THE LORD'S SUPPER

ARCHBISHOP LAUD (1620-1643)

 

For forty years this man waged war on the reformed Protestant Church of England. He set out with one determined aim: to unprotestantize the Church of England. We must presume that he sincerely believed that his actions were for God’s benefit and for the good of the Church of England: but there can be no doubt that he was, in reality, a traitor to the Reformed Church of England, and a tyrant to those over whom he had authority.

 

He was ordained by Bishop Young at Rochester in 1601, and it was during the next few years, whilst he was engaged in university work, that he first became known for his disaffection towards sound reformed teaching. In various sermons and lectures he sought to undermine important reformed truths and outraged his Protestant colleagues. On several occasions he was reprimanded by his superiors. However, he gained influential friends who were later to assist him in his extraordinary rise to power in the Church of England.

 

In 1616 he was appointed Dean of Gloucester Cathedral. It must be remembered that sixty-five years earlier John Hooper had been Bishop of Gloucester and it was under his teaching, with other reformers, that the Communion Tables had been brought down from the East Wall, where they stood as ‘altars’, and set up in the midst of the choir. Just sixty years earlier, still in living memory, John Hooper had been burned at the stake, within sight of the Cathedral, for refusing to abandon his reformed views, especially those concerning the Lord’s Supper.

 

Now, in 1616, William Laud insisted on replacing the Communion Table back against the East Wall. Both the Bishop and the people were strongly opposed to this, knowing that it tended to bring back the Papal notion of an ‘altar’, and encouraged the idea of a sacrifice, and a ‘Priest’, and the Mass, into the Lord’s Supper. Laud had his way.

 

Due to the persistence of his influential friends, he was made a Bishop in 1621 and from that time his policies took on an ever-widening sphere of influence. He never lost a moment in advancing his cause. He encouraged and gathered around him a group of men with similar views. His doctrines found eager adherents among the unspiritual. He rose to become Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. Now his power and influence reached its peak. He relentlessly and meticulously pursued his policy of unprotestantizing the Church of England. This he did in a variety of ways.  Firstly, from his position as Archbishop – a position of great influence – he fostered and nurtured a spirit of disaffection for the reformation among the easily led, and less spiritual members of the Church. Secondly, he advanced his own particular principles by every way open to him. By injunctions to the clergy, guide lines, recommendations and, not least, by his own powerful example he brought into the Church a whole series of suspicious innovations – each one in itself a trifle, but seen as a whole, an undoubted attempt to change the plain Protestant religion of the Church of England. Not only were the Communion Tables removed permanently to the East wall, but they were also to be fenced in (Laud used the shallow pretence of avoiding irreverence with respect to dogs and being used as seats!). Laud advocated candles, crosses, ornamentation, hangings to drape the Lord’s Table, anything which seemed to give the appearance and flavour of an ‘altar’. Significantly, he sought also to give official sanction to the dangerous word ‘altar’ itself. He encouraged bowing to the table, bowing at the name of ‘Jesus’, bowing down to the consecrated Bread and Wine. He also encouraged the forbidden practice of retaining some of the consecrated bread and wine to be kept in the Church to be worshipped!

 

Laud openly declared his belief that the consecrated bread and wine changed into Christ’s body and blood. He raised what he was pleased to call the ‘altar’ into a position of unwarranted superiority over the pulpit saying: “the altar is the most important place for there is Christ’s body whereas from the pulpit comes only his word”.

 

Laud’s third line of attack on the Church of England was by persecution. His disgraceful treatment of French and Walloon refugee congregations in London was a prelude to his attack on men of his own church. Puritans were persecuted and brought before the ecclesiastical Courts and the Star Chamber for the most minor infringements whilst those who turned the Communion Service into a semi Popish mass were openly encouraged! During Laud’s reign of terror, many of the Church of England’s best men were silenced, either through imprisonment or exile: men like Richard Baxter and Edward Calumny. The preaching of the gospel was openly hindered or belittled. The word of God, scripturally supreme, was thrust into a position of inferiority to the sacraments.

 

Laud wormed his way into the confidence of a foolish monarch, King Charles I, and also became a political figure whose intervention helped precipitate the Civil War of 1643-48.

 

Laud was eventually imprisoned in 1641 and executed in 1645 for crimes against Church and State. He did not receive good treatment and his punishment was over-harsh; but he cannot be called a martyr of the Church for he was not