When Dom Leander lay dying it bishop sought earnestly to see him.

been Godfrey Goodman,

was said that an English This may probably have 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.

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. Thus, 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.'

Individual

from Rome.

-an

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 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,”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 Viscount remained, with every wide literary interest and with considerable freedom of speculation, a sincere Christian of the English Church.

Lucius

Carey,

Falkland

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

cases the grossest irreverence prevailed in the use of parish churches. The churches often "lay nastily"; and the altars were often left in the middle of the chancel, contrary to the Injunctions of Elizabeth, with the result that men lounged upon them or covered them with their hats and cloaks.

Many customs too survived in country places which "a godly and thorough reformation" should have swept away. A curious petition, for instance, reached Laud in 1637 from Survival of the parish of Clungunford, Salop, a "spacious wide old customs. parish," containing "many very old and ancient

people," and having an ancient custom time out of mind that after evening prayer on Easter day the parson should provide a church-feast, in the church, of bread and cheese and ale or beer, for the refreshing of those ancient people that repaired to evening prayer, having received the holy sacrament the same day "in the morning, and also for relief of the poor of the parish that repair thither for relief, and have always had sufficient provision of bread and cheese given them by the inhabitants to serve them and their families a good space afterwards." About fifty years past, the petitioners asserted, it was ordered by the then Archbishop of Canterbury that this feast should be thenceforth kept, not in the church but in the parsonage house. It had been so kept until the last Easter, when Samuel Barkeley, the present rector, discontinued the custom altogether. The inhabitants appealed to the archbishop to have it restored. Laud answered: "I shall not go about to break this custom, so it be done in the parsonage house in a neighbourly and decent way; but I cannot approve of the continuance of it in the church, and if ever I shall hear it be so done again, I will not fail to call the offenders into the High Commission."

Laud's un

The archbishop, indeed, was often unwilling to interfere, whatever his own opinions may have been. For example, a preacher before the University of Cambridge, named willingness Adams, is said to have asserted the necessity of conto interfere fession to a priest. Rushworth records the investigation of the subject by the Heads, with the result that a majority voted that he had taught nothing contrary to the doctrine of the Church of England. The papers in the case were sent to Laud, but he made no comment on them,

needlessly.