EPIPHANY · 10 JANUARY
William Laud
Archbishop of Canterbury · Martyr · d. 1645 · The High Church Tradition in its Fullness
Laud — LAWD · Juxon — JUK-sun (his chaplain at the scaffold) · Arminian — ar-MIN-ee-an (his theological position) · Bocardo — boh-KAR-doh (Oxford prison, where Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley were held) · Lux Mundi — LUKS MUN-dee
O God, who by thy servant William didst recall the Church of England to the beauty of holiness and to the full Catholic inheritance of its worship; Grant that the tradition he gave his life to defend may be faithfully received and faithfully transmitted; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
William Laud (LAWD) (1573–1645) was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633 until his execution on Tower Hill on 10 January 1645 — beheaded by order of the Long Parliament, charged with treason, dying on the same Tower Hill where Thomas More had died a century before, for the same fundamental offence: refusing to subordinate the Church to the will of the state. Laud was the most consequential churchman of the Caroline period: his vision of Anglicanism was explicitly Catholic, liturgically rich, theologically Arminian against the dominant Calvinist tide, and architecturally ambitious — he restored St Paul’s Cathedral, beautified the Oxford colleges, and required a reverence for altars, vestments, and ceremonial that the Puritan party found intolerable. His History of the Troubles and Trial, written in the Tower, is a sustained defence not merely of his personal innocence but of the principle that a national church has a life and authority that cannot be reduced to the convenience of its civil rulers.
The three decades of Laudian Anglicanism — from his appointment as Bishop of London in 1628 to the Parliamentary victory in 1645 — are the period in which the High Church tradition crystallised into the form that the Oxford Movement would later recover: the altar railed, the liturgy adorned, the presence of God honoured in the beauty of holiness. Laud required the railing of the altar at the east end, the eastward position of the celebrant, genuflection at the name of Jesus, bowing toward the altar on entering church. These were not innovations but recoveries — the practices of the pre-Reformation church, stripped out by the Elizabethan and Jacobean settlements and restored by Laud as the appropriate expression of the faith the Anglican church claimed to hold. The Puritans understood perfectly well what Laud was doing and why it mattered; their opposition was not mere aestheticism but a genuine theological battle about whether the Church of England was a reformed Catholic church or a Protestant church with Catholic vestiges.
He went to the scaffold saying he had always endeavoured to serve the King and the Church and that he had done his best. His chaplain William Juxon (JUK-sun) stood by him, as Juxon would later stand by Charles I at his execution four years later. The Laudian martyrdom is among the most humanly complex in the archive: Laud was not a lovable man — he was combative, uncompromising, politically miscalculating — and the suffering he caused the Puritans and the Scots through his liturgical impositions was real and serious. But the principle he died for was the principle the Oxford Movement died for in its own way: that the Church of England is the Catholic Church in England, that its worship is the worship of the universal Church expressed in the English tongue, and that no parliament and no king can alter that fundamental character.
Laud’s feast falls on 10 January in Epiphany — the season of manifestation and disclosure, which is entirely right for the archbishop who spent his life making visible what he believed the Church of England to be. He is in the cloud of witnesses as the man who paid the highest price for the conviction this archive has been expressing from the beginning: that the beauty of holiness is not an optional extra but a theological imperative, that the altar must be reverenced because the Lord whose sacrifice it commemorates deserves reverence, and that the Church which loses its liturgical dignity has lost something essential to its nature. He paid for that conviction with his head. The cloud of witnesses receives those who die for the beauty of holiness as readily as it receives those who die for the truth of doctrine, because in the end they are dying for the same thing.
O Almighty God, who by thy servant William didst set before the Church of England the vision of worship worthy of the God it serves; Grant that beauty and holiness may never be separated in our offering, and that the price paid for the Catholic inheritance of this Church may teach us never to treat it lightly; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.