CHAPTER LXXIII. THE BEGINNING OF LAUD'S ARCHBISHOPRIC. On his return from Scotland, Charles had ridden hastily in advance of his retinue, anxious to rejoin the Queen at Greenwich before her approaching confinement. On October 14 she gave birth to a second son, baptized James by Laud, in memory of his grandfather. Laud named Laud was no longer Bishop of London. When he entered 1633. the King's presence for the first time after he had August 6. left Scotland, he received an unexpected greeting. Archbishop. "My Lord's Grace of Canterbury," said Charles, "you are very welcome." The news of Abbot's death had just reached the Court.1 The change made by Laud's promotion may not seem to have been great. Before, as after, his accession to the archbishopric, he was possessed of Charles's fullest confidence, and he had not scrupled to interfere in the King's name in dioceses not his own. In reality Charles was Results of his promo tion. the consequences of the change were enormous. indeed ready to make himself the centre of the ecclesiastical administration, and he had definite ideas on the direction in which he wished to go; but he had not the force of character or the perception of the reality of things at a distance which marks out a great administrator, and, determined as he was to make his will felt, he rarely knew enough of what was going on to rouse himself to action. All that was wanting to Charles Heylyn, Cypr. Angl. 250. was supplied by Laud. Every man who had a grievance against the Puritans, who could complain that Church property was embezzled or Church services irregularly performed, that this minister neglected to wear a surplice, and that the other minister omitted to repeat the Creed or the Lord's Prayer, appealed to Laud. As Bishop of London, Laud, if he pleased, could go to the King and procure his order that the complaint should be redressed; but he could hardly conceal from himself that the world looked upon his interference as impertinent. As archbishop he had his hand upon the spring by which, except in the remote and poor northern province, the whole ecclesiastical machinery was moved. His authority might be vague and undefined. There might be some doubt how far he was justified in interfering with the other bishops; but there could be no doubt that the authority existed, and it was certain that in his hands its claims would be pushed to the utmost. It was nothing to him that the bishops would sink into mere agents of a central authority. The danger to society of taking away the habit of initiative from inferior officials was one which was not likely to alarm him. He cared merely that the right thing should be done, very little that men should put their hearts into their work at the risk of sometimes going a little wrong. Abbot's last report. No doubt Abbot had been negligent. To the inertness of character and age he united the inertness of a man who knew that he was powerless to carry his ideas into practice. Eight months before his death he had sent in to the King a report of the state of his province. He did not care to know anything about it. The bishops, 'for aught it appeared,' had been keeping residence. For aught that he could learn, ordinations had been canonically kept. Here and there there had been something wrong, but it would be a comfort to his Majesty to hear that 'so little exorbitancy' could be found. The reins were soon to be grasped by a tighter hand. Abbot was scarcely dead when some one-probably an Abbot's Report, Jan. 2, 1633, Laud's Works, v. 309. 1633 LAUD'S PRINCIPLES. 301 ecclesiastic attached to the household of the Queen--offered Laud a Cardinal's hat if he would place himself at the disposition of the Pope, and the offer was repeated a fortnight later. "Something dwells within me," was the reply of the new Archbishop, "which will not suffer me to accept that till Rome be other than it is." A Cardinal's hat offered to Laud. Laud's Neither the emissaries of Rome nor the Puritans who charged Laud with entering into a secret understanding with Rome understood his character. Half the dogmatic principles. teaching of the Papal Church, half the dogmatic teaching of the Calvinistic Churches, was held by him to be but a phantom summoned up by the unauthorised prying of vain and inquisitive minds into mysteries beyond the grasp of the intellect of man, as unreal as were the Platonic ideas to the mind of Aristotle. The craving after certainty which sent the Calvinist to rest upon the logical formulas of his teacher, and which sent the Roman Catholic to rest on the expositions of an infallible Church, had no charms for him. It was sufficient for him that he knew enough, or thought he knew enough, to guide his steps in the practical world around him. As he shunned the extremes of intellectual life, so too did he shun the extremes of emotional life. The fervour of asceticism, and the sharp internal struggles by which the Puritan forced his way to that serene conviction of Divine favour which he called conversion, were to Laud mere puerile trivialities which a sober and truthful man was bound to avoid. Laud not work. Soberness of