Laud, William

William (1573-1645), an archbishop of Canterbury. He was a native of Reading, the son of a clothier. He was educated at Oxford. He took priest's orders in the Episcopal church. In 1617, as royal chaplain, he accompanied King James in a trip to Scotland. He foreshadowed his future course by advising the king to insist on "papistical reforms" in the Scottish church. He rose from one position to another rapidly. Charles I was pleased with Laud's zeal for episcopacy and made him bishop of Bath and Wells, and later Bishop of London. In 1630 Laud was made Chancellor of Oxford. He gave the University a rich collection of manuscripts and founded a chair of Arabic. In 1633, Laud became Archbishop of Canter bury, primate of all England. At this point his real career began. "Since I came to this place," he said of himself, "I labored nothing more than that the external public worship of God--too much slighted in most parts of this kingdom--might be preserved, and that with as much decency and uniformity as might be, being still of opinion that unity cannot long continue in the church when uniformity is shut out at the church doors. And I evidently saw that the public neglect of God's service in the outward face of it, and the nasty lying of many places dedicated to that service, had almost cast a damp upon the true and inward worship of God,--which, while we live in the body, needs external helps, and all little enough to keep it in any vigor." Green, the historian, says:

Cold, pedantic, superstitious as he was (he notes in his diary the entry of a robin-redbreast into his study as a matter of grave moment), William Laud rose out of the mass of court prelates by his industry, his personal unselfishness, his remarkable capacity for administration. At a later period, when immersed in State business, he found time to acquire so complete a knowledge of commercial affairs that the London merchants themselves owned him a master in matters of trade. Of statesmanship indeed he had none. But Laud's influence was really derived from the unity of his purpose. He directed all the power of a clear, narrow mind and a dogged will to the realization of a single aim. His resolve was to raise the Church of England to what he conceived to be its real position as a branch, though a reformed branch, of the great Catholic church throughout the world; protesting alike against the innovations of Rome and the innovations of Calvin, and basing its doctrines and usages on those of the Christian communion in the centuries which preceded the council of Nicaea. The first step in the realization of such a theory was the severance of whatever ties had hitherto united the English church to the reformed churches of the Continent. In Laud's view episcopal succession was of the essence of a church, and by their rejection of bishops, the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches of Germany and Switzerland had ceased to be churches at all.

Laud ordered the communion table to be removed to the east end of the English churches, where it had stood prior to the Reformation, and ordered the communicants to receive the sacrament of the Lord's Supper on their knees. The Puritans regarded this change as a return dangerously near to the Catholic mass. Non-conforming clergymen and parishioners alike were harassed, threatened, fined, and imprisoned. Thirty clergymen in Norwich alone were driven from their parishes. Thousands of Puritans under Winthrop and other leaders sought homes in the New World. On the occasion when the Dean of Edinburgh appeared in the pulpit of St. Giles Church and began to "read a prayer from a book," old Jenny Geddes, unable to contain herself, sprang up and threw her cutty stool at the offending clergyman's head.

In political matters Laud was for the prerogative of the king against the commons. He stood with Strafford for arbitrary royal authority. He so far led the English church toward Catholicism that the pope offered him a cardinal's hat. When the storm broke and the Long Parliament took up the reins of authority, Strafford and Laud were accused of treason. Failing to find statutory grounds for conviction both were condemned by bills of attainder which the Lords durst not refuse to pass. The Scotch in particular insisted on Laud's execution. He was beheaded on Tower Hill, January 10, 1645, in the seventy-second year of his age. His death was the occasion of rejoicing in the New England colonies.