Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Archbishop of Canterbury, Martyr
January 10 · d. 1645
also known as William Laud of Canterbury
William Laud, born at Reading in 1573, the only son of a clothier, rose through Oxford and the royal court to be Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633 to 1645. He worked to order the worship of the Church of England, enforced that order through the king's courts, and was impeached, imprisoned in the Tower for nearly four years, and beheaded on Tower Hill on 10 January 1645 by an act of attainder after the charge of treason failed at law. He is commemorated on 10 January.
William Laud was a clothier's son from Reading, and nobody expected him to end up wearing the mitre of Canterbury. He went up to St John's College, Oxford, at sixteen, was made a fellow at twenty, and was ordained deacon and then priest in the year he turned twenty-eight. He was small, and quick-tempered about it, and he had one conviction that never left him: that the way a church prays is not a small thing. Order in worship, he thought, was reverence made visible.
That conviction cost him early. At his divinity exercises in 1604 he argued that there could be no true church without bishops, and his own Oxford teacher rebuked him publicly for it. The next year, doing a favour for the great man who employed him as chaplain, Laud performed a marriage he should have refused: no licence, and one of the parties divorced. He was disgraced. For the rest of his life, every 26 December, he wrote the anniversary down in his diary and repented of it. Forty years of that. He was a man who kept accounts with God in ink.
Then the rise. Bishop of St Davids, then Bath and Wells, then London, and in 1633, at sixty, Archbishop of Canterbury. Now he could order the whole Church, and he did. Communion tables were moved back to the east end. Inspectors rode out through every diocese to see that the rubrics were kept. And when men wrote pamphlets against bishops, Laud used the king's own courts against them. In 1637 he sat in judgment and gave the speech himself, and William Prynne, who had already lost his ears once, had the stumps cropped and his cheeks branded with two letters for seditious libeller. Prynne took the brand and read it as Stigmata Laudis, the marks of Laud, and wore it as his accusation for the rest of his days.
The wheel came round. Laud pressed a new prayer book on Scotland without asking the Scots; Edinburgh rioted; war followed; and Parliament, when it met, came for the archbishop. He was impeached in December 1640 and sent to the Tower on 1 March 1641, and there he stayed, an old man in a cell, for nearly four years. When his trial finally opened, the man leading the prosecution was Prynne. The lawyers argued it out and the treason charge would not stand at law. So Parliament passed a bill of attainder instead, and killed him by vote.
On 10 January 1645 he climbed the scaffold on Tower Hill, seventy-one years old, holding a royal pardon nobody would honour. A man named John Hinde stood by and wrote down what he said, and the pamphlet was printed that same year. Laud looked at the crowd and the block and began, dryly, "This is a very uncomfortable place to preach in," and then took his text from Hebrews, of running with patience the race set before us, looking unto Jesus. He answered the charge they had killed him for: "I was borne and baptized in the bosome of the Church of England, as it stands yet established by Law." He paid the executioner. He asked for room.
Then he prayed, in the third winter of a civil war, for the country that was about to take his head: "blesse this Kingdom with peace and plenty, and with brotherly loue and charitie, that there may not be this effusion of Christian bloud among them." He had told them beforehand what his signal would be. He said, "Lord, receive my Soule," and the axe came down. Hinde wrote that line down too. The last thing William Laud asked for was not his own life. It was peace for the men who were taking it.
You will meet, if you have not already, the moment when something you are certain is right can be had by force. Laud was certain, and he was right about a good deal, and he reached for the courts, and the reaching undid the cause and marked another man's face for life. Four years later the same instinct, turned around, killed him by a vote that skipped the verdict. What is striking is not that he was punished but what he did with the punishment: he kept a diary of his own faults for forty years, he refused the escape offered him twice, and at the end he prayed for the peace of the nation that was killing him rather than for vindication. Where in your own life are you holding something true, and reaching for a means of holding it that would cost somebody else more than the truth is being served by?
The frame of Laud's life comes almost entirely from one modern account: S. R. Gardiner's article in the Dictionary of National Biography, published in 1892, which synthesizes Star Chamber minutes, parliamentary journals, and Laud's own corrected diary into a dense dated chronology. Strip that article away and roughly thirty-five of the forty datable events in this life go with it. Gardiner's own sympathies lay with the Parliamentary side, which is worth knowing, and which cuts against reading his caution about Laud as partisanship in Laud's favour. Hugh Trevor-Roper's biography of 1940, the standard modern critical treatment, was not consulted for this account.
Beneath Gardiner sit three kinds of contemporary witness, and they do not agree. First, Laud himself: a diary kept over four decades, a History of the Troubles and Trial, and the published Relation of the Conference with the Jesuit "Mr Fisher" (an alias of John Percy, 1569 to 1641), first printed in 1624 and enlarged in 1639. The diary has a fraught textual history. Parliament seized it, and William Prynne printed it in garbled form in 1644 before Henry Wharton produced a corrected edition in 1695; the two differ materially, and any citation has to name which. Second, the scaffold pamphlet of 1645, taken down by John Hinde and printed within days, whose title page already complains of rival false copies in circulation, so that fidelity was contested in period. Third, the two mirror-image partisans: Prynne, who was both Laud's victim and his prosecutor, in A Breviate of the Life of William Laud (1644), and Peter Heylyn, Laud's former chaplain, in Cyprianus Anglicus (1668), written expressly against Prynne. They are read together or not at all.
