IV DOM LEANDER, 1634 45 The mission Leander, 1634. Martin (a Welshman, whose name was John Jones) in 1634. He had been at Merchant Taylors' School and at St. John's College, Oxford, and was well acquainted of Dom with Laud. Windebanke said to Panzani, "if we had neither Jesuits nor Puritans in England I am confident a reunion might easily be effected"; and a Benedictine was thought both at Rome and at the English court to be a much less dangerous person than either. Dom Leander came to inspect the English Roman Dom visit to England. ists and to report on such matters as the oath of Leander's allegiance. It seems that a curious offer had already been made to Laud of a cardinal's hat: but Laud had naturally refused "till Rome should be other than she is." None the less it was not difficult for Leander to see that there were points of approximation. In his report he emphasised the fact that the English Churchmen with whom he had to deal considered "as schismatics those other Protestant churches scattered throughout Europe who have repudiated and turned away from the ancient ecclesiastical hierarchy." His interviews with important persons came to nothing, for the English Episcopate was firm in its adherence to Reformation standards. He got so far as to draw up instructions for an agent who was to be sent from Rome to report on the question of reunion, advocating an assembly of moderate men to discuss points of difference, and he advised for concessions on the part of the pope that communion in both kinds might be granted, and the marriage of the clergy and the liturgy in English be allowed, "also the admittance of the English clergy (coming to agree in points of faith) in their prelatures, dignities, and benefices, either by re-ordination sub conditione, since their orders here be invalid or dubious, or by way of commendam, as many princes ecclesiastical and other beneficiated persons are admitted." Nothing came of the suggestion. It is unlikely that it ever came to the ears of Laud. It was revived under Charles II., but at this time the death of Dom Leander caused the business to fall into other and less sympathetic hands, and no progress was made. The later Roman agents, notably Panzani, were ignorant of English life : and even if Laud had been willing to go a step to meet them the project of reunion was impossible. When Dom Leander lay dying it was said that an English bishop sought earnestly to see him. This may probably have been Godfrey Goodman, who was consecrated to Bishop Goodman of the see of Gloucester in 1624, and who, in 1636, Gloucester. asked, Panzani said, to be allowed to keep an Italian priest to say mass secretly in his house. In 1640 he was committed to prison for his communications with Rome. Through him, and it is possible to a lesser extent with Mountague, negotiations may have been continued. But Laud, it is certain, kept out of them. An Oratorian sent to England in 1635 was forbidden, "on any pretext whatever, to allow himself to be drawn into communication with the Archbishop of Canterbury." Efforts were made to bribe the archbishop, with money and with the cardinalate, a ness in the typical example of the ignorance of England that English existed among papal agents. An account of the archbishop's trial, still in manuscript, tells us that he spoke on this point, "declaring that if he had desired preferment for compliance with the Church of Rome, he might have had more honour in foreign parts than ever he was likely to obtain here, and that it was no outward honour but his conscience that caused him to refuse the Cardinal's hat." Laud's firm Church. Thus, It is clear, on the other hand, that Laud had no desire to persecute. He was willing to some extent to recognise the jurisdiction of a vicar apostolic over his co-religionists, though he was utterly, opposed to the establishment of "any popish hierarchy." He emphatically declared that the State did not punish Romanists for opinion, but only for disloyalty. he said, "When divers Romish priests and Jesuits have deservedly suffered death for treason, is it not the constant and just profession of the State, that they never put any man to death for religion, but for rebellion and treason only? Doth not the State truly affirm that there was never any law made against the life of a papist, quatenus a papist only? And is not all this State false, if their very religion be rebellion? For if their religion be rebellion, it is not only false, but impossible, that the same man, in the same act, should suffer for his rebellion and not for his religion. And this King James understood very well, when in his Premonition to all Christian monarchs he saith, 'I do constantly VI CONVERSIONS FROM ROME 47 maintain that no papist, either in my time or in the time of the late Queen, ever died for his conscience.'” from Rome. William and The While this was his attitude towards Romanists ecclesiastically and politically, he was very eager to secure the return of English Roman Catholics to the church of their Individual fathers. At his trial he gave a list of twenty-two conversions persons whom he had himself "recalled from Rome." When he challenged any one to give a better proof of his zeal Hugh Peters "told him there were those ministers that could prove not only twenty-two but two hundred, yea, some above five hundred, that were converted by their diligent and faithful labours in