Nor was this the only presage of coming mishaps. Charles was afterwards accused, during the Long Parliament, of having altered the coronation oath; the very sermon, also, preached by the eloquent Penhouse, Bishop of Carlisle, formerly his tutor, seemed to invite fate to do her worst; he chose a text, according to Heylyn, more proper for a funeral than a coronation--"I will give to thee a crown of life"--and engrafted on it a discourse which those who heard it judged might, with great propriety, have been uttered when his Majesty was dead, but not just at the moment when he was about to undertake the government of his people.
The ceremonial being concluded, the King walked in his robes from Westminster Abbey to the Hall, and delivered to Laud, who represented the Dean of Westminster, the crown, sceptre, and the sword called cortena. Laud, after receiving the regalia, returned to the Abbey, and, placing them on the altar, offered them up in his Majesty’s name; after which they were again locked up, never to see the light until after the stirring season of the Rebellion, and the more placid years of the Commonwealth. They were again displayed at the Restoration.[[292]]
All these forms were regarded as next to impious by the Puritan party; and, since there was now a cordial alliance between Laud and Buckingham, the popular hatred was divided between them both. Two years had now passed since Buckingham, in the miseries of an ague, had sent for Laud to console and advise him. Laud was, in truth, one of the most agreeable of companions, and carried with him to his grave an apprehension quick and sudden--"a sociable wit and pleasant humour."[[293]] So that, even in the crisis of a malady, then of a far more severe character than in the present day, Buckingham forgot his sufferings, or bore them with a patience unwonted to his irritable nature; and, “by that patience, did so break their heats and violences, that at last they left him.”
After this period, Laud became, Heylyn tells us, “not only a confessor, but a councillor to the Duke;” and to his advice it was owing that the endowments of the Charter-house were not appropriated by the Duke to the maintenance of the war, a plan which had been contemplated by the Duke, but applied to those of education. Laud, we must in gratitude recall, opposed all alienations of that nature; and to his firmness, as well as to that of the honest-hearted Sir Edward Coke, who, as trustee to the estates called Sutton’s Lands, resisted the attempts of the Crown to seize them, we owe the preservation of many colleges and hospitals.
During his intimacy with Buckingham, Laud succeeded in imbuing him with those opinions which he himself advocated during his life, and died to support. These were opposed to what was then called “Doctrinal Puritanism,” a term which Buckingham expressed a wish to comprehend, and which Laud undertook to expound. These doctrinal points related to the observance of the Lord’s Day; to the “indiscrimination,” says Heylyn, “of bishops and presbyters, the power of sovereigns in ecclesiastical matters, the doctrine of confession and of sacerdotal absolution, and the five points which had, for the last twenty years, been agitating the churches of Holland.”[[294]] Those points, which have unhappily raised so many bitter resentments, were now beginning to inflame the public mind in England with that fever of intolerance which is so contagious, and so inimical to true religion. These controversies, in the time of Buckingham, were carried on between the party called Arminians and the Calvinists. “A swarm of books,” as Heylyn calls them, came over from Holland, and awoke out of “that dead sleep,” as he terms the then state of the Church, the learned divines of Oxford. Laud had been one of the first, on the publication of these works, to espouse and to advocate what was then styled Arminianism, so called from a famous professor of Leyden, Von Armene. Whatever was the standard of Laud’s opinions, and whatsoever merit may be attached to their sincerity, or what blame soever to their virulence, it is, at all events, satisfactory to believe that the attention of Buckingham was, during the latter years of his life, directed to subjects of mightier import than the sublunary interests which had hitherto solely engrossed his attention.
Laud had, indeed, those qualities which form the man of piety into the missionary of social life--a mission much required in all ages. The rigid, uncompromising priest, who gives no latitude to opinion, no indulgence to error, generally does far more harm than good. The lax man of the world, with weak purpose, and flickering notions of right and wrong, is a scandal to the faith he professes, and lends a hand to indifference, if not to infidelity. But Laud, an enthusiast, perhaps a zealot, was the most agreeable of bigots. Born at Reading, the son of a clothier, he had been reproached, like Buckingham, with the meanness of his origin. Like most men, he felt the imputation; and even in his garden at Lambeth, when in the height of his greatness, he is stated by his biographer, Doctor Heylyn, to have shewn no ordinary degree of vexation on his countenance, after reading a libel in which he was reproached with his parentage, “as if,” he said, “he had been raked out of a dung-hill.” He owned that he had not the good fortune “to be born a gentleman,” but he had the happiness to be descended from honest parents. The beautiful, old-fashioned College of St. John’s, at Oxford, had received him as a commoner, and he entered there at a period when Calvinism influenced, strange to say, the tone and spirit of that university. All that had once been held sacred was decaying or disused; and the Reformed Church of England had become eclipsed by the doctrines and writings of Zuinglius, introduced by Dr. Humphrey, the then Vice-Chancellor, who had received his impressions, when deprived of his fellowship by Queen Mary, at Zurich, the very hot-bed of Calvinism.
The use of the surplice, the custom of bowing at the name of Jesus, commanded by Queen Elizabeth in 1559, and the distinctive dress of the priests, had been laid aside, when Laud, in 1604, performed his exercise for Bachelor of Divinity, into which treatise he introduced those tenets which were soon conceived, or misconceived, to be tainted with Romanism.
Nevertheless, from the time when he was president of his own college, St. John’s, to the moment of his promotion to the see of Canterbury, there was little real obstruction to Laud’s elevation, notwithstanding that the whole of his career was one of controversy and contention, until he rose to the highest pinnacle of ecclesiastical greatness, and fell, subsequently, into the very depths of adversity.
This slight sketch is necessary to show how naturally Laud might be expected to succeed in gaining an influence over Buckingham, since he had been always engaged in winning over those of opposite opinions, and in the great battle of controversy. Cheerful, not too severe, nor even sufficiently strict, in his notions of morality, as appears from his conduct relative to Mountjoy, Earl of Devonshire--a short, stout man, with a plump and merry visage, the very opposite of a Puritan or Calvinist minister--no man knew better than Laud how to lay aside the gravity which was unseasonable; accessible in his manners, staunch as a churchman to the interests of his order, but perfectly indifferent, personally, to the gifts of fortune, Laud delighted the great Duke, weary of fame, and perhaps of life, by the sweetness of manner and vivacity of temper which become so well men of high attainments. They were henceforth friends, until the thread of Buckingham’s existence was cut short by the assassin’s blow.
It is impossible to estimate too highly the effects of this intimacy upon the character of the Duke. He seems to have yielded readily to the remonstrances of Laud against the misappropriation of church revenues; and indeed, according to another authority, his own disposition accelerated the effect produced by these impressions. Buckingham was not the rapacious oppressor described by the contemporary slanderers of his time. “Oppression and avarice,” observes Nichols, in his history of Leicestershire, “he knew not.”