been called the greatest Archbishop who has sat in the chair of Augustine since the Reformation, and one who, amid the apparent failure of all his aims, re-laid firm and deep the old foundations of the English Church.1 He was the only son of a wealthy merchant, or clothier, at Reading, and was born there in 1573. When Laud was in later years taunted with the meanness of his origin, he described himself as "a man of ordinary but very honest birth." He was educated at the Free Grammar School of the town, and went at sixteen years of age to S. John's College, Oxford. Reading school possessed certain privileges, i. e. Fellowships and Scholarships at S. John's, and this doubtless determined the choice of a College. His tutor was Buckeridge, afterwards President, who taught him to ground his studies "upon the noble foundation of the Fathers' Councils and the ecclesiastical historians." Here then we have the beginnings of that learning which in subsequent years was to be turned to such good account

Blount, Earl of Devon, 1603. Vicar of Stanford, Northamptonshire, 1607. Also Vicar of N. Kilworth, 1608. Rector of Cuxton, Kent, 1610. President of S. John's, Oxford, 1611 (elected by the Fellows). Prebendary of Lincoln, 1614, and Archdeacon of Huntingdon, 1615 (by Bishop Neile of Lincoln). Dean of Gloucester, 1616 (by James I). Prebendary of Westminster and Bishop of S. David's, 1621 (by James I). (The King gave Laud permission to hold the office of President in commendam. "But," writes Laud in his diary, "by reason 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." He resigned the office a fortnight before his consecration to S. David's.) Bishop of Bath and Wells and Dean of the Chapel Royal, 1626 (by Charles I). Privy Councillor, 1627. Bishop of London, 1628. Chancellor of Oxford, 1629 (by the University). Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin, 1633 (elected by the Fellows). Archbishop of Canterbury, 1633. Committed to the Tower, March 1, 1641. Beheaded on Tower Hill, January 10, 1645.

William Laud, by W. H. Hutton, B.D., 1895, p. 3.

2 A London merchant, Sir Thomas White, founded the College with great munificence "to the honour of God, the Virgin Mary and S. John the Baptist." This was in 1555. The buildings were partly those of a Cistercian Monastery founded in 1456 by Archbishop Chicheley. Two fellowships were reserved for students from Reading.

L

against Rome. Oxford was largely Calvinist in doctrine when Laud matriculated, and the new foundation of S. John's played the part of Oriel in the nineteenth century in being the home of Churchmanship. When Laud became a Fellow he soon gathered disciples round him, and by the time he graduated as B.D. (1604, i.e. at thirty-one years of age), he was sufficiently important to be proceeded against by the Vice-Chancellor for maintaining the Catholic doctrine and position of the English Church. On proceeding to D.D. his thesis affirmed that episcopatus" is "jure divino." His chaplaincy with Charles Blount, Earl of Devon, was marked throughout his life by a painful memory. He married his patron to a divorced lady, Lady Rich, who had been her new husband's mistress. Laud kept the day for the rest of his life as one of penitence and humiliation, and never forgave himself for a too ready compliance with an unrighteous demand.

In these early days of study and comparative obscurity, Laud laid the foundations of his knowledge and principles, and when he was called upon in later years to put these into practice, he was only giving expression to his long-cherished thoughts. A time of crisis was coming in the earlier years of the seventeenth century upon the English Church and State, and in the then close relationship between the two a like fate awaited both. Moments of crisis reveal character but do not create it, and Laud must be regarded as the exponent of principles then generally accepted, but not necessarily inherent in the Church's position and rights. It is possible to imagine an archbishop who would have acted with greater wisdom, and while defending the Church's faith would have been a mediator between an obstinate king and an enraged people. History, however, records a different story, and Laud was the willing agent in all things for the royal will. His decision involved the Church in the common ruin, and gave a political bias to Churchmanship which identified it with absolute government. The result has been to call down upon his head the vials of wrath and indignation and

to make him the chief scapegoat to carry the sins of the Stuart dynasty. The historians of the nineteenth century revelled in unqualified abuse. Hallam says of him: "Though not literally destitute of religion, it was so subordinate to worldly interest and so blended in his mind with the impure alloy of temporal pride that he became an intolerant persecutor of the Puritan clergy, not from bigotry, which in its usual sense he never displayed, but systematic policy." Macaulay uses of him more contemptuous language: "The mean forehead, the pinched features, the peering eyes of the prelate suit admirably with his disposition. They mark him out as a lower kind of Saint Dominic, differing from the fierce and gloomy enthusiast who founded the Inquisition as we might imagine the familiar imp of a spiteful witch to differ from an archangel of darkness." All this is graphic and spiteful writing, but it is not history, and few men now turn to Macaulay for wellbalanced judgments of any historical personage. This excess of abuse has produced a reaction, and the real Laud must be rescued from these caricatures of his mind and actions. Mr. Gladstone, Dr. Mozley 1 and Bishop Creighton, no mean authorities, have expressed their opinions upon Laud and his times, and have done much to set the maligned Archbishop in true historical perspective. "Laud saved the English Church," says Dr. Mozley. "That any one of Catholic predilections can belong to the English Church is owing, as far as we can see, to Laud. He saw the good element that was in her, elicited, fostered and nurtured it, brought the incipient Church school to size and shape, and left it spreading over the Church and setting the standard. Let us be historically just. Let the dead have their due. Let us acknowledge facts and allow their true stamp and authorship to remain upon them. The English Church in her Catholic aspect is a memorial of Laud." Bishop Creighton's witness is similar: "So far as Laud is concerned (the disasters) only emphasised

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1 Archbishop Laud (1845), by Dr. Mozley.

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2 Lectures delivered at All Hallows Barking, in 1895.