Everything about William Laud totally explained
Archbishop William Laud 7 October 1573 10 January 1645 was Archbishop of Canterbury and a fervent supporter of
King Charles I of
England, whom he encouraged to believe in
divine right. His support for Charles, absolute monarchy, and his persecuting of opposing views led to his beheading in the midst of the
English Civil War.
Clergyman
Laud was born in
Reading, Berkshire, of comparatively low origins, his father, also William, having been a
cloth merchant (a fact about which he was to remain sensitive throughout his career). He was educated at
Reading School and, through a White Scholarship,
St John's College, Oxford. He was baptised at
St Laurence's Church in Reading.
On
5 April 1601, he entered the Church, and his
Catholic,
High Church tendencies and antipathy to
Puritanism, combined with his intellectual and organisational brilliance, soon gained him a reputation. At that time, the
Calvinist party was strong in the Church, and Laud's affirmation of
Apostolic succession was unpopular in many quarters. In
1605, somewhat against his will, he obliged his patron,
Charles Blount, 1st Earl of Devon, by performing his marriage service to a divorcée. In 1609, he became rector of
West Tilbury in Essex.
He continued to rise through the ranks of the clergy, becoming President of St John's College in 1611; Prebendary of Lincoln in 1614, and Archdeacon of Huntingdon in 1615. He was consecrated
Bishop of St David's in
1622, translated
Bishop of Bath and Wells in
1626, and
Bishop of London in
1628. Thanks to patrons who included
George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, and the King himself, he reached the highest position the
Church of England had to offer, the
Archbishopric of Canterbury, and with it the episcopal primacy of all England, in
1633. As
Archbishop of Canterbury, he was prominent in government, taking the king's line and that of
Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford in all important matters. It is believed that he wrote the controversial
Declaration of Sports issued by King Charles in 1633.
In 1630, Laud was elected as
Chancellor of the
University of Oxford, and became much more closely involved in the running of the university than many of his predecessors had been. His most significant contribution was the creation of a new set of statutes for the university, a task completed in 1636. Laud served as the fifth Chancellor of
Trinity College, Dublin between
1633 and
1645.
High church policy
The famous pun "give great praise to the Lord, and little laud to the devil" is a warning to Charles attributed to the official court jester or "fool" Archie Armstrong. Laud was known to be touchy about his diminutive stature.
Laud was a sincere Anglican and loyal Englishman, who must have been frustrated at the charges of
Popery levelled against him by the
Puritan element in the Church. Whereas Strafford saw the political dangers of Puritanism, Laud saw the threat to the
episcopacy. But the Puritans themselves felt threatened: the
Counter-Reformation was succeeding abroad, and the
Thirty Years' War wasn't progressing to the advantage of the Protestants. It was inevitable that in this climate, Laud's aggressive high church policy was seen as a sinister development. A year after Laud's appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury, the ship Griffin left for America, carrying religious dissidents such as the Puritan minister
Anne Hutchinson.
Laud's policy was influenced by another aspect of his character: his desire to impose total uniformity on the Church. This, too, was driven by a sincere belief that this was the duty of his office, but, to those of even slightly differing views, it came as persecution. Perhaps this had the
unintended consequence of garnering support for the most implacable opponents of the Anglican compromise. In
1637,
William Prynne, John Bastick and Henry Burton sentenced to mutilation (removal of ears and branding on both cheeks) for the crime of
seditious libel Prynne alone was to suffer the fate of having "SL" branded on his forehead. Although it stood for "Seditious libeller, Prynne argued it stood for "Stigmata Laudis".
His intolerance towards the Presbyterians extended to
Scotland, where it led to the
Covenanter movement and the
Bishops' Wars. The
Long Parliament of
1640 accused him of
treason, resulting in his imprisonment in the
Tower of London, where he remained throughout the early stages of the
English Civil War. In the spring of
1644, he was brought to trial, but it ended without being able to reach a verdict. The parliament took up the issue, and eventually passed a
bill of attainder under which he was beheaded on
January 10,
1645 on
Tower Hill, notwithstanding being granted a royal pardon.
William Laud is remembered in both the
Church of England and the
Episcopal Church in the United States of America with a
Commemoration on 10 January.
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