I

CORONATION OF CHARLES 1.

3

abated it was at last possible for the coronation to take place, and, after a day of thanksgiving on January 29, 1626, the king was crowned on the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin.

Considerable interest attaches to the coronation of Charles I. At the crowning of his father the form had been drawn up in haste, and the new king desired that a special His revision of the office should be made. He issued coronation, Feb. 2, 1626. a commission to Abbot, the archbishop, and other prelates, to act in the matter. Of this committee an energetic member was William Laud, Bishop of St. David's, who, from the beginning of the reign, through the influence of the Duke of Buckingham, rose steadily in the king's favour. Laud also acted a special part in the coronation itself, being appointed to act as deputy for the Dean of Westminster-Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, who was already in disgrace. The most minute care was taken in the preparation of the form, and the manuscript notes of Laud on the printed text, which are extant, show with how scrupulous an exactness he prepared every detail. From the consecration of the oil to the ordering of the procession, from the warning of the king on the previous evening to spend his time in contemplation and prayer, down to the provision for his position at every point of the ceremony, all was settled with reference to ancient precedents. Question was made many years later as to the form of coronation oath which the king took, but it was proved to have been the same that was taken by his fatherthe form, in fact, which had continued with scarce an alteration of phrase since the days of the old English kings.

His

In the new king Englishmen saw a man who differed in notable particulars from his father. Charles had been trained in the doctrine and discipline of the English Church. He was devout, temperate, chaste, serious-they are character. the very words of a Puritan lady-but reserved. Said a clerical critic, " our sovereign had not the art to please." "A mild and gracious prince, who knew not how to be or to be made great," wrote Laud years later, in the bitterness of his grief at "the murder of Strafford." Sir Henry Wotton, diplomatist, ecclesiastic, and poet, wrote in 1633 a "panegyrick" of his master, which happily expresses what churchmen thought

and courtiers knew about their young king eight years before. "When you had assumed the crown, before all other things there was resplendent in you a religious mind, the support of kingdoms, the joy of good men. The Chapel Royal was never more in order. The number of eminent divines daily increased. Sermons in no age more frequented; in none more learned; and the examples of the prince more effectual than the sermons. No execrations rashly proceeded from Your ears abhorring not only any wanton but even the least sordid word." Such Charles seemed to his friends. Difficulties were to disclose weaknesses in his character, adversities to develop its genuine piety. But from first to last the king remained a devoted son of the Church.

your mouth.

His interests

attachments.

He came to the throne with two attachments close to his heart and his mind. The first was the friendship that had begun with his boyhood for George Villiers, Duke and of Buckingham, the fascinating "Steenie" of his father, King James. Buckingham's was a charming personality, spoilt by success. He was a man of vicious life but not of vicious heart, one who sinned and repented and sinned again, till he came to his sudden tragic end by the assassin's knife. Those who knew him saw how much good was in him. Laud, to whom he had confessed his sins, prayed constantly that he might be devout in God's truth and Church. He had listened seriously to the controversy held in the presence of his mother between English and Roman divines, and he had formed his opinions on those of the school of Andrewes. It was through him, there can be no doubt, that the new king was led to form the second great attachment of his life, an attachment rather of the mind than of the heart, but one durable in the principles which its influence instilled. On the night before the coronation it was the duty of Laud, as deputy for the Dean of Westminster, to advise the king of his duties and of how to prepare for them. Perhaps it was then that the bishop became the king's confessor. Certainly from that hour they worked hand in hand for Church and State. The great ecclesiastical figure of Charles's reign, overpowering all others by the breadth of his aims and the firmness of his determination, was Laud.

William Laud was born at Reading on October 7, 1573,

I

LAUD'S EARLY CAREER

Laud.

