Archbishop William Laud

Laud, William (1573–1645), archbishop of Canterbury, was born in Reading on 7 October 1573, the only son of William Laud (d. 1594), a prosperous clothier, and his wife, Lucy, née Webb (d. 1600), the widow of John Robinson, another Reading clothier

Laud matriculated in October 1589 at St John's College, Oxford—an institution which provided his home for the best part of the next thirty years. St John's was a Marian foundation which had not therefore experienced the rigours of the Edwardian Reformation, and Laud joined the college only sixteen years after five fellows, including Edmund Campion, had defected to Rome. Catholic tendencies had not entirely left the college. Another influence was his tutor, John Buckeridge. Buckeridge was the source of many of Laud's early ‘high-church’ views: his surviving published works reveal an exalted view of the sacraments and of episcopacy and a taste for Greek patristic literature.

Laud found himself almost constantly at the centre of controversy. A sermon preached by Laud in St Mary's in October 1606 was condemned by the vice-chancellor Henry Airay, provost of Queen's, ‘as containing in it sundry scandalous and Popish passages’ . Two years later Laud was creating controversy yet again in his DD thesis, when he maintained that only a bishop can confer orders, and that episcopacy is a separate order from presbyters, and superior to them by divine right. As a result Laud was accused of unchurching the foreign Reformed churches.

However, given the frequency with which the charge of popery was made against him, and the defection of some of his own Oxford acquaintances to Rome, that Laud would in later life have a troubling dream that he was reconciled to Rome. Despite the fact that the charge of popery pursued him from his Oxford days right until his death, there is no evidence whatsoever that Laud ever seriously contemplated conversion to the Roman church, which he always seems to have regarded with distaste. Therefore, it would be unwise to assume that he was simply hostile towards all manifestations of foreign Reformed divinity at this point.

It was not long before Laud's continuing clashes with Abbot brought him before James again. According to Heylyn, Laud in a sermon on Shrove Sunday 1615 at the university church ‘insisted on some points which might indifferently be imputed either to Popery or Arminianism (as about that time they began to call it)’ The sermon contained Laud's by now characteristic attack on presbyterians as being as bad as papists.

In 1616 James 1 appointed Laud to the deanery of Gloucester, and he soon proved to be a predictably controversial appointment. Having been, as he claimed, charged by James to sort out irregularities in the diocese, he began early in 1617 by placing the communion table in the cathedral altarwise at the east end of the church, and commanded people to bow towards the altar on their approach. This prompted an enraged response. However, it was his close association with the king's favourite, Buckingham, which put Laud on the path to success over the following years. He became chaplain, or confessor, to Buckingham three weeks later, and for the next six years his dedication to the favourite was absolute. While he enjoyed the approval of James, and later Charles, he was perceived most of all as Buckingham's man.

The accession of Charles to the throne at the end of March 1625 was to be a turning point in Laud's life, but it was not initially marked by any close relationship with the king. Nevertheless, much of his contact with the king took place via Buckingham. Just a week after James's death Laud presented to the duke ‘a schedule, in which were wrote the names of many Churchmen, marked with the letters O. and P.’ (Works, 3.159)—presumably meaning ‘orthodox’ and ‘puritan’—which Buckingham had requested in order to deliver it to Charles. Tt was only with Charles' favoured clergyman, Andrewes's death that Laud received the crucial post of dean of the Chapel Royal and the longer-term promise of the archbishopric of Canterbury.

As Laud's position at court grew more powerful, however, so it also came to seem more vulnerable. His enemies at court were constantly intriguing against him, and the Devonshire marriage was still being dredged up to poison the king and Buckingham against him. Archbishop Abbot was his inveterate enemy but it was John Williams whose intrigues were giving Laud sleepless nights. His obsessive fears of Williams coloured his interpretation of political crises for the rest of his life: he was convinced that his enemy was behind the activities of Henry Burton, John Bastwick, and William Prynne, and even the Scottish rebellion over the prayer-book.

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	Date"Date" is a type and predefined property provided by Semantic MediaWiki to represent date values.
Act Abolishing the Office of King	17 March 1649
Army Remonstrance	18 November 1648
Civil War - Regicide	6 December 1648 30 January 1649
Civil War - Restoration	4 April 1660
Commissions of Array	1 June 1642
Execution of Archbishop William Laud	10 January 1645
Execution of Charles I	30 January 1649
Execution of Thomas Wentworth	12 May 1641
Four Bills	24 December 1647
Grand Remonstrance	22 November 1641
Heads of Proposals	22 September 1647
Instrument of Government	16 December 1653
Militia Ordinance	7 December 1641
Naseby	14 June 1645
National Covenant	27 February 1638
Newcastle Proposals	1 July 1646
Nineteen Propositions	1 June 1642
Petition of Right	7 June 1628
Petition of the Leveller Women	11 September 1649
Putney Debates	1 October 1647
Representation of the Army	5 June 1647
Root and Branch Petition	11 December 1640
Saffron Walden	1 May 1647
Scottish Prayer Book	23 July 1637
Short Parliament	13 April 1640
The Bishop's War	1 January 1639
The Five Members	4 January 1642
The Second Civil War	22 February 1648
The Self Denying Ordinance	19 December 1644
Treaty of Uxbridge	29 January 1645