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diversion of Buckingham's good graces from himself; and their quarrel was extended nearly to personal violence. In the mean time his old enemy Abbot, and others, revived to his disadvantage the matter of the Earl of Devonshire's marriage, which had slept for twenty years; and he found it prudent to defend himself, by making a full exposition of his conduct in it to the King. While these feuds were raging, Williams fell into disgrace; Abbot was sequestered, in consequence of an accidental homicide; King James died; and Laud, who seemed thus to have become suddenly a favourite of fortune, rose presently to a degree of consideration which, while it placed him for a time above the reach of his enemies, served in the end but to enhance the weight of his fall.

In 1626, soon after the accession of Charles, he was appointed Dean of the Chapel Royal, sworn of the Privy Council, and translated to the See of Bath and Wells; and in 1628 to that of London. In the same year the first parliamentary attack was made on him by the puritan faction in the House of Commons. There was too much decency yet remaining in the majority of that body to allow it to countenance the accusation of Popery, which had been so long levelled at him without doors; but he was charged with Arminianism, in the remonstrance which was voted not long before the dissolution of that Parliament. It is probable that this blow was rather intended to aggravate the weight of the vengeance then meditated against his great friend Buckingham, than to injure the Bishop himself. Be this as it might, the Duke, within very few weeks after, was taken off by assassination, and Charles, with more good meaning than judgment, instantly bestowed on Laud the same degree of confidence and power which that extraordinary man had so long held; and by that grace placed him in the same peril from which his patron had been just before removed. This partiality of the King's towards him was visible only in its effect on public affairs, for Laud acquired then no temporal appointment; so that he

was considered rather as a favourite than a minister, which increased his unpopularity. In the mean time he governed in ecclesiastical matters with a strictness that bordered on severity; and yet those who can examine his conduct dispassionately will find that he never uttered nor countenanced a judicial sentence that was not strictly just. Such even were those of the Starchamber (where, by the way, though he incurred all the odium, he sat but as an ordinary member), under the authority of which, frightful corporal punishments, and great fines, were inflicted on the flagitious libellers, Leighton, Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne. The prudence of those measures may indeed be reasonably doubted; but this is no place for lengthened disquisition. On the twelfth of April, 1630, he was elected Chancellor of the University of Oxford; and in the spring of 1633 waited on the King at his coronation in Scotland. He renewed there with earnestness his favourite plan of accomplishing an union of the two Churches; and the partial success of his endeavours produced afterwards the worst consequences. On the fourth of August in that year, within very few days after his return from Scotland, he succeeded Abbot in the Archbishopric of Canterbury.

It is the intention of this small memoir to give chiefly such circumstances of the life of Laud as have been slightly, or not at all, mentioned in history, and to touch in a more general way on those which have been already largely recorded. To pursue that course, therefore, for the events of his Primacy are well known, I will observe, that his activity, which had gradually increased with his power, arose now to its utmost height, and that the obstinacy of his adversaries at least kept pace with it. Their refractory spirit did but increase his vigour, for his courage was equal to his zeal. Among his regulations for the restoration of the genuine usages of the Church of England, no one was more resisted by the sectaries than his order to replace the altar in its ancient situation: and they affected to regard with the utmost horror the revival of what was called the Book of Sports, the true

and original intention of which was to prevent the profanation of Sunday by immoral recreations. In his eagerness for uniformity of worship he prohibited the use of their own liturgies to Protestant foreigners resident in England, who quitted it therefore in great numbers; and, as almost all those persons were merchants or manufacturers, he rendered himself odious by this measure to the whole commercial body of his own country, to whom it occasioned considerable loss and inconvenience. The same disposition led him, though less openly, to exert his authority, or at least his endeavours, to restrict the freedom of the Romish worship in the Queen's family; and thus he lost the good will of the Catholics, even while the puritans were insisting that he was in his heart a Papist. But his measures in Scotland produced results equally miserable to his country and himself. In his late visit to that kingdom he had prevailed on the Bishops there to enjoin the use of a liturgy approved, in fact composed, by himself, and his brother Prelates in England, together with certain canons for the government of the Scottish Church; and the promulgation of these, which had been long delayed, produced instantly the most frantic tumults, and caused in the end the formation of that vile and fatal code of fanaticism and rebellion, which its authors dignified with the title of the solemn league and covenant.

