attorney you are; Stenny (Buckingham) hath set you on. You have pleaded the man a good Protestant, and I believe it; neither did that stick in my breast when I stopt his promotion. But was there not a certain lady that forsook her husband, and married a lord that was her paramour? Who tied that knot? Shall I make a man a prelate, one of the angels of my church, who hath a flagrant crime upon him?" Williams declared that the doctor was heartily penitent for his share in this transaction; besides, he asked James who would dare to serve him, good master as he was, if he would not pardon one fault, even if it should be of a scandalous magnitude? "You press well," replied his majesty, "and I hear you with patience; neither will I revive a trespass any more which repentance hath mortified and buried; and because I see I shall not be rid of you unless I tell you my unpublished cogitations, the plain truth is, that I keep Laud back from all place of rule and authority because I find he hath a restless spirit, and cannot see when matters are well, but loves to toss and change, and to bring things to a pitch of reformation floating in his own brain, which may endanger the steadfastness of that which is in a good pass, God be praised. I speak not at random; he hath made himself known to me to be such For when, three years since, I had obtained of the Assembly of Perth to consent to five articles of order and decency in correspondence with this church of England, I gave them promise, by attestation of faith made, that I would try their obedience no farther in ecclesiastic affairs, nor put them out of their own way, which custom has made pleasing unto them, with any new encroachments. Yet this man hath pressed me to invite them to a nearer conjunction with the liturgy and canons of this nation; but I sent him back again with the frivolous draught he had drawn....For all this, he feared not mine anger, but assaulted me again with another ill-fangled platform to make that stubborn kirk stoop more to the English pattern; but I durst not play fast and loose with my word. He knows not the stomach of that people; but I ken the story of my grandmother, the queen-regent, that,

a one.

after she was inveigled to break her promise, made to some mutineers at a Perth meeting, she never saw good day, but from thence, being much beloved before, was despised of all the people. And now your importunity hath compelled me to shrive myself thus unto you, I think you are at your farthest, and have no more to say for your client." Williams, however, as he had been instructed, did not allow this characteristic oration to put him down; he still urged that Laud, notwithstanding "the very audacious and very unbecoming attempt" mentioned by his majesty, was "of a great and tractable wit," and if he fell into an error would, at least as soon as any man, find a way to get out of it. And his pertinacity was successful. James, impatiently asking if there was nothing he could say that was not to have its answer, exclaimed, "Here, take him to you, but on my soul you will repent it." "And so," concludes Hacket, away in anger, using other fierce and ominous words, which were divulged in the court, and are too tart to be repeated."

66 went

Thus was Laud at last made a bishop. He was formally elected by the chapter on the 10th of October, 1621, a few days after entering his forty-ninth year, The king had given him leave to hold the presidentship of St. John's in commendam with his bishopric; "but by reason," he writes in his Diary, "of the strictness of that statute, which I will not violate, nor my oath to it, under any colour, I am resolved before my consecration to leave it." And he did resign it accordingly. It is worth noticing, that Laud's great enemy Prynne, in the edition of the Diary which he very unhandsomely published in September, 1644, while the archbishop yet lived, had the dishonesty to omit all notice of this resignation; so that even Laud's biographer Heylin, who wrote before the Diary was published in its integrity by Wharton, in 1695, represents him as retaining his college office with his bishopric. Laud himself, with all his passion, precipitation, and short-sightedness, never committed anything so thoroughly base as this suppression of the truth by the great Puritan lawyer and patriot.

In the next year, 1622, Laud obtained much reputation by a conference or disputation which he maintained on the 24th of May, in presence of his majesty and other distinguished personages, with Fisher the Jesuit. Fisher had been for some time attempting to make a Roman Catholic of the Countess of Buckingham, mother of the duke (or rather marquis only, as yet); and it was apprehended that, if he should succeed, her son also would be very likely to go over to the old religion. But both at this public conference, at which the countess and the marquis were present, and in private discourse with the lady, Laud acquitted himself so ably as to satisfy her upon every point, and thus to avert what was looked upon by many as a serious national danger. Buckingham also from this time took him into his most intimate confidence. "Being Whit-Monday," he records, under date of June 9th, 66 my lord Marquess Buckingham was pleased to enter upon a near respect to me: the particulars are not for paper." And under June 15th he enters, "I became C. to my Lord of Buckingham" (meaning, it is supposed, confessor). All the notices in the Diary of this affair are carefully suppressed by Prynne, one of whose objects was to represent the archbishop as having been all his life a thorough papist. Laud himself published in 1624 an account of his argument with Fisher. He notes that he had not previously appeared in print.

