By Emma Laws, Cathedral Librarian
William Laud was Archbishop of Canterbury during the latter part of the reign of Charles I and acted as his royal advisor. He gave his name to ‘Laudianism’, an early 17th century reforming movement within the Church of England that sought to build on the work of Richard Hooker to find a middle way between Roman Catholicism on the one hand and Puritanism on the other. Instead, Laud’s critics accused him of reintroducing Catholic practices and traditions to the reformed Church of England; Laud retaliated with shocking brutality, transforming his victims into martyrs.
At the outset of the English Civil Wars, Parliament arrested Laud and imprisoned him in the Tower of London; he was charged with high treason, found guilty, and sentenced to death. On this day – 10 January – in 1645, Laud was beheaded on Tower Hill. He delivered his final sermon from the scaffold, beginning with the words: ‘This is a very uncomfortable place to preach in’.
Laud confronted his critics: ‘I have, upon this sad occasion, ransack’d every corner of my Heart, and yet, I thank God, I have not found any of my Sins deserving Death by any known Law of this Kingdom’. He declared, finally, that he was born and baptised in the Church of England and ‘have always lived in the Protestant religion established in England, and in that I come now to die’. Rather than attempting to ‘overthrow the true Protestant religion’, Laud concluded, ‘I never endeavoured the subversion of the laws of the realm, nor never any change of the Protestant religion into popish superstition’.
This pamphlet – printed on a single folded sheet – was printed in 1709 to ‘vindicate’ Laud’s memory. It gives the year of Laud’s execution as 1644 rather than 1645 but is a fascinating account of his last moments. Laud asked those in attendance to leave the scaffold ‘that I might have… room to die’ and paid the executioner, Richard Brandon, for a quick and merciful death. According to the pamphlet, Laud’s last words – and his signal to the executioner – were ‘Lord receive my Soul’.
William Laud is remembered in the Church of England on 10 January.