RBH Home
Maps & Travels
Articles
Legends
Towns & Villages
Castles & Houses
Churches
Biographies
Gentry
Family History
Odds & Ends
Mail David
William Laud (1573-1645)
Introduction
The
history of William Laud is in a manner the history both of church and
state in England for some twenty or more most memorable years. If it were
to be written with a copiousness corresponding to the quantity of the
materials, volumes on volumes might be filled with it. Indeed it does
actually stand recorded in several folios, besides State Trials and
Parliamentary History, and Strafford Letters and other collections of
State Papers, in which he fills much space. There is the history of his
'Life and Death' in one folio volume by Dr. Peter Heylin and that of his
'Troubles and Trial' in another, considerably larger, edited from his own
papers by the learned Henry Wharton. We have his own Diary besides many of
his letters and a mass of other authentic documents. The facts of the
greater part of his history therefore are before us in extraordinary
distinctness. Whatever we may think of him, there he is, the man and his
acts, still, if we choose, almost as plainly to be seen by us as by his
contemporaries. Some things respecting him, indeed, we know better than
they did. His life was more than most lives passed in the light, and few
have had the light so unsparingly let in upon them as he has had even in
his deepest privacies. We have his written words intended only for the eye
of the most intimate friendship or for no eye but his own. We ought not to
forget, in judging him, this trying ordeal through which it has been his
fate to be made to pass.