As a judge he showed a tyrannical spirit both in the star chamber and high-commission court, threatening Felton, the assassin of Buckingham, with the rack, and showing special activity in procuring a cruel sentence in the former court against Alexander Leighton in June 1630 and against Henry Sherfield in 1634. His power was greatly increased after his return from Scotland, whither he had accompanied the king, by his promotion to the archbishopric of Canterbury in Aug. 1633. "As for the state indeed," he wrote to Wentworth on this occasion, "I am for Thorough." In 1636 the privy council decided in his favour his claim of jurisdiction as visitor over both universities. Soon afterwards he was placed on the commission of the treasury and on the committee of the privy council for foreign affairs. He was all-powerful both in church and state. He proceeded to impose by authority the religious ceremonies and usages to which he attached so much importance. His vicar-general, Sir Nathaniel Brent, went through the dioceses of his province, noting every dilapidation and every irregularity. The pulpit was no longer to be the chief feature in the church, but the communion table. The Puritan lecturers were suppressed. He showed great hostility to the Puritan Sabbath, and supported the reissue of the Book of Sports, especially odious to that party. He insisted on the use of the prayer-book among the English soldiers in the service of Holland, and forced strict conformity on the church of the mer chant adventurers at Delft, endeavouring even to reach the colonists in New England. He tried to compel the Dutch and French refugees in England to unite with the Church of England, advising double taxation and other forms of persecution. In 1634 the justices of the peace were ordered to enter houses to search for persons holding conventicles and bring them before the com missioners. In 1637 he took part in the sentence of the star chamber on Prynne, Bastwick and Burton, and in the same year in the prosecution of Bishop Williams. He urged Strafford in Ireland to carry out the same reforms and severities.
He was now to extend his ecclesiastical system to Scotland. The new prayer-book and canons were drawn up by the Scottish bishops with his assistance and enforced in the country. The attack not only on the national religion, but on the national inde pendence of Scotland, proved to be the point at which the system, already strained, broke and collapsed. Laud continued to support Strafford's and the king's arbitrary measures to the last. Though at first opposed to the sitting of convocation, after the dissolution of parliament, as an independent body, on account of the opposi tion it would arouse, he yet caused to be passed in it the new canons which both enforced his ecclesiastical system and assisted the king's divine right, resistance to his power entailing "damna tion." Laud's infatuated policy could go no further, and the et cetera oath, according to which whole classes of men were to be forced to swear perpetual allegiance to the "government of this church by archbishops, bishops, deans and archdeacons, etc.," was long remembered and derided. He was attacked and reviled as the chief author of the troubles on all sides. In October he was ordered by Charles to suspend the et cetera oath. The same month, when the high commission court was sacked by the mob, he was unable to persuade the star chamber to punish the offenders. On Dec. 18, he was impeached by the Long Parliament, and on March I, imprisoned in the tower. On May 12, at Strafford's request, the archbishop appeared at the window of his cell to give him his blessing on his way to execution, and fainted as he passed by. On May 31, 1643 Prynne received orders from the parliament to search his papers, and published a mutilated edition of his diary. The articles of impeachment were sent up to the Lords in October, the trial beginning on March r2, 1644, but the attempt to bring his conduct under a charge of high treason proving hope less, an attainder was substituted and sent up to the Lords on Nov. 22. In these proceedings there was no semblance of respect for law or justice, the Lords yielding (Jan. 4, 1645) to the menaces of the Commons. Laud now tendered the king's pardon,
which had been gralited to him in April 1643. This was rejected, and it was with some difficulty that his petition to be executed with the axe, instead of undergoing the ordinary brutal punish ment for high treason, was granted. He suffered death on Jan. 1o, on Tower Hill, asserting his innocence of any offence known to the law, repudiating the charge of "popery," and declaring that he had always lived in the Protestant Church of England. He was buried in the chancel of All Hallows, Barking, whence his body was removed on July 24, 1663 to the chapel of St. John's, Oxford.
Laud never married. He is described by Fuller as "low of stature, little in bulk, cheerful in countenance (wherein gravity and quickness were all compounded), of a sharp and piercing eye, clear judgment and (abating the influence of age) firm memory." His personality, on account of the sharp religious antagonisms with which his name is inevitably associated, has rarely been judged with impartiality. His severities were the result of a narrow mind and not of a vindictive spirit, and their number has certainly been exaggerated. His career was distinguished by uprightness, by piety, by a devotion to duty, by courage and consistency. In particular it is clear that the charge of partiality for Rome is unfounded. Laud's complete neglect of the national sentiment, in his belief that the exercise of mere power was sufficient to suppress it, is a principal proof of his total lack of true statesmanship. The hostility to "innovations in religion" was probably a far stronger incentive to the rebellion against the arbitrary power of the crown, than even the violation of con stitutional liberties; and to Laud, therefore, more than to Straf ford, to Buckingham, or even perhaps to Charles himself, is especially due the responsibility for the catastrophe. He held fast to the great idea of the catholicity of the English Church, to that conception of it which regards it as a branch of the whole Christian church, and emphasizes its historical continuity and identity from the time of the apostles, but here again his policy was at fault ; for his despotic administration not only excited and exaggerated the tendencies to separatism and independentism which finally prevailed, but excluded large bodies of faithful churchmen from communion with their church and from their country. The emigration to Massachusetts from 1629 onwards was not composed of Separatists but of Episcopalians. Thus what Laud grasped with one hand he destroyed with the other.
Spiritual influence, in Laud's opinion, was not enough for the church. The church as the guide of the nation in duty and god liness, even extending its activity into state affairs as a mediator and a moderator, was not sufficient. Its power must be material and visible, embodied in great places of secular administration and enthroned in high offices of state. Thus the church, descending into the political arena, became identified with the doctrines of one political party in the state—doctrines odious to the majority of the nation—and at the same time became associated with acts of violence and injustice. Equally disastrous to the state was the identification of the king's administration with one party in the church, and that with the party in an immense minority not only in the nation but even among the clergy themselves.
Laud's works are to be found in the Library of 4nglo-Catholic Theology (7 vols.), including his sermons (of no great merit), letters, history of the chancellorship, history of his troubles and trial, and his remarkable diary, the mss. of the last two works being the property of St. John's College. Various modern opinions of Laud's career can be studied in T. Longueville, Life of Laud, by a Romish Recusant (1894) ; Congregational Union Jubilee Lectures, vol. i. (1882) ; W. H. Hutton, Wm. Laud (1895) ; Archbishop Laud Com memoration, ed. by W. F. Collins (lectures, bibliography, catalogue of exhibits, 1895) ; Hook, Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury; and H. Bell, Archbishop Laud and Priestly Government (1907); A. S. Duncan-Jones, Archbishop Laud (1927).