Such were his proceedings with regard to the Church; nor was his political conduct more temperate. It was not till 1634 that he was first named to temporal offices. He was then appointed a member of the Committee for trade, and the King's revenues; and, within a few weeks after, when the Treasury was put into commission on the death of Weston, Earl of Portland, was chosen one of the Commissioners, and also placed on what was then called the Foreign Committee. In these several situations the King's partiality, and the character of his own temper, naturally led him to assume a dictatorial authority, and feuds arose, injurious to the public service, between himself and his

colleagues, particularly in the Treasury, which at the end of a year determined him to quit it. He prevailed however on Charles not only to dissolve that commission, which was certainly composed of wise and experienced persons, but to nominate for Lord Treasurer his friend, Bishop Juxon, an incomparable ornament in all respects to his sacred profession, and perhaps therefore wholly unfit to sit at the helm of public affairs. Here, as in all the rest, Laud erred from good motives. He had discovered that great frauds and peculations were practised in the department of the Treasury, and that many former Treasurers had connived at them, in order the more effectually to secure to themselves the largest share of the spoil; and, charmed by his conviction of Juxon's perfect integrity, he overlooked his various disqualifications. Of this appointment, unfortunately made at a moment when the conciliation of parties was most essential to the King's interests, Lord Clarendon says that "the eyes of all men were at gaze who should have this great office, and the greatest of the Nobility, who were in the chiefest employments, looked upon it as the prize of one of them; when on a sudden the staff was put into the hands of the Bishop of London, a man so unknown that his name was scarce heard of in the kingdom. This inflamed more than were angry before, and no doubt did not only sharpen the edge of envy and malice against the Archbishop, who was the known architect of this new fabric, but most unjustly indisposed many towards the Church itself, which they looked upon as the gulph ready to swallow all the great offices." Not less unpopular, however necessary, were the ordinations by which, in 1637, he vainly endeavoured to curb that gigantic creature of careless forbearance which has since obtained the name of the liberty of the press. On the eleventh of July in that year he procured a decree in the Starchamber to regulate the trade of printing, by which the printers were restricted to a precise number, and the publication of any book which had not been licensed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Bishop of

London, or by one of their chaplains, or by the Chancellor, or Vice-chancellor, of one of the Universities, strictly prohibited.

The public character of Laud, which was in fact balanced between good intentions and bad management, has perhaps never yet been fairly estimated, even by the most impartial; and it has been truly observed that of no other man has so much good, and so much evil, been reported. This however is certain, that he fell a sacrifice, not to justice, but to the inordinate rage of a faction. He was one of the first objects of the vengeance of the Long Parliament. On the eighteenth of December, 1640, not many weeks after the meeting of that fatal assembly, an impeachment of high treason against him was carried up by Denzil Holles to the Peers, and received by them with equal satisfaction; but his enemies, in the extravagancy of their hatred, had forgotten to provide themselves with specific charges. At length, at the end of ten weeks, during which he was confined in the custody of the Usher of the Black Rod, Sir Henry Vane presented to the Lords fourteen articles, most of which were notoriously false, and not one of them approaching to treason. He was now removed to the Tower, where he remained a close prisoner for three years, in which interval he was gradually stripped, under the illegal authority of various votes, sometimes of one House of Parliament, sometimes of the other, not only of all the functions and revenues of his Archbishopric, but nearly of the whole of his private property. At last, on the twelfth of March, 1643-4, he was brought to trial on the fourteen charges first preferred against him, to which the Commons had lately added ten others, and had adopted also a large and confused body of accusation supplied by the Scottish commissioners then in London. Twenty days were passed in the proceeding, which was equally distinguished by the ingenuity and the malignity with which it was conducted, and yet in the end his prosecutors durst not call either on the House of Peers, or on a jury, to decide on the evidence. The Commons, however, had determined to shed the blood of this champion of

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