KING CHARLES AND ARCHBISHOP LAUD.
The antagonism was intensified and brought to a bloody issue under Charles I. (1625-1649) and William Laud. They belong to the most lauded and the most abused persons in history, and have been set down by opposite partisans among the saints and among the monsters. They were neither. They were good men in private life, but bad men in public. They might have been as respected and useful in a humble station, or in another age or country, as they were hateful and hurtful at the helm of government in Protestant England. It was their misfortune rather than their crime that they were utterly at war with the progressive spirit of their age. Both were learned, cultured, devout gentlemen and churchmen, but narrow, pedantic, reactionary, haughty aristocrats. The one was constitutionally a tyrant, the other constitutionally a pope or an inquisitor-general. They fairly represented in congenial alliance the principle and practice of political and ecclesiastical absolutism, and the sovereign contempt for the rights of the people, whose sole duty in their opinion was passive obedience. Kingcraft and priestcraft based upon divine right was their common shibboleth. By their suicidal follies they destroyed the very system which they so long defended with a rod of iron, and thus they became the benefactors of Protestantism, which they labored to destroy. Both died as martyrs of despotism, and their last days were their best. 'Nothing in life became them as the leaving it.'
Charles wanted to rule without a Parliament; he did so, in fact, for more than eleven years, and the four Parliaments which he was compelled to convoke he soon arbitrarily dissolved (1625, 1626, 1629, and 1640). He preferred ship-money to legal taxation. He made himself intolerable by his duplicity and treachery. 'Faithlessness was the chief cause of his disasters, and is the chief stain on his memory. He was in truth impelled by an incurable propensity to dark and crooked ways. It may seem strange that his conscience, which on occasions of little moment was sufficiently sensitive, should never have reproached him with this great vice. But there is reason to believe that he was perfidious, not only from constitution and from habit, but also on principle. He seems to have learned from theologians whom he most esteemed that between him and his subjects there could be nothing of the nature of mutual contract; and that he could not, even if he would, divest himself of his despotic authority; and that in every promise which he made there was an implied reservation that such promise might be broken in case of necessity, and that of the necessity he was the sole judge.' [1357]
William Laud [1358] rose, like Cardinal Wolsey, by his abilities and the royal favor from humble origin to the highest positions in Church and State. He began his career of innovation early at Oxford, and asserted in his exercise for the degree of Bachelor of Divinity (1604) the absolute necessity of baptism for salvation, and the necessity of diocesan episcopacy, not only for the well-being, but for the very existence of the Church. This position exposed him to the charge of heresy, and no one would speak to him in the street. Under James he was kept back, [1359] but under Charles he rose rapidly, and after the death of Abbot, who was a Puritan, he succeeded him in the primacy of the English Church. When he crossed the Thames to take possession of Lambeth, he met with an ominous accident, which he relates in his Diary (Sept. 18, 1633). The overloaded ferry-boat upset, and his coach sank to the bottom of the river, but he was saved as by water, and 'lost neither man nor horse.'
Laud was of small stature [1360] and narrow mind, but strong will and working-power, hot and irascible in temper, ungracious and unpopular in manner, ignorant of human nature, a zealous ritualist, a pedantic disciplinarian, and an overbearing priest. He was indefatigable and punctilious in the discharge of his innumerable duties as archbishop and prime minister, member of the courts of Star-Chamber and High-Commission, of the committee of trade, the foreign committee, and as lord of the treasury. He was for a number of years almost omnipotent and omnipresent in three kingdoms, looking after every appointment and every executive detail in Church and State. [1361]
His chief zeal was directed to the establishment of absolute outward uniformity in religion as he understood it, without regard to the rights of conscience and private judgment. His religion consisted of High-Church Episcopalianism and Arminianism in the nearest possible approach to Rome, which he admired and loved, and the furthest possible distance from Geneva, which he hated and abhorred. [1362] But while Arminianism in Holland was a protestant growth, and identified with the cause of liberal progress, Laud made it subservient to his intolerant High-Churchism, and liked it for its affinity with the Semipelagianism of the Greek fathers. To enforce this Semipelagian High-Churchism, and to secure absolute uniformity in the outward service of God in the three kingdoms, was the highest aim of his administration, to which he bent every energy. He could not conceive spiritual unity without external uniformity. This was his fundamental error. In a characteristic sermon which he preached at Westminster before Parliament, March 17, 1628, on unity in Church and State (Eph. iv. 3), he says: 'Unity of any kind will do much good; but the best is safest, and that is unity of the Spirit. . . . The way to keep unity both in Church and State is for the governors to carry a watchful eye over all such as are discovered or feared to have private ends. . . . Provide for the keeping of unity, and . . . God will bless you with the success of this day. For this day, the seventeenth of March, Julius Cæsar overthrew Sextus Pompeius. . . . And this very day, too, Frederick II. entered Jerusalem, and recovered whatsoever Saladin had taken from the Christians. But I must tell you, these emperors and their forces were great keepers of unity.' [1363]
In the same year he caused the Royal Declaration to be added to the Thirty-nine Articles to check their Calvinistic interpretation. [1364] From the same motive he displaced, through the agency of Wentworth and Bramhall, the Calvinistic Irish Articles, and neutralized the influence of Archbishop Ussher in Ireland. But the height of his folly, and the beginning of his fall, was the enforcement of his episcopal and ritualistic scheme upon Presbyterian Scotland in criminal defiance of the will of the people and the law of the land. This brought on the Scotch Covenant and hastened the Civil War.
