William Laud - High Church Policy

High Church Policy

The pun "give great praise to the Lord, and little Laud to the devil" is a warning to King Charles attributed to the official court jester Archibald Armstrong. Laud was known to be touchy about his diminutive stature. He was almost sixty when he became Archbishop, and having waited with increasing impatience for a decade to replace Abbot, was no longer prepared to compromise on any aspect of his policy.

Whereas Strafford saw the political dangers of Puritanism, Laud saw the threat to the episcopacy. But the Puritans themselves felt threatened: the Counter-Reformation was succeeding abroad and the Thirty Years' War was not progressing to the advantage of the Protestants. In this climate, Laud's high church policy was seen as a sinister development. A year after Laud's appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury, the ship Griffin left for America, carrying religious dissidents such as Anne Hutchinson, the Reverend John Lothropp and the Reverend Zechariah Symmes.

Laud's policy was influenced by his desire to impose uniformity on the Church of England, which was driven by a belief that this was the duty of his office but, to those of differing views, it came as persecution. Perhaps this had the unintended consequence of garnering support for the most implacable opponents of the Anglican compromise. In 1637, William Prynne, John Bastwick and Henry Burton were convicted of seditious libel and had their ears cropped and their cheeks branded. Prynne reinterpreted the "SL" ("Seditious Libeller") branded on his forehead as "Stigmata Laudis". Laud moved to silence his principal episcopal critic John Williams who was convicted of various offences in Star Chamber; but contrary to Laud's expectation, Williams refused to resign as Bishop of Lincoln, and waited patiently until 1641 when he moved to bring about Laud's downfall.

Charles I towards the end of his life admitted that he had put too much trust in Laud, and allowed his "peevish humours ", and obsession with points of ritual, to inflame divisions within the Church: he warned his son not to rely entirely on anyone else's judgement in such matters. Laud, on his side, could not forgive the King for allowing Strafford's execution and dismissed him as " a mild and gracious Prince, that knows not how to be or be made great".