Besides all this intolerance and oppression, it must be acknowledged that there was in the ministry of the Church of England a large amount of ungodliness and immorality. To believe that all the charges of clerical viciousness and criminality were true, would be to imbibe Puritan prejudice; whilst, on the other hand, to believe that all were false, would betray a strong tincture of High Church partiality; so much could not have been boldly affirmed, and generally believed, without a large substratum of fact. But more of this hereafter.
Rigid ceremonialism, desecration of the Sabbath, sympathy with Roman Catholicism, fondness for imitating popish practices, cruel intolerance, alliance with unconstitutional rule, and the immorality of clergymen, will serve to explain what gave such force to the antagonistic puritan feeling which surged up so fearfully in 1640. The Church had become thoroughly unpopular amongst the middle and lower classes in London and other large places; in short, with that portion of the people, which in the modern age of civilization, must and will carry the day. They did not then, with all their fondness for theological controversy, care so much for any abstract idea of Church polity as for the actual working of ecclesiastical machinery, and the character and conduct of ecclesiastical men before their eyes. It was not any Presbyterian or Independent theory, as opposed to the Episcopalian system of the Church of England, that swept the nation along its fiery path in the dread assault which levelled the Episcopal establishment; but it was the indignation aroused by corruption, immorality, and intolerance, which kindled the blazing war-torch destined to burn to the ground both temple and throne. Had the Church of England been at that time a liberal and purely Protestant Church, and its rulers wise, moderate, and charitable men; whatever might have been the influence of ecclesiastical dogmas, its fate must have been far different from what it actually became.
The person who carried Anglo-Catholicism to its greatest excess, and who, by other unpopular proceedings, did more than anybody else, to alienate from the State religion a large proportion of his fellow-countrymen, was William Laud. Ritualism ran riot under the rule of this famous prelate. Alienated from the theology of Augustine, but relishing the sacerdotalism of Chrysostom, he delighted in a gorgeous worship such as accorded with the Byzantine liturgy, and was penetrated with that reverence for the priesthood and the Eucharist which the last of the Greek orators, in his flights of rhetoric, did so much to foster. Whatever might be the extravagances in Byzantium, they were nearly, if not quite, paralleled when Archbishop Laud held unchecked sway. A church was consecrated by throwing dust or ashes in the air.[40] The napkin covering the Eucharistic elements was carefully lifted up, reverently peeped under, and then solemnly let fall again: all which performances were accompanied by repeated lowly obeisances before the altar. This ceremony was quite as childish and far less picturesque than the dramatic doings in the Greek Church, when choristers aped angels by fastening to their shoulders wings of gauze.[41] Into cathedrals, churches, and chapels, were also introduced pictures, images, crucifixes, and candles, which, with the aid of surplices and copes,[42] bowing, crossing, and genuflections, produced a spectacle which might be taken for a meagre imitation of the mass. Had not public opinion, which was beginning to be a mighty power, checked such proceedings, there can be no doubt they would speedily have reached such lengths, that an English parish church would have differed scarcely at all from a Roman Catholic chapel.[43]
Laud's size was in the inverse ratio of his activity—for he had the name of "the little Archbishop," though his capacities for work were of gigantic magnitude. His influence extended everywhere, over everybody, and everything, small as well as great—like the trunk of an elephant, as well suited to pick up a pin as to tear down a tree. His articles of visitation traversed the widest variety of particulars, descending through all conceivable ecclesiastical and moral contingencies, down to the humblest details of village life. Churchwardens were asked, "Doth your minister preach standing, and with his hat off? Do the people cover their heads in the Church, during the time of divine service, unless it be in case of necessity, in which case they may wear a nightcap or coif?" These functionaries were also required to state, how many physicians, chirurgeons, or midwives there might be in the neighbourhood; how long they had used the office, and by what authority; and how they demeaned themselves, and of what skill they were accounted in their profession.[44] A report of the state of his province he presented to the King year by year.[45] Every bishopric passed under his review, and the substance of the information he obtained and digested, affords a bird's-eye view of the religious condition of each diocese, in the Archbishop's estimation. Oxford, Salisbury, Chichester, Hereford, Exeter, Ely, Peterborough, and Rochester, were in a tolerably fair condition, although furnishing matter here and there for some complaint. But in his own see of Canterbury there were many refractory persons, and divers Brownists and other separatists, especially about Ashford and Maidstone, who were doing harm, "not possible to be plucked up on the sudden."[46] London occasioned divers complaints of nonconformity. Factious and malicious pamphlets were circulated, Puritans were insolent, and curates and lecturers were "convented." From Lincoln came complaints, that parishioners wandered from church to church, and refused to come up to the altar rail at the holy communion; Buckingham and Bedfordshire also abounded in refractory people. Norwich had several factious men: Bridge and Ward are named, and it is said there was more of disorder in Ipswich and Yarmouth than in the cathedral city. Lecturers were abundant, and catechising neglected. In the diocese of Bath and Wells, lectures were put down in market towns, and afternoon sermons were changed into catechetical exercises. Popish recusants appeared fewer than before, and altogether the bishop had put things in marvellous order.
