of bishops as he cared for the spiritual independence of congregations. His counterpart in our own times is to be found, not in the ecclesiastics who magnify the authority of the Church, but in the lawyers who, substituting the supremacy of the House of Commons for the supremacy of the crown, strive in vain to reply to all spiritual and moral questionings by the simple recommendation to obey the law.

3. Laud and Ecclesiastical Architecture

Laud understood far better how to deal with buildings than with men. The repairs at St. Paul's were being carried briskly on under the superintendence of Inigo Jones. During the remainder of Laud's time of power from £9000 to £15,000 a year were devoted to the work, arising partly from contributions more or less of a voluntary nature, partly from fines imposed by the High Commission which were set aside for the purpose. Much to the king's annoyance, rumors were spread that the greater part of this money was not applied to the building at all, but went to swell the failing revenues of the crown. The restoration of the external fabric drew attention to an abuse of long standing. The nave and aisles had, from times beyond the memory of men then living, been used as places of public resort. Porters carried their burdens across the church as in the open street. Paul's Walk, as the long central aisle was called, was the rendezvous of the men of business who had a bargain to drive, and of the loungers whose highest wish was to while away an idle hour in agreeable society. To the men of the reigns of James I and Charles I it was all that the coffee-houses became to the men of the reign of Charles II and James II, and all that the clubhouses are to the men of the reign of Victoria. There were to be heard the latest rumors of the day. There men told how some fresh victory had been achieved by Gustavus, or whispered how Laud had sold himself to the pope, and how Portland had sold himself to the king of Spain. There,

too, was to be heard the latest scandal affecting the credit of some merchant of repute or the good name of some lady of title. When the gay world had moved away, children took the place of their elders, making the old arches ring with their merry laughter. The clergy within the choir complained that their voices were drowned by the uproar, and that neither prayers nor sermon reached the ears of the congregation.

With this misuse of the cathedral church of the capital, Charles, not a moment too soon, resolved to interfere. He issued orders that no one should walk in the nave in time of service, that burdens should not be carried in the church at all, and that the children must look elsewhere for a playground. In order to meet the wants of the loungers excluded from their accustomed resort, he devoted £500 a year to the building of a portico at the west end for their use. The straight lines of the Grecian architecture of the portico contrasted strangely with the Gothic traceries above. It reminds us, as we see it in the old prints, of the deadness of feeling with which even a great artist, such as Inigo Jones, regarded the marvels of medieval architecture; it may also bring before us the memory of one instance in which Charles thought it necessary to conciliate opposition.

In his care for St. Paul's, Laud was not likely to neglect his own chapel at Lambeth. Abbott had left it in much disorder. Fragments of painted glass were mingled confusedly with white spaces in the windows. The painted glass was now restored to the condition in which it had originally been when placed there by Archbishop Morton. It contained scenes from the Old and New Testament; a representation of the Saviour hanging upon the a crucifix as the Puritans termed it occupying the east end. When the windows were completed, the communion table was moved to the eastern wall. Toward this the archbishop and his chaplains bowed whenever they entered. There does not seem to have been any thing gorgeous or pompous in the ceremonial observed, which would have distinguished it from that which is to be seen in almost every parish church in England at the present day..

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§ 4. The Puritan Sabbath

If Laud was intolerant whenever Church order and discipline were concerned, the Puritans whom he combated were no less intolerant when they believed that the interests of morality were