Several things are genuinely contested. The heaviest is causation in the Prynne case. The received narrative, which is Prynne's own self-presentation amplified by later Puritan and Whig writers, makes Laud the direct author of both mutilations. The documents are more particular. For the sentence of 17 February 1634, carried out in May, Attorney-General Noy is the named instigator, and no clear document places Laud behind it; what the record shows is Prynne writing to Laud on 11 June 1634 to accuse him, whereupon Laud forwarded that letter to the Attorney-General as grounds for a further prosecution. For 1637 there is no ambiguity at all: Laud's own sentencing speech of 14 June survives in print. Both the tradition and the documents are reportable, and they are two different things.
Two smaller points of the same kind. The riot at St Giles', Edinburgh, on 23 July 1637 is firmly dated; the stool thrown by Jenny Geddes is later popular legend layered onto it, and the bronze stool at St Giles' was installed in 1992 to commemorate the story rather than to preserve a relic. And the end of Laud's life turns on a distinction his defenders have always pressed: he was tried, the treason charge could not be sustained at common law in October 1644, and Parliament proceeded instead by ordinance of attainder, sent up to the Lords on 22 November 1644 and passed on 4 January 1645. (One reference work gives 15 November 1644 for a Commons passage; the DNB sequence is followed here.) That procedural irregularity is acknowledged by historians hostile to him, and it is the strongest ground the tradition has for calling him a martyr.
Laud's commemoration is a calendar observance on the model of a moral exemplar. There was no canonization process, and there is no paper trail of one because there was none to leave; no relics beyond the tomb, no miracles claimed, no shrine, and no pilgrimage.
The tomb has moved once. In 1645 he was buried in the chancel of All Hallows Barking, the parish nearest the execution site, in a vault beneath the communion table, which was the ordinary provision for an executed prisoner rather than a mark of honour. On 24 July 1663, after the Restoration, his remains were carried to the chapel of his own college, St John's, Oxford, which he had endowed more generously than anyone since its founder, and laid in a vault beneath the altar between the tomb of that founder, Sir Thomas White, and the tomb of Archbishop William Juxon, who had been buried in the same chapel a fortnight earlier. Who arranged the removal is not established.
Three Anglican calendars keep 10 January. The Church of England commemorates him in Common Worship. The Anglican Church in North America's Book of Common Prayer 2019 names the day "William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, Martyr, 1645," which is that church's own framing of him. The Episcopal Church appoints propers in Lesser Feasts and Fasts, with a collect that asks for the thing his death is remembered for: "Keep us, O Lord, constant in faith and zealous in witness, that, like your servant William Laud, we may live in your fear, die in your favor, and rest in your peace."
The apparatus below covers the quotations used above. Laud wrote in English throughout, so no translator is involved in any of them.
The scaffold words come from The Arch-bishop of Canterburie his Speech, or, His Funerall Sermon Preached by Himself on the Scaffold on Tower-Hill on Friday the Tenth of January, 1645, "faithfully written by Iohn Hinde" and printed the same year. The opening line and the text from Hebrews stand shortly after the opening address; the profession of loyalty to the Church of England stands in the fourth particular, near the close of the speech proper; the petition for the kingdom and the words "Lord, receive my Soule," together with the recorder's note that these were the prearranged signal, close the final prayer. The full text is available in the Text Creation Partnership transcription hosted by the Oxford Text Archive, https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/xmlui/bitstream/handle/20.500.12024/A49716/A49716.html, and the catalogue record for the pamphlet, including the title page's complaint of false copies, is at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A49716.0001.001?view=toc.
"The catholic church of Christ is neither Rome nor a conventicle" comes from the Epistle Dedicatory, pages xxxi to xxxii, of A Relation of the Conference between William Laud and Mr Fisher the Jesuit, edited by Edward Cardwell (Oxford University Press, 1839), https://archive.org/details/a589787100lauduoft. The same Epistle, at page xxviii, carries Laud's Naaman analogy for Rome and England as one church in two conditions.
The refusal of the cardinal's hat is the diary entry for 17 August 1633, with the sequel of 21 August, in The Works of William Laud, volume III (Devotions, Diary and History), page 219, edited by William Scott and James Bliss for the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1847 to 1860, seven volumes in nine). Prynne's A Breviate of the Life of William Laud (London, 1644), https://archive.org/details/gpl_1058064, is cited here only for the seizure and hostile first printing of the diary, not for this wording.
The chronology throughout rests on S. R. Gardiner, "Laud, William," in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1885 to 1900, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Laud,_William, with the companion article on Prynne for the 1634 and 1637 sequence. Laud's Star Chamber speech of 14 June 1637 is printed in Rushworth's Historical Collections, volume 3, pages 116 to 133, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/rushworth-papers/vol3/pp116-133. The collect is from Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2024 (The Episcopal Church), at 10 January. Kenneth Fincham's edition of The Further Correspondence of William Laud (Church of England Record Society 23, Boydell Press, 2018) supplements the Victorian Works with letters they did not print.
Two remarks of his own bear on the charge that killed him, that he was secretly a Roman Catholic. In the Epistle Dedicatory to the Relation of the Conference, in the edition Edward Cardwell brought out at Oxford in 1839, he wrote that "The catholic church of Christ is neither Rome nor a conventicle." And his diary records, on 17 and 21 August 1633, a second offer of a cardinal's hat and his refusal of it: "something dwelt within me, which would not suffer that, till Rome were other than it is." A private refusal in his own hand, dated twice.
Almighty God, you gave your servant William Laud boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12