judgment in matters of doctrine, combined with an undue reverence for external forms, an entire want of imaginative sympathy, and a quick and irritable suited to his temper, made Laud one of the worst rulers who could at this crisis have been imposed upon the English Church. For it was a time when, in the midst of diverging tendencies of thought, many things were certain to be said and done which would appear extravagant to his mind; and when the bond of unity which he sought to preserve was to be found rather in identity of moral aim than in exact conformity with any special standard. The remedy for the diseases of the time, in short, was to be sought in liberty, and of the value of liberty Laud was as ignorant as the narrowest Puritan or the most bigoted Roman Catholic.. Rumours of Rome. Case of Those who are most prone to misunderstand Laud's lean others are themselves most liable to be misunderings to. stood. The foreign ecclesiastic, if such he was, who offered Laud a Cardinal's hat, did not stand alone in his interpretation of the tendencies of the new Archbishop. One Ludowick Bowyer, a young man of good family, who may have been mad, and was certainly a thief and a swindler, went about spreading rumours that Laud had been detected in raising a revenue for the Pope, and had been sent to the Tower as a traitor. The Star Chamber imprisoned him for life, fined him 3,000/., ordered him to be set three times in the pillory, to lose his ears, and to be branded on the forehead with the letters L and R, as a liar and a rogue. "His censure is upon record," wrote Laud coolly in his diary, "and God forgive him." 1 Nov. 30. Eleanor Davies. Whether Ludowick Bowyer was mad or not, there can be no doubt of the insanity of Lady Eleanor Davies, the widow of the poetic Irish Chief Justice, Sir John Davies. Two years before, her brother, the Earl of Castlehaven, had been executed for the commission of acts of wickedness so atrocious and disgusting as to be explicable only by confirmed aberration of mind. His sister's madness was fortunately only shown in words. She believed herself a divinely inspired interpreter of the prophecies of Daniel, and she published a book in which she recorded her ravings. She was brought before the High Commission. On October. the title-page was printed backwards her maiden name, Eleanor Audeley, followed by the anagram, Reveale O Daniel. Sir John Lambe pointed out that to make this correct, an 'I' had to be substituted for the 'Y,' and suggested as a truer result from 'Dame Eleanor Davies,' 'Never so mad Kendrick to Windebank, Sept. 13. Same to Windebank, Sept. 26, Oct. 5. Windebank's Notes, Nov. 13, S. P. Dom. ccxlvi. 28, 82, ccxlvii. 21, ccl. 59. Laud to Wentworth, Nov. 15, Strafford Letters, 1, 155; sentence, Rushworth, ii. App. 65. The fine appears never to have been paid. 1633 LADY ELEANOR DAVIES. 303* a ladie.' Loud laughter followed, but the poor woman was not allowed to benefit by the jest. She was imprisoned in the Gatehouse and fined 3,000l. She immediately discovered that Laud was the beast in the Revelation, and that he would die before the end of November.2 Such a case was precisely one in which Laud, if he had had any magnanimity in him, would have used all his influence in favour of a relaxation of the punishment of a lady whose follies were their own penalty, and who, if she needed restraint, needed restraint of a tender and affectionate kind. The sentence was, however, carried out with extreme severity. Lady Eleanor's daughter petitioned in vain that her mother might be allowed to take the air, and that 'for womanhood's sake' she might have some one of her own sex to attend upon her, as well as some grave divines to comfort her in the troubles of her mind.3 Laud's The sharpness and irritability with which Laud was commonly charged were not inconsistent with a readiness to use persuasion rather than force as long as mildness harshness. promised a more successful issue. When once he discovered that an opponent was not to be gained over, he lost all patience with him. He had no sense of humour to qualify the harshness of his judgment. Small offences assumed in his eyes the character of great crimes. If in the Star Chamber, any voice was raised for a penalty out of all proportion to the magnitude of the fault, that voice was sure to be the Archbishop's. Almost immediately after his promotion Laud received a letter from the King which was doubtless written at his own Sept. 19. instigation. In this letter he was directed to see that Restriction the bishops observed the canon which restricted their ordinations to persons who, unless they held certain exceptional positions, were able to show that they were about of ordina tion. As Heylyn tells the story, and as it has constantly been repeated, she tried to get the anagram out of Eleanor Davis. What I have given must be right, as it stands so on the title-page. Lambe's anagram is only right by spelling Davies. The book is in S. P. Dom. cclv. 21. 2 Nicholas to Pennington, Oct. 28. Lines and petition, S. P. Dom. ccxlviii. 65, 93, cclv. 20. Petition of Lady Hastings, S. P. Dom. cclv. 21. |