the work of the ministry, and might have recalled more had they not been silenced by him,”—an absurd boast. Laud's converts could be named: and many of them did yeoman service for the English Church. Of these the ablest was William Chillingworth. Laud had known him from his childhood, and he felt a Chillingworth peculiar sorrow at his conversion to Rome by Fisher, Religion of the very Jesuit whom the bishop had controverted. Protestants (1637). In 1632 he returned to England from Douai, much dissatisfied with Roman teaching. Juxon, Laud's successor as President of St. John's College, Oxford, and Sheldon, then a Fellow of All Souls', were urgent with him to reconsider his position, and the former reported to Laud that the "pervert" declared himself ready to take any course for satisfaction that his friends might advise, and to confer with Laud himself or any one deputed by him. Juxon shrewdly suspected Chillingworth to be anxious to be Laud's convert, thinking "all his motives are not spiritual, protest he never so much.” At Great Tew, near Oxford, he stayed with the fascinating Lucius Carey, Viscount Falkland, who remained, with every wide literary interest and with considerable freedom of speculation, a sincere Christian of the English Church. Lucius Viscount At Great Tew it is probable, as well as through direct intercourse with Laud, the mind of Chillingworth found satisfaction. He returned to the Church of England, and before long he published a vindication of his position in answer to a Jesuit attack. Chillingworth's Religion of Protestants (1637) is an interesting illustration alike of the influence of Laud's tolerant spirit and of the broad principles on which it was possible to defend the doctrines of the English Church. It is, above all things, a plea for liberty. It protests against the "presumptuous imposing of the senses of men upon the general words of God, and laying them upon men's consciences together, under the equal penalty of death and damnation." It was an assertion of intellectual honesty and of the welcome which the English Church gave to a free and rational inquiry. The Religion of Protestants, as the Church of England knew it, was declared to be "a safe way of salvation." It was a book which was destined greatly to influence the thought of the future; and through it Laud's penetrating insistence on the fact that "the Church of England never declared that every one of her Articles are fundamental in the faith" came to be a prominent thought in the minds of the next generation of theologians. "Nothing is necessary to be believed but what is plainly revealed," was a clear statement; but like all similar statements there were difficulties in the interpretation of it. Sir Kenelm Digby, a genius and an eccentric, was another in whose conversion Laud took the keenest interest, though not with the same success. The relations between Sir Kenelm the two men are, however, a happy example of the Digby. "goodness and affection" which those who knew him recognised in the archbishop. Throughout, they were spiritual motives alone to which Laud appealed. A touching letter from Sir William Webbe, who had profited by the ministry of John Cosin, then rector of Brancepeth, and who was one of Laud's converts, well illustrates this. AUTHORITIES.-Laud's Works; State Papers, Domestic; Strafford Papers; the correspondence of Panzani, Con, and Rossetti (transcripts in the Record Office); and The Pope's nuntioes, or the negotiations of Seignior Panzani, Seignior Con, etc., London, 1643; Berington, Memoirs of Panzani; E. L. Taunton, The English Black Monks. On the position of Chillingworth Tulloch's Rational Theology in England in the Seventeenth Century (which may be compared with Dr. Gardiner's History) sketches the relations of Falkland with the theologians of the time. CHAPTER V LAUD'S ADMINISTRATION OF THE CHURCH AFTER this survey of his attitude towards some of those who stood outside we are in a position to examine and estimate the nature of the work which Laud as archbishop undertook. It has often been asserted that he was a reformer, and that his chiefest interest was the conflict with Calvinism. But it is certain that he would have repudiated any idea of innovation, and that he took no active measures to suppress freedom of speculation on the Calvinistic or any other theology, provided it did not desert the limits of loyalty to the Church. To the world his work seemed to be mainly practical. And there was need of it. Scandals in the Church. The case of Anthony Bourne and Edward Hewitt, churchwardens of Knottingley, Bedfordshire, is perhaps an extreme one: but that it should be possible showed the need of action. They were charged in the High Commission Court in 1637 with allowing the most disgraceful scandals in Church. It was alleged that in 1634 and the two following years fighting cocks were brought into the chancel of the church of Knottingley, and there fought in front of the altar, in the presence of many spectators who betted and performed "the other offices ordinarily used by cock-fighters." The churchwardens and the minister of the parish were themselves present, with many others "both youths and men, laughing and sporting as spectators at a cock-fight use to do." As we do not know the result of the proceedings taken it is possible that there may be much exaggeration in this tale: but it is certain that in many |