[[334]]The next year, 1632, Henry Sherfield, Esq. recorder of Sarum, was fined in the Star Chamber £500. on the following occasion. There was in the city of Salisbury a church called St. Edmund’s, whose windows were painted with the history of the creation; where God the Father was represented in the form of an old man, creating the world during the first six days, but painted sitting on the seventh, to denote the day of rest. In expressing the creation of the sun and moon, the painter had put in God’s hand a pair of compasses, as if he was going to measure them. The recorder was offended with this profaneness; and, by an order of vestry, took down those painted glasses, and broke some of the panes with his stick, and ordered others to be put up in their room. Upon this an information was exhibited against him in the Star Chamber, by the attorney-general; where Sherfield was for this reason charged with being ill-affected to the discipline of the Church of England, and the government thereof by bishops, because he had broken excellent pictures of the creation, and fined for his crime in the sum above mentioned, committed to the Fleet, removed from his recordership, and bound to his good behaviour. Nor was Laud ashamed, in justification of such pictures, to urge, as the papists continually do, that place in Dan. vii. 9, in which God is described as “the ancient of days;” shewing himself a worse divine, or a more popishly affected one, than the Earl of Dorset, who then sat with him in the court, and said, that by that text was meant “the eternity of God, and not God to be pictured as an old man, creating the world with a pair of compasses. But I wish” added the Earl, “there were no image of the Father, neither in the church, nor out of the church; for, at the best, they are but vanities and teachers of lies.”
In 1633,[[335]] Laud was made Archbishop of Canterbury; and having observed that the placing the communion table in the body of the church, or at the entrance of the chancel, was not only a prostitution of the table to ordinary and sordid uses, but the chancel looked like an useless building, fit only for a schooling and parish-meeting, though originally designed for the most solemn office of religion; to redeem these places, as he termed it, from profaneness, and restore them to the primitive use of the holy sacrament, the archbishop used his utmost diligence to remove the communion table from the body of the church, and fix it at the upper end of the chancel, and secure it from the approach of dogs, and all servile uses, by railing it in, and obliging the people to come up to those rails to receive the sacrament with more decency and order. This affair, says Lord Clarendon, he prosecuted more passionately than was fit for the season, and created disputes in numberless places;[[336]] so that the high commission had frequent occasions to punish the ministers, who were suspected of too little zeal for the Church of England. And as since the reformation the altars were changed into communion tables, and placed in the middle of the chancel, to avoid superstition; many imagined, and that with too much reason, the tables were again turned into altars with intent to revive a superstitious worship.
In the year 1634,[[337]] he set up and repaired Popish images in the glass windows of his chapel at Lambeth; particularly one of God the Father, in the form of a little old man. This Laud himself owned, that he repaired the windows at no small cost, by the help of the fragments that remained, and vindicated the thing. He introduced also copes, candlesticks, tapers, and such like trumperies. So that L’Estrange, whom no man will charge with partiality against the archbishop, says of him: [[338]]“The Archbishop of Canterbury stands aspersed, in common fame, as a great friend at least, and patron of the Romish Catholics, if he were not of the same belief. To which I answer by concession: true it is, he had too much and long favoured the Romish faction—though not the Romish faith. He tampered indeed to introduce some ceremonies, bordering upon superstition, disused by us, and abused by them. From whence the Romanists collected such a good disposition in him to their tenets, as they began not only to hope, but in good earnest to cry him up for their proselyte.”[proselyte.”]
Under the year 1635,[[339]] the author of the notes to the Complete History tells us, that one of the great offences taken by wise and good men against the archbishop, was the new attempt of reconciling the Church of England to the Church of Rome. The design was to accommodate the articles of the Church of England to the sense of the Church of Rome, for the reconciliation of the two churches. Davenport, an English Franciscan Friar, published a book to this purpose, under the name of Franciscus de Sancta Clara, which was dedicated to the king, and said to have been directed to Archbishop Laud. And it was an article objected against him, that for the advancement of popery and superstition in this realm, he had wittingly and willingly harboured and relieved divers popish priests and jesuits, and particularly Sancta Clara, who hath written a popish and seditious book, wherein the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England are much traduced and scandalized, the said archbishop having divers conferences with him, while he was writing the said book. The archbishop did not seem to deny his acquaintance with the man, nor with the design of the book; but was rather afraid the book would not answer the design.
The same author farther adds, that the best observations on this matter were made by Mr. Rous, in a speech against Dr. Cosin, March 16, 1640, “A second way by which this army of priests advanceth this popish design, is the way of treaty. This hath been acted both by writings and conference. Sancta Clara himself says, ‘Doctissimi eorum, quibuscunque egi.’[‘Doctissimi eorum, quibuscunque egi.’] So it seems they have had conference together. And Sancta Clara, on his part, labours to bring the articles of our church to popery, and some of our side labour to meet him in the way. We have a testimony that the great arch-priest himself hath said: ‘It were no hard matter to make a reconciliation, if a wise man had the handling of it.’”[‘It were no hard matter to make a reconciliation, if a wise man had the handling of it.’”]
Such was the good opinion which the papists had of Laud, and of his inclinations to popery, that it is certain they offered him a cardinal’s cap. Eachard and others say he refused it.
[[340]]But the Lord Wiquefort, as cited by Mr. Oldmixon, informs us, in his Treatise of the Ambassador and his Function, that Laud treated with Count Rosetti, the popish agent in England, for a pension of 48,000 livres a year; which if the Pope would have settled upon him, he would not only have accepted the cardinal’s cap, but have gone to Rome, and have dwelt with the Pope and his cardinals as long as he lived.
The bitter and relentless fury with which he treated the puritans, and others, who were friends to the Church of England, and some of the best protestants in the kingdom, is a demonstration that he was more papist than protestant. Of the puritans he used to say, as Heylin tells us, that “they were as bad as the papists;” and indeed he used them in a much worse manner.
In the Considerations he presented to the King, “Anno 1629, for the better securing the Church Government,” he prayed his Majesty, amongst other things, that Emanuel and Sydney Colleges in Cambridge, which are the nurseries of puritanism, may from time to time be provided of grave and orthodox men for their governors. In the several accounts of his province, which he sent to the King, we read almost of nothing but conformity and non-conformity to the church, refractory people to the church, peevish and disorderly men, for preaching up the observation of the sabbath, breach of church canons, wild, turbulent preachers, for preaching against bowing at the name of Jesus, and in disgrace of the common prayer book; and in consequence of these things, presentments, citations in the high commission court, censures, suspensions from preaching, and other like pious methods, to reduce and reform them.[[341]] And so grievous and numerous were the violencies he exercised on these and the like occasions, in the star chamber, high commission, and spiritual courts, that many excellent and learned men were forced to leave the kingdom, and retire to the West-Indies. And yet even this was unmercifully forbidden them. For in the year 1637, a proclamation was issued to stop eight ships going to New England; and another warrant from the council, of which Laud was one, to the Lord Admiral, to stop all ministers unconformable to the discipline and ceremonies of the church, who frequently transport themselves to the summer islands, and other plantations; and that no clergyman should be suffered to go over, without approbation of the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, and Bishop of London. These prohibitions, as the Complete Historian observes, increased the murmurs and complaints of the people thus restrained, and raised the cries of a double persecution, to be vexed at home, and not suffered to seek peace or refuge abroad.
But how were the papists treated all this while? why with brotherly mildness and moderation. For whilst these severities were exercising against protestants, there were many pardons and indulgencies granted to popish offenders. The papists were in reality his favourites and friends.