III

truth.

LAUD'S BEGINNING OF WORK

31

Many people "spoke extreme ill of him, as the cause

of all that was amiss,"

pernicious protector, dangerous peer,

That smooth'st it so with King and commonweal.

As the years went on it became clearer and clearer that he was without any strong personal support, a minister, like Richelieu in France, who depended wholly on the king. "But then I have nothing but the king's word to me; and should he forget or deny it, where is my remedy?" So he wrote to Strafford in 1636. It was all along the weakness of his position.

But, none the less, in spite of his own personal defects of manner and the mistakes of his indiscreet supporters, Laud won his way to the achievement of his great aim.

This

was simply to restore to the Church of England a dignified simplicity of worship and a loyal obedience to the formularies which had come to her from the past through the age of her Reformation.

His prepara

work.

Laud was prepared for the great work which he was to undertake by experience of every branch of clerical labour. At Oxford he had been a fellow, a lecturer, and the head of his college. He knew academic life and tion for his its weaknesses intimately, and when he came to be Chancellor of the University of Oxford he instituted a thorough reformation of the statutes, which provided a code destined to endure for more than two hundred years. As a parish priest, too, he had considerable experience of country life. If he did not reside long on any of his benefices he visited them regularly and preached often. As Dean of Gloucester he had the king's instructions to restore the dignity of the Cathedral worship, and he succeeded, though he was "much pestered with the Puritan faction." As Bishop of St. David's he paid only two visits to his diocese, but he left distinct marks of his activity and munificence, and he kept a close watch upon his see from London. He was Bishop of Bath and Wells for only two years, and cannot be said to have left much impression there.

But when he came to London, on July 15, 1628, he was able personally to direct the work of what was already a great diocese.

Laud as

His wide

His clergy urged him to the suppression of nonconformity; and he set about the task, as letters sent to him show, Bishop of with discretion. "Prudent, moderate, courteous," London. the clergy found him, "patiently forbearing them, giving them time to consult conformable ministers, and vouchsafing to confer with them himself." So a letter describes him. Not only in London was he busy in the duties of his office, and in social work such as the suppression of play-houses that tended to vice, but outside he had much work to do. As superintendent of the English congregations on the continent of Europe it was his duty to see that they conformed to the established use of the English Church. He was interests. concerned in the conversion of Mohammedan visitors to England and the restoration of "renegados." He was responsible, too, for a serious reminder of the obligations of the episcopal office addressed by the king to Archbishop Abbot. Seeing that divers bishops live in and about London, wrote Charles to the primate, to the ill example of the inferior clergymen and the hindrance of God's service and the king's, the archbishop is required to command all bishops to their sees, those only excepted whose attendance at court is necessarily required. And further, none were to be permitted to reside upon their own lands or on benefices held in commendam, but only in their episcopal houses. The order was certainly needed, as the bitter wailing of Bishop Williams. when he was ordered to leave London for his diocese well evidenced.

His care for

the Church.

Again, he was active in the restoration of St. Paul's Cathedral church, a work which was to win again the most solemn associations for what should be the great the public centre of London worship, but had for long been used services of almost as an alley on 'Change. Under his guidance eminent preachers began to attract crowds to the services, and the fabric was repaired to be a worthy setting for the Divine offices celebrated within. The quiet dignity of Cathedral worship had always a great attraction for Laud. His visitation inquiries show how careful he was in requiring an exact obedience to the statutes of the different chapters from those who were bound to them. He took great interest in the disturbance which occurred at Durham, when Peter

Smart, one of the prebendaries, protested against the use of the canonical vestments and against the Cathedral service, and was in consequence of his contumacy deprived of his prebend. In 1630 Bishop Howson, who had been translated from Oxford to Durham, wrote to Laud, then Bishop of London, giving an historical narrative of the "innovations" in the service in his cathedral church. They began, he said, with the omission of the prayers at six in the morning, intended especially for householders and servants, and usual in other cathedral churches. This alteration gave great offence, and at the request of Justice Hutton and many others the six o'clock prayers were restored, whereupon "the innovating part ordered the customary morning service so, by reading more than is usually read and by a great variety of music, that they wearied the congregation with extraordinary long service, beginning after eight of the clock and continuing till after eleven." To remedy this, Bishop Howson directed that the Nicene creed should occasionally be said instead of sung, as also the responses after the commandments. "These

alterations gave general content, the people, after their own parochial services, which were early, coming by troops to the cathedral, there being no set sermon in the morning in the whole city."

