White King by Leanda de Lisle

Author:Leanda de Lisle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

18

EVIL WOMEN

ON THE DAY of his death, 10 January 1645, the diminutive Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, dressed in his habitual black. Laud had been a chief supporter of Charles’s rule without Parliament. Facing trial for his life had been no less than he had expected. Nevertheless, this death had been a long time coming. He had spent four years in the Tower, writing memoirs, as well as penning defences of episcopacy and the liturgy. He might have been left there and forgotten if it had not been necessary for him to appoint bishops at Parliament’s request. When he had refused to appoint an individual who had once been rejected by the king, his enemies in Parliament were reminded that they had unfinished business in his regard.

For Laud, the Church of England was a pillar of a Christian society, which, along with the Crown and a well-established social hierarchy, would protect the weak from the strong. Others saw him as an apologist for tyranny and an enemy of the godly. Popery had been the leading accusation made against Laud at his trial, and he had defended himself from it vigorously. He had ‘laboured nothing more, than that the external worship of God might be preserved’, he told his judges. Puritan neglect of places of worship was a kind of sacrilege while ritual and ceremony were together ‘the hedge that fence the substance of religion from all the indignities which profaneness … too commonly put upon it’. Since the essence of religious ceremonies was that the whole congregation took part, so uniformity of religion in the community had been at the heart of his reforms. Enforcing it had in turn been allied to royal authority.1

It was defiance of royal authority that had cost Laud’s prosecution lawyer, the Puritan polemicist William Prynne, his ears and had branded his face. Defiance of Parliament’s authority was to cost William Laud his life.

As with Strafford, the prosecution had failed to achieve a conviction at trial. Laud had been condemned by Parliament. The Act of Attainder was passed on 4 January 1645: the same day that Parliament abolished the Book of Common Prayer, and with it the old Jacobean and Elizabethan liturgy of the Church of England. Now, six days later, the seventy-one-year-old was being escorted to Tower Hill. The white-haired old man was harangued and harassed by a mob all the way to the scaffold. Even here his tormentors were so numerous that they barred his way to the block.fn1 ‘I did think’, Laud commented drily, ‘that I might have room to die.’ Despite the clamour he met his end ‘supported by remarkable constancy’.2

Charles was certain God would now punish Parliament for their actions. He ascribed his own misfortunes to divine retribution for having agreed to send the innocent Strafford to his death in May 1641. Charles bore no such responsibility for Laud’s beheading. This Act of Attainder had not borne his signature. It was Parliament’s turn to feel divine retribution, Charles assured Henrietta Maria, ‘this last crying blood being totally theirs’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.