CHAPTER III

THE RISE OF LAUD

power.

WITH the dissolution of Parliament and the issue of the king's proclamation it seemed perhaps for a moment as if there might be peace. Two years passed. Buckingham's The beginning murder removed one great danger from the king. of Laud's The news came to Laud as he was with the Archbishop at Croydon, consecrating Mountague to the see of Chichester, on August 24, 1628. Whatever the king might say in proclamations, it was clear that he had his own opinions in Church matters, and that they were those of Mountague and Laud. Such promotion indeed was "more magnanimous than safe." But Buckingham's place must be filled, and, though not outwardly, Laud filled it.

Williams.

Since 1626 much had happened, of which we have first to tell. The one competitor had already, by Buckingham himself, been swept from Laud's path. On October The rivalry 25, 1626, John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, of Bishop Dean of Westminster, and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England, was required to give up the ensign of his high legal office. It seemed the end of a great career. A subtle Welshman, of ancient family and ready learning, he had been brought forward by Lord Chancellor Ellesmere. "The chaplain," says his friend and eulogist, Bishop Hacket, "understood the soil on which he had set his foot, that it was rich and fertile, able with good tendance to yield a crop after the largest dimensions of his desires." Preferments came rapidly to him. As a parish priest he "walked as a Burning Light before his brethren," a

constant and ready preacher, "he lived like a magnifico at home," full of hospitality and charity. Buckingham became his patron, and it was he who brought over the young duchess to the English Church. When he became Dean of Westminster, he was generous in the restoration of the abbey and the further endowment of the school. King James took a fancy to the astute, capable, supple ecclesiastic, and made him Lord Keeper and Bishop of Lincoln, so "he reaped no less than two harvests in one month." He won the reputation of a clever lawyer, and to the last he held the confidence of the old king. Charles looked upon him with another eye. On the day after the king's accession Williams commended two out of his own family to be preferred," and the king coldly made no answer. Buckingham had already begun to distrust him. He was indeed not one whom men learnt to rely upon. Laud felt that he was his enemy. In the discharge of his duty as bishop he was shamefully lax. He had never, it seems, resided in his diocese; and to the king this was intolerable. From the very beginning of the reign he was in disgrace, and when the great seal was taken from him, he at last retired to the manor of Buckden, where he built a great house, laid out fine gardens and lived in stately fashion. There he waited, ready, if need be, to throw the weight of his ability on to the side of the opposition to the king's ministers.

From the date of Williams' retirement the advancement of Laud was unchallenged. He was indeed the only great man

The insigni- among the bishops. On September 25, 1626,

ficance of the Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, "lumen bishops. orbis Christiani," as Laud calls him in his diary, passed away. Abbot the Archbishop of Canterbury spent the last years of his life in insignificance, removed from all royal favour through his political opposition to the king's measures, and, as he thought, by the influence of Laud. Of this we shall hear more shortly. Bishop Morton of Lichfield, Bishop Field of Llandaff, Bishop Harsnet of Norwich, Bishop Howson of Oxford, Bishop Davenant of Salisbury, Bishop Mountaigne of London, Bishop Buckeridge of Rochester, Bishop Neile of Durham, were all men of eminence but not of power. Each had characteristic merits,

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THE CAROLINE BISHOPS

25

none was without learning, and perhaps none was above criticism. Certainly Bishop Mountaigne is remembered now chiefly as the "swan-eating and canary-sucking" prelate of Milton's attack. One at least of the Elizabethan bishops lingered on, Toby Matthew, Archbishop of York, a doughty champion in the past of the English Church against Edmund Campion, a sturdy ruler of the North, and a man of humour also. He was near his end. Of the new bishops none was especially notable, save perhaps Goodman of Gloucester, whose Lenten sermon before the king in 1626 called attention to his approximation towards Roman doctrine, and who, though some of the most learned of the bishops decided that he spoke rather incautiously than falsely, was never sincere in his attachment to the Reformation. The bishops were not men, as the king felt, to guide the Church in difficult ways. He "chid" them all, Laud tells, in the spring of 1626, "that in this time of Parliament we were silent in the cause of the Church, and did not make known to him what might be useful, or was prejudicial, to the Church, professing himself ready to promote the cause of the Church." There was in truth no leader till Laud came forward to fill the place. On August 26, 1626, he was elected Bishop of Bath and Wells. When Andrewes died he succeeded him as Dean of the Chapel Royal. On July 15, 1628, he was translated to London. By this time the Puritans looked on him as the head and front of all offence against them. "Laud, look to thyself. Thy life is sought. As thou art the fountain of all wickedness, repent thee of thy monstrous sins, before thou be taken out of the world," were the words of a paper in St. Paul's churchyard, the beginning of a long series of bitter libels.