5

"a man of ordinary but very honest birth." He had risen slowly, and not without lapses and disappointments, Early career and through many interesting experiences. As a of William child he must have been stirred by the national enthusiasm in the days of the Armada. As a boy at St. John's College, Oxford, he had for chamber-fellow a bright lad with strong leanings towards Romanism, who afterwards became a Benedictine, and for tutor one who became a good parish priest and a good bishop, and who taught him to found his studies on "the noble foundations of the Fathers, councils, and the ecclesiastical historians." As a man he had first an academic, then a wider training. In the university he was first scholar, then fellow, of St. John's College, Oxford, and later tutor and proctor. In the world he was chaplain to Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, succeeding in the office a brother-fellow of his college. In this post it was that he committed the error which all his life he never ceased to bewail. He married his master to the unhappy lady who had long been his mistress, Penelope, Lady Rich, the "Stella" of Philip Sidney's romantic verse, a divorced woman, whom the law of the Church would not suffer to wed. "Serving my ambition and the sins of others," was his own sad comment on the act. Yet it is significant that he studied ancient authorities on the subject of divorce, both before and after his act; and when he concluded that he was wrong he honestly expressed it. "The authority of the canon law, true, to putting away his wife, but neither silent nor unexpressed to marrying again,” he wrote in his comment on the Earl of Devonshire's tract, written after Lord Mountjoy had been raised in the peerage. Thus Laud's first contact with the world was unfortunate. In the university, too, he was not at his ease. He had become a definite and active opponent of the Calvinistic teaching, and he had suffered, as the restorers of old paths so often suffer. In dissertations and in sermons he championed the position, familiar to the leaders of the English Reformation, and emphatically asserted by Andrewes and Buckeridge, that the English Church had departed from Rome only as regards her errors, and that the right of reform, so long as the foundation was untouched, belonged to every national church. No less did he depart from the extreme Protestants by his asser

tion of the Divine right of Episcopacy. He was attacked by the Calvinists, and was convented before the Vice-Chancellor, but he was saved from condemnation by the intervention of more liberal thinkers from outside, and of the Chancellor of the University himself.

In August 1608 Laud became chaplain to Bishop Neile of Rochester, a man -so wrote Heylin in later days"who very well understood the constitution of the Church of England, though otherwise not so eminent in all parts of learning as some other bishops of his time; but what he wanted in himself he made good in the choice of his servants, having more able men about him from time to time than any other of that age." Neile introduced his chaplain to King James, who soon appreciated his talents, but seems always to have doubted his wisdom. In 1611 Laud was elected president of his college after a hot contest, which even went, on appeal, to the visitor, and at last to the king. For eleven years he "governed the college in peace, without so much as the show of a faction." His good work was recognised. He lived down the Calvinist opposition, was made a royal chaplain, and in 1616 became Dean of Gloucester, with the king's special command to "reform and set in order what he found there to be amiss." He carried out Queen Elizabeth's injunctions as to the position of the altar, having it moved to the east end. Beyond this he did nothing of note. In 1621 he became Bishop of St. David's. From that time he began gradually to be employed in affairs of State, became acState. quainted in some degree of intimacy with Prince Charles, and was the close friend of Buckingham. He was preaching at Whitehall on March 27, 1625, when the news came that the king was dead.

Laud and the

For the late king Laud had a sincere respect as "the most learned prince that this kingdom hath ever had for matters of religion," with "an assured confidence in Christ." For his son he had a genuine affection. Within a week of the old king's death his successor chose Laud to preach at the opening of Parliament. The sermon, owing to the plague, which caused all ceremony to be laid aside, was not preached till June 19. It very clearly set out the lines of the

I

POLITICAL PRINCIPLES OF THE REIGN

His

7

alliance between Church and king as they appeared to the sovereign and to his chief ecclesiastical adviser. Two significant passages may be quoted, for they serve as clues to much that came after.

If there

announcepolitical principles.

ment of

was to be a settled and flourishing State and a a Church without "dissolution," then "the king must trust and endear his people; the people must honour, obey, and support their king; both king and peers and people must religiously serve and honour God. Shut out all superstition in God's name, the farther the better; but let in no profaneness therewhile. If this be not done, take what care you can, God is above all human wisdom, and in some degree or other there will be liquefactio terra, a 'melting,' or a waste, both in Church and State." And again, with a reminiscence of Hooker, he said, "It is not possible in any Christian commonwealth that the Church should 'melt' and the State stand firm; for there can be no firmness without law, and no laws can be binding if there be no conscience to obey them; penalty alone could never, can never, do it. And no school

can teach conscience but the Church of Christ." opinions Charles was in thorough sympathy.

With such

AUTHORITIES.-Clarendon, History of the Great Civil War; Heylin, Cyprianus Anglicus. For the coronation of Charles I. see the volume with that title, edited by the Rev. Christopher Wordsworth for the Henry Bradshaw Society; Laud's Works (Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology).