Laud, WILLIAM, Archbishop of Canterbury, was born at Reading, a well-to-do clothier's son, on 7th October 1573. From Reading free-school, where he 'had the happiness to be educated under a very severe schoolmaster,' he passed at sixteen to St John's College, Oxford, of which four years later he was admitted a fellow. Ordained in 1601, he made himself obnoxious to the university authorities by his open antipathy to the dominant Puritanism; but his solid learning, his amazing industry, his administrative capacity, his sincere and unselfish churchmanship, soon won him both friends and patrons. One of these was Charles Blount, Earl of Devonshire, whom in 1605 Laud married to the divorced Lady Rich (an offence that ever weighed heavy on his conscience); another was Buckingham, to whom he became confessor in 1622, having a month previously disputed before him and the countess his mother with Fisher the Jesuit. Meanwhile he rose steadily from preferment to preferment—incumbent of five livings (1607–10), D.D. (1608), president of his old college and king's chaplain (1611), Prebendary of Lincoln (1614), Archdeacon of Huntingdon (1615), Dean of Gloucester (1616), Prebendary of Westminster and Bishop of St Davids (1621), Bishop of Bath and Wells, Dean of the Chapel Royal, and a privy-councillor (1626), Bishop of London (1628), Chancellor of Oxford (1630), and finally Archbishop of Canterbury (1633). That very week he received two offers of a cardinal's hat; but 'my answer,' he writes in his Diary, 'was that somewhat dwelt within me, which would not suffer that, till Rome were other than it is.'
Already, after Buckingham's assassination, he had virtually become the first minister of the crown, one with Strafford and Charles I. in the triumvirate whose aim was absolutism in church and state, and which thus stood opposed to Puritanism alike and democracy. Laud's task, a grateful one, was to raise the English Church to its rightful position of a branch, if a younger branch, of the Church Catholic, to root out Calvinism in England and Presbyterianism in Scotland. In the former country he drew up a list of 'Orthodox' and 'Puritan' ministers, whom, the wheat and the tares, he proceeded to separate by scolding, suspending, depriving. Freedom of worship was withdrawn from Walloon and French refugees; Englishmen abroad were forbidden to attend Calvinistic services; and at home 'gospel preaching, justification by faith, and Sabbatarianism were to be superseded by an elaborate ritual, by the doctrine of the real presence, celibacy, and confession, and by the Book of Sports (q.v.)—changes rigorously enforced by the court of High Commission and the Star Chamber. Nor was a policy without result which checked the development of Puritanism within the Anglican communion; which raised up a school of such Laudian clergy as Cosin, Nicholas Ferrar, George Herbert, Juxon, Manwaring, Montague, and Wren; which has borne later fruit in the Nonjurors, the Tractarians, and the Ritualists; and which to-day has a standing memorial in every Anglican church throughout the world—the altar-wise position of the Holy Table. In Scotland it was otherwise. There the tentative effort made by James I. and Laud in 1617 to give back life to dead Episcopacy had merely failed. Laud's second attempt (1635–37), involving the thorough Anglicising of the Scottish Church, gave birth to the riot in St Giles', Edinburgh, that riot to the Covenant (q.v.), the Covenant to the 'Bishops' war,' and this in turn to the meeting of the Long Parliament, which on 18th December 1640 impeached the archbishop of treason, and ten weeks later sent him to the Tower. He would not escape (Grotius urged him to do so); and at last, after a tedious and complicated trial before a handful of peers, of whom never more than fourteen were present, and of whom the Speaker alone sat through the whole proceedings, after a defence that extorted praise even from Prynne, on 17th December 1644 he was voted 'guilty of endeavouring to subvert the laws, to overthrow the Protestant religion, and to act as an enemy to parliament.' The judges unanimously declared that this was not treason; but under an unconstitutional ordinance of attainder, and the gallows reluctantly commuted for the axe, he was beheaded on Tower Hill, 10th January 1645. He was buried first in the church of All-Hallows, Barking, and in 1663 translated to the chapel of St John's at Oxford.
To Heylin Laud is 'the holy martyr;' to Laud's accusers 'the great incendiary;' to Macaulay just 'a ridiculous old bigot.' To us he seems rather a typical college don, fussy, restless, high-handed, concerned about trifles, cold and unsympathetic, as little in mind as in person. Withal, he was childishly superstitious, his Diary teeming with omens and silly dreams, as 'Dreamed of the marriage of I know not whom,' and 'Dreamed of the burial of I know not whom, and waked sad.' Superstition, of course, was a failing of that age; so, too, was the chief sin of which Laud stands accused—intolerance. For if Laud cut off Puritans' ears, the Puritans cut off Laud's head. His great misfortune, indeed, was that he rose, like the parasite ivy, to eminence. Had he lived and died a college president, his waspishness would have long since lost its sting, and his memory survived only as that of the founder of the chair of Arabic, and a munificent benefactor of the Bodleian Library.
Of Laud's works, collected in the Anglo-Catholic Library (7 vols. Oxford, 1847–60), by far the most interesting is his Diary, which was published by Wharton in 1694. Peter Heylin, Laud's chaplain, first wrote his biography, Cyprianus Anglicanus (1668); and there are modern lives by Le Bas (1836), Mozley (1845; republished in Essays, 1878), Hook (Lives of Archbishops, 1875), A. C. Benson (1887), C. H. Simpkinson (1894), and R. H. Hutton (1895). See also the articles, with works there cited, on CHARLES I., STRAFFORD, CHILLINGWORTH, HALES, JEREMY TAYLOR, and PRYNNE.