As Laud's eye—that ferret-like eye, which under its arched brow, looks with cunning vigilance from Vandyke's canvas—ran over his whole province, and his busy pen recorded what he learned, he sent to the Inns of Court—the benchers having betrayed Puritan tendencies—and insisted upon surplice and hood, and the whole service prescribed for the occasion being used in chapel before sermon. He claimed rights of ecclesiastical visitation in the two universities, and inspected cathedrals and churches, as to their improvements and repairs; condescending even to order the removal of certain seats employed for the wives of deans and prebendaries, and directing them to sit upon movable benches, or chairs.[47]
English residents in Holland;[48] chaplains of regiments amongst the Presbyterian Dutch; Protestant refugees in this country; and the ecclesiastical affairs of Scotland, all came under his vigilant notice, and within his tenacious grasp.[49]
In his own diocese and province[50] Laud's hand fell heavily on those beneath his sway. "All men," it is remarked, "are overawed, so that they dare not say their soul is their own." The clergy of his cathedral muttered their dissatisfaction. Reports circulated that they were "a little too bold with him;" and his remedy was, "If upon inquiry I do find it true, I shall not forget that nine of the twelve prebends are in the king's gift, and order the commission of my visitation; or alter it accordingly."[51] Dean and prebendaries were soon humbled under such discipline.
In court and country, in Church and State, Laud, next to the Earl of Strafford, must be considered to have been the most powerful minister in England.[52] Pledged to a thorough policy of arbitrary kingship, he helped in all things his royal master, and his able fellow-councillor. When Strafford was in Ireland as Lord Lieutenant, the Archbishop was the great power at home behind the throne. "He is the man," said courtiers, when they would point out the most favourable medium for approaching royalty.[53] His own power availed for the province of Canterbury; by the help of his archiepiscopal brother, Neil of York, it sufficed for all England. Such a man, so bigoted, so imperious, and so marvellously active, was sure to make many more foes than friends. He had also ways, altogether his own, of making enemies. As he himself tells us, he kept a ledger, in which he preserved a strict account of the theological and ecclesiastical bias of clergymen, for the guidance of his royal master in the distribution of patronage. O and P were the letters at the heads of two lists. On the Orthodox all favours were showered. From those favours all Puritans were excluded.[54]
The Anglicanism of Laud was dear to Charles I. for two reasons. First, it harmonized with his own despotic principles. The King had been, ever since he assumed the crown, working out a problem in which the direst mischief was involved—whether it were not possible for an English sovereign, without casting away constitutional forms, to grasp at absolute dominion, to make the Commons a mere council for advice, or a Court to register decrees, rather than an integral branch of the Legislature; and, while conceding to them the office of filling the country's purse, to claim and exercise an independent power of managing the strings. He disliked parliaments, if they exercised their rights. "They are of the nature of cats," said he, "they ever grow curst with age, so that if you will have good of them, put them off handsomely when they come to any age, for young ones are ever most tractable."[55] His remedy for troublesome parliaments was dissolution. He preferred ship money to legal taxation: Anglicanism, from its maintenance of the Divine right of Kings, favoured his views in this respect, and divines of that stamp were after his own heart. But there was a second reason why Charles was drawn towards Laud. It would be unjust to the King to represent him merely as a politician. Grave, cold, reserved and haughty—qualities indicated in the countenance which the pencil of Vandyke has made familiar to us all—he was also a man of sincere religious feeling; but that feeling appears in harmony with his natural character. Stately ceremonialism, court-like prelacy, priestly hauteur, and a frigid creed corresponded even more with the idiosyncracy of the man than with the prejudices of the monarch. From a youth he had shown a leaning towards the Roman Catholic form of worship, and this tendency had been nourished by the education received from his father. "I have fully instructed them," King James observed in a letter touching his sons, "so as their behaviour and service shall, I hope, prove decent, and agreeable to the purity of the primitive Church, and yet as near the Roman form as can lawfully be done, for it hath ever been my way to go with the Church of Rome usque ad aras."[56]