29 july: translation of william laud, archbishop of canterbury, sometime bishop of st.david's, sometime chancellor of oxford

although charged with several crimes again and again, laud was always found innocent by the courts.  the puritan parliament had to pass a special bill to have him executed.  let us hope the long parliament will not soon return.

laud pretty much embodied everything the puritans opposed, and he did it insistently.  it was i suspect his determination most of all that led to his death.  tyranny can more easily overlook principled opposition of the quiet, scholarly type than it can embarrassment of those who simply do not recognize its authority.

i wonder what we would say about laud today.  i am not going to speculate on what he might have to say about contemporary politics, if for no other reason than that they probably could not have been imagined by him, although i suspect he would have been horrified.  i suspect we would see him as someone who was trying to impose his opinions on a diverse culture.  he did not himself see what he was doing as any such thing.  he saw himself, i believe, as one who was trying to preserve an old and wise culture from the fifty-one per-cent approval rating of the day.

it is fascinating that if he were alive today, laud would be considered a homosexual.  he was not so-called in his own time; then there was no such term.  it would have to wait for the more clinical nineteenth century, when sexuality began to replace love as the object of desire.  (i always wonder how our discussion might change if we used a term i prefer, homophilia, rather than homosexuality.)  he was well known to have 'male favourites,' one of whom was buckingham, also a favourite of the king.  so far as i know, no one wanted to behead james for his 'sodomy.'  and charles, who would lose his head, was one of the most chaste and faithful husbands to have worn the english crown.  (the present monarch seems also faithful, but then she is literally a queen.)

of course one could make a sort of jest that it was laud's fondness for decoration and dress-up that got him in trouble.  then of course we are left with a number of embarassments, one of which is what must we say about benedict and st. peter's.  but then of course we know what some already say about them, and the most vicious charge against laud, from the viewpoint of the puritans, was that he was a papist.  again, he saw himself as no such thing.  he saw the church of rome as discontinuous with the medieval church, and sought to assure the continuity of the church of england.

laud has been called bigoted, but in his defence it must be said that he opposed again and again the harsh sentencing of prominent puritans.  they would not oppose a harsh sentence for him.

the american episcopal church's lesser feasts and fasts 2006  has this to say about laud:

'Laud's reputation has remained controversial to this day.   Honored as a martyr and condemned as an intolerant bigot, he was compassionate in his defense of the rights of the common people against the landowners.  H was honest, devout, loyal to the king and to the rights and privileges of the Church of England.  He tried to reform and protect the Church in accordance with his sincere convictions.   But in many ways he was out of step with the views of the majority of his countrymen . . . .'

Lord forbid that anyone be out of step with the views of the majority.  parliament seems particularly unable to deal with one who notices that the parliament is naked.

 lesser feasts and fasts continues:

'He made a noble end, praying on the scaffold:  "the Lord receive my soul, and have mercy upon me, and bless this kingdom with peace and charity, that there may not be this effusion of Christian blood amongst them."' (p. 124)

he is buried under the high altar at st. john's college, oxford.