In England he filled all vacancies with Churchmen and Arminians of his own stamp. He kept (as he himself informs us in his Diary) a ledger for the guidance of his royal master in the distribution of patronage: those marked by the letter O (Orthodox) were recommended to all favors, those marked P (Puritans) were excluded from all favors. Bishop Morely, on being asked what the Arminians held, wittily and truthfully replied, 'The best bishoprics and deaneries in England.' He expelled or silenced the Puritans, and shut up every unauthorized meeting-house. 'Even the devotions of private families could not escape the vigilance of his spies.' In his eyes the Puritans were but a miserable 'fraction' of fanatics and rebels, a public nuisance which must be crushed at any price. He made the congregations of French and Dutch refugees conform or leave the land, and forbade the English ambassador in Paris to attend the service of the Huguenots. He restrained the press and the importation of foreign books, especially the favorite Geneva translation of the Bible prepared by the Marian exiles. He stopped several ships in the Thames which were to carry persecuted and disheartened Puritans to New England, and thus tried to prevent Providence from writing the American chapter in history. In this way Oliver Cromwell is said to have been kept at home, that in due time he might overthrow the monarchy.
With equal rigor Laud enforced his ritualism, which was to him not only a desirable matter of taste and propriety, but also an essential element of reverence and piety. He took special care and showed great liberality for the restoration of cathedrals and the full cathedral service with the most pompous ceremonial; he made it a point of vital importance that the communion-tables be removed from the centre of the church to the east end of the chancel, elevated above the level of the pavement, placed altar-ways, railed in, and approached always with the prescribed bows and genuflexions [1365] He called the altar 'the greatest place of God's residence on earth,' and magnified it above the pulpit, because on the altar was Christ's body, which was more than his Word; but he denied the charge of transubstantiation. He introduced pictures, images, crucifixes, candles, and brought put every worn-out relic from the ecclesiastical wardrobe of the Middle Ages. Being himself unmarried, he preferred celibates in the priesthood. In the University of Oxford, to which he was a munificent benefactor, he was addressed as His Holiness, and Most Holy father.
No wonder that he was charged with the intention to reintroduce popery into England. The popular mind, especially in times of excitement, takes no notice of minor shades of distinction, and knows only friend and foe. Laud, no doubt, did the pope's work effectually, but he did it unintentionally. He loved the Roman Church much better than the Protestant sects, but he loved the Anglican Church more. He once dreamed, as he tells us, 'that he was reconciled to the Church of Rome,' but was much troubled by it. [1366] He was twice offered, by some unnamed agent, a cardinal's hat, but promptly declined it. [1367] He preferred to be an independent pope in England, and aped the Roman original as well as he could, with more or less show of real or imaginary opposition that springs from rivalry and affinity. Neal says that he was not 'an absolute papist,' but 'ambitious of being the sovereign patriarch of three kingdoms.' [1368] From his 'Conference' with Fisher the Jesuit, which is by far his ablest and most learned performance, it is very evident that he differed from Rome on several points of doctrine and practice, such as the invocation of Mary and the saints, the worship of images, transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the mass, works of supererogation, the temporal power of the pope, and the infallibility of councils; and that his mind, though clear and acute, was not sufficiently logical to admit the ultimate conclusions of some of his own premises. [1369] He regarded the Reformation merely as an incident in the history of the English Church, and rejected only such doctrines of Romanism as he was unable to find in the Bible and the early fathers. In his long and manly defense before the House of Lords he claimed to have converted several persons (Chillingworth among them) from popery, but frankly admitted that 'the Roman Church never erred in fundamentals, for fundamentals are in the Creed, and she denies it not. Were she not a true Church, it were hard with the Church of England, since from her the English bishops derive their apostolic succession. She is, therefore, a true but not an orthodox Church. Salvation may be found in her communion; and her religion and ours are one in the great essentials. I am not bound to believe each detached phrase in the Homilies, and I do not think they assert the pope to be Antichrist; yet it can not be proved that I ever denied him to be so. As to the charge of unchurching foreign Protestants, I certainly said generally, according to St. Jerome, "No bishop, no Church;" and the preface of the book of ordination sets forth that the three orders came from the apostles.' In his last will and testament he says: 'For my faith, I die as I have lived, in the true orthodox profession of the Catholic faith of Christ, foreshadowed by the prophets and preached to the world by Christ himself, his blessed apostles, and their successors; and a true member of his Catholic Church within the communion of a living part thereof, the present Church of England, as it stands established by law.'