Letters such as these show both Laud's interest in the detailed arrangements of cathedral services and the important position which he had already assumed before the death of Abbot. He was consulted indeed on every subject of interest to the Church, by all classes, from the king and the lords of the council down to parish priests in difficulties "among false brethren."

Puritan

activity.

Of Laud's relations with the parochial clergy, a characteristic example is to be found in the letter of one Dr. Samuel Brooke, written to the Bishop of London on December 15, 1630. With a postscript skilfully eulogising Laud's tractate against Fisher as one of the most novel, pure, lively and yet substantial, judicious and learned pieces he ever read in his life, and with the commendation of a little tract of his own to such sober judgment as that of the author whose work he was commending, he concludes an acute summary of the situation with which the Episcopate

D

had to deal. "Predestination," he writes, "is the root of Puritanism, and Puritanism the root of all rebellion and disobedient intractableness, and all schism and sauciness in the country, nay, in the Church itself." It was this false doctrine which had made so many thousands of the people, and so great a part of the gentry of the land, opponents of the ancient Church teaching. These it was who began to speak as if their teaching was that of the Church, "they will have the Church of England to be theirs," and they wounded her "at the very heart, with her own name." There was a deeper cause of alienation too: "where nothing is done, the weeds will grow, as they do." All the while the activity of antagonism, which Dr. Brooke rightly observed was growing, and Parliamentary action was becoming in Laud's view distinctly dangerous. There is among the State Papers of the year 1628 an account of the purport of eight Bills, which, it is said, in the indorsement by Bishop Laud, "should have passed in the Commons against the Church in that session." They were against citations without a previous presentation by churchwardens: to take away the prohibited times for matrimony; to subject scandalous ministers to trial by temporal judges; to allow any man to leave his own parish church on Sundays if there be no sermons; that no clergyman shall be justice of peace; that no man shall be urged to subscribe but only to the articles of 1562; to deprive clergymen who teach contrary to the said articles; to limit the major excommunication to cases of heresy.

It is clear that Laud was watching the proceedings of Parliament with the keenest interest and with grave dissatisfaction. He made elaborate notes of what was done, collected precedents for royal action in view of further difficulties, and was prepared to resist all interference of the Commons in matters belonging properly to the Church. But Charles's still it was his chief aim to suggest "articles of peace." There can be no doubt that it was with

endeavours to make

peace. this purpose that the king, under his advice, issued. in November, 1628, the famous declaration now prefixed to the Thirty-nine Articles. Thus it runs :

"For the present, though some differences have been ill raised, yet we take comfort in this, that all clergymen within

our realm have always most willingly subscribed to the Articles established; which is an argument that they all agree in the true, usual, literal meaning of the said Articles; and that even in those curious points, in which the present differences lie, men of all sorts take the Articles of the Church of England to be for them; which is an argument again, that none of them intend any desertion of the Articles established. That therefore in these both curious and unhappy differences, which have for so many hundred years, in different times and places, exercised the Church of Christ, We will, that all further curious search be laid aside, and these disputes shut up in God's promises, as they be generally set forth to us in the Holy Scriptures, and the general meaning of the Articles of the Church of England according to them. And that no man hereafter shall either print, or preach, to draw the Article aside any way, but shall submit to it in the plain and full meaning thereof: and shall not put his own sense or comment to be the meaning of the Article, but shall take it in the literal and grammatical sense."

"Predestination is the root of all Puritanism, and Puritanism the root of all rebellion and disobedient intractableness." Only in the plain teaching of the English Church, apart from Rome's hyperdefinite decisions, and Calvin's desperate ventures of distorted logic, did Laud look to find "articles of peace." It was in this hope that in September, 1633, he took up the work of Primate of All England, when Charles called him to Canterbury on the death of Abbot.

AUTHORITIES.-Hacket, Scrinia Reserata; Laud, Works; and the State Papers, Domestic, are the chief authorities for this chapter. Archbishop Abbot wrote a vindication of his action, which was published in Rushworth's Historical Collections, i. 435 sqq. (ed. 1659). The works of Sibthorpe and Mountague give their views: Laud's Letters to Wentworth, in Strafford Papers, 1739, give occasional illustrations: and the lives of Sibthorpe, Manwaring, and Mountague, in the Dictionary of National Biography, add details and refer

ences.