On the political side of Laud's career it would be foreign to the purpose of this book to dwell. But his political position must be briefly noted, for it was an important cause of the unpopularity which was shown by the lampoons.

Laud's political career.

The employment of ecclesiastics in offices of State was universal throughout Europe, and Laud, though he certainly did not seek office, was ready to undertake any work which the confidence of the king might thrust upon him. The State

Papers of the early years of Charles I. show him gradually more and more busied in secular matters, in affairs of trade and finance, in the committee on Foreign Affairs, and on the commission of the Admiralty. His impatience of mere officialism is revealed in many of his letters to Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, whom politics and religion alike made his friend. An energetic man in all he undertook, his work, and his theory of work, were "thorough." But he was much less of a politician than the people fancied, and his political platform was the platform of his masters, of Hooker, and Bodin, and Aristotle.

The Divine right of kings.

The doctrine of the Divine right of kings was not developed by Laud but was full-blown when he came into It was the answer of English controverpower. sialists to the advocates of the papal claims. Its completest expression may be found in words, probably in Laud's own writing, written at the culmination of his power, in 1640. "The most high and sacred order of kings is of Divine right, being the ordinance of God Himself, founded in the laws of nature, and clearly established by express texts both of the Old and New Testaments." That this Divine right was a right to govern wrong was a view which Laud would have been the first to reject; but to take up arms against even tyranny was as clearly in his eyes unlawful. He denied that there was "an absolute power" in the king; and he declared to the last that he " was never yet such a fool as to embrace arbitrary government." All this seems confusion to the modern thinker but the truth is that clear definitions, except in the hands of the lawyers, whose definitions were almost invariably favourable to an exalted royal prerogative, were not often, in the early seventeenth century, either concise or consistent. And Laud was no master of phrase, but a plain, blunt man, and he "could not conceive that the judges would put that under their hands to be law which should afterwards be found unlawful." It is not difficult for any reader of his works to understand how natural was his attitude towards the monarchy, or how far removed from any assertion of arbitrary principles.

:

But, none the less, "noscitur a sociis." That the conse

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THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS

27

quences of the doctrine of Divine right were pressed to an extremity is shown clearly enough by the Its chief instance of Dr. Robert Sibthorpe, a Northampton exponents: Sibthorpe, clergyman, who preached in the church of St. Sepulchre in that town on February 22, 1627, a sermon on Romans xiii. 5, warmly recommending a loyal response to the king's demand for a general loan. The loan had aroused much discussion, and a royal commission had inquired at Northampton in the previous month the opinion of the country clergy as to its lawfulness. Sibthorpe argued strongly in favour of the loan, and he printed his sermon and sent it to the king. It contained a statement that "if princes command anything which subjects may not perform, because it is against the laws of God or of nature, or impossible, yet subjects are bound to undergo the punishment without either resistance or railing and reviling; and so to yield a passive obedience where they cannot exhibit an active one.' The phrase was one that was to have a famous history.

The sermon did not pass unchallenged. The king sent it to Archbishop Abbot for his license, and personally answered some of the objections which the primate made to it. Still Abbot refused to license it, and it was only on the intervention of Laud that it was licensed by Mountaigne, Bishop of London, after four other bishops had signified their assent. The king, wrote Laud, conceived the sermon to be "for his special service." No sooner was it published than it was vehemently denounced. The king took its author under his protection, made him one of his chaplains in ordinary, and gave him (January 24, 1629) his special pardon. He was soon forgotten, in the Parliament's zest for higher game. He joined the king's garrison at Oxford in 1643, was ejected from his livings in 1647, but recovered them at the Restoration, and he died shortly after.

He pro

The case of Sibthorpe served to show the strong divergence in opinion on constitutional matters between the king and the archbishop. Abbot resisted Charles to the face; and Charles ordered him to withdraw to Canterbury. tested because of his disagreement with the citizens. required to reside within his diocese, and he regarded this, no doubt rightly, as disgrace. He was clearly in opposi

He was