In January, 1623, Laud was inducted into the parsonage of Creeke, in the diocese of Peterborough, which he was permitted to hold in commendam, with his not very well endowed Welch bishopric. But the new reign, which began in March, 1625, when he was in his fifty-second year, was the beginning to him of new fortunes.

Yet his own account informs us that attempts were at first made to prejudice the royal mind against him. Under date of Saturday, 9th of April, he writes, "The Duke of Buckingham, whom, upon all accounts I am bound for ever to honour, signified to me that a certain person, moved through I know not what envy, had blackened my name with his majesty King Charles; lay

ing hold, for that purpose, of the error into which, by I know not what fate, I had formerly fallen in the business of Charles, Earl of Devonshire, 1605, December 26."* He was too strong, however, in the favour of the royal favourite and most powerful man in the kingdom, to be injured now by this stale story. At the coronation, on the 2nd of February, 1626, he officiated as dean of Westminster, in room of Bishop Williams, who had for the present passed into the shade, and whom Charles would not have to take part in the ceremony, so that he was obliged to make Laud, whom he cordially hated, his deputy. On the 6th of March thereafter he resigned his parsonage of Ibstock; on the 20th of June he was nominated to the bishopric of Bath and Wells; in the beginning of October he was appointed to the office of dean of the Chapel Royal, vacant by the death of Bishop Andrews; in the end of April, 1627, he was sworn a privy counsellor, which in those days implied that he was to take an actual share in the government of the kingdom; and in July, 1628, Charles succeeded in having him placed in the see of London, though not till after some months had been spent in getting room made for him by the removal of Bishop Mountain, which proved almost as difficult as if he had been a real mountain that had to be got out of the way. The scheme was that Mountain should go to Durham, from which Neile, Laud's friend, was transferred to succeed Andrews at Winchester; but having spent a great part of his life, as Heylin expresses it, in the air of the court," he looked upon such a relegation to the cold regions of the North as "the worst kind of banishment, next neighbour to a civil death;" however, before he was Bishop of Durham more than in form, the death of Dr. Toby Matthews, archbishop of York, made another opening for him, with which he was better satisfied; so that he presided over three sees in succession in that year; and he died before the end of it.

Laud had already made himself so unpopular by his *The entry is in Latin: the translation is Wharton's.

apparent preference of ceremonies to spiritual religion, and his severe, not to say violent measures against puritanism, as well as by his intimate connexion with Buckingham, that when the House of Commons which met in March, 1628, fell upon the duke, voting him to be the great cause of all the grievances in the kingdom, they also drew up a remonstrance to the king, in which, among other matters, they denounced Laud and his friend Neile as unsound in their theological opinions, and the authors or principal promoters of sundry innovations of a Romish character in the services of the church. To this admonition, however, he paid no heed. The parliament rose on the 26th of June, and on the 23rd of August Buckingham was assassinated. In April, 1630, Laud was chosen their Chancellor by the University of Oxford. A few months later occurred the first of several notorious cases of Laud's ferocity of procedure in the High Commission Court,-that of Dr. Alexander Leighton, "a Scot by birth, a doctor of physic by profession, a fiery Puritan in faction," is Heylin's description of him -who was brought before the court for publishing a tract entitled 'An Appeal to the Parliament; or, Zion's Plea against Prelacy,' and was sentenced to pay a fine of 10,000l., to be twice set in the pillory and whipped, to have his ears cut off and his nose slit, to be branded in the face with the letters S. S. (for Sower of Sedition), and to be imprisoned in the Fleet for the remainder of his life. This barbarous sentence was executed in all its parts; and Leighton (who was the father of the learned, eloquent, and admirable Archbishop Leighton, who held the see of Glasgow in the next age) lay in prison for ten years. On Sunday the 16th of January of the next year, 1630, took place Laud's famous consecration of the church of St. Catherine Cree, London, on the north side of Leadenhall Street, Prynne's satirical and probably somewhat exaggerated account of which, in his Canterbury's Doom (1646), has been in substance incorporated by Hume in his History, and is familiar to most readers. As a sample both of Laud and of Prynne, we will quote the concluding paragraph