Van Dyck, Archbishop William Laud, 1636, National Portrait Gallery, London
Even someone with a natural talent for sycophancy like van dyck could not make Laud look anything other than thin skinned and awkward. Despite this, you really should not underestimate this man, as too many did in his own lifetime.
William Laud (1573-1645) pronounced “lord” not “loud” (I learnt this the hard way) is probably the most important Archbishop of Canterbury of the period bar Thomas Cranmer from the previous century. Modern Anglicanism/Episcopalism is as much his vision as it is Cranmer’s.
He’s often associated with a movement called Arminianism which sought to reverse some Calvinist excesses such as the doctrine of predestination and a renewed emphasis on sacraments, liturgy and hierarchy. It, in Laud’s variant anyway, also emphasised royal power and was a theological basis for Charles’s vision of sacredotal kingship.
Laud’s strategy and vision was to return the Church in England back to its pre reformation status and wealth, albeit purged of “Romish” errors and puritan troublemaking. This was music to both Charles and George’s ears who were looking for allies and tools to shut down opposition and increase crown revenue.
Christopher Hill was on to something when he said that what Charles and Laud were doing was using the tools of the Catholic counter reformation to build an ostensibly Protestant autocratic monarchy boosted by a hierarchal authoritarian church; at the expense of the Calvinist aristocratic grandees, landowners, and merchant class who dominated the governance in the three kingdoms and their parliaments.
All this was part of a larger ideological programme of turning back the erosion of crown power and church wealth in both kingdoms, as well as the elimination of resistance theory and popular sovereignty as ideological alternatives to authoritarian monarchy and hirachical religion.
You don’t need to be a church historian or a theologian to see how grossly unrealistic and needlessly provocative this was. It all came to grief in Scotland where Laud and Charles’s hubristic ambitions met reality and their attempts to impose a revised liturgy for Scotland (really a copy and paste of the BCP) led to the Covenanter movement and the Scottish invasion of northern England, supported by treasonous lords like Warwick, Manchester, and Essex in England as a way to force Charles hand into recalling parliament. Soon Charles lost his authority, the country was engulfed in civil war. Laud was impeached, arrested, imprisoned on bogus charges of promoting “popery” and executed in 1645.
Laud was a thin skinned man who was often the subject of much criticism for his “low born” origins. Even Charles would later state that he was too indulgent of Laud’s “peevish humours” and that his obsession with ceremony and order was unnecessary. He often argued with others in council meetings and had a reputation for vindictiveness, as evidenced by the treatment of puritan pamphleteers like Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne, and the reliance on prerogative courts and church courts to enforce uniformity and punish dissent. This was summed up be Burton himself saying he’d been strangled by lawn sleeves and prynnes claim that the brand of SL was not “seditious libeller” but “stigmata laudis.”
Laud was out of place at the female dominated court of Charles I as he was deeply uncomfortable with women, and despite later claims, him and Henrietta could not stand each other. There is an old story that he was offered a Cardinal’s hat by pope Urban VIII but I’ve never seen any evidence for this and Laud also made a point of ostentatiously avoiding the Queen’s papal envoys and priests despite their best efforts to engage him.
He’s often believed to have aspired to in effect be a second Wolsey or an English Richelieu, there’s simply not enough evidence for these claims; besides lacking meaningful interest in foreign policy or military affairs, Laud did not have the self confidence, emotional discipline, or strategic vision for that kind of role, nor the appetite for it.
You would not guess that he had erotic dreams about George from this portrait (Laud was almost certainly gay - his own diary is the source of the dreams as well as sexual encounters with other men) and that he was a proud cat dad in an age of dog people (Richelieu was a cat dad too).
He also left the most withering judgement on Charles, before his execution in 1645, namely that he was “a mild and gracious Prince, that knows not how to be or be made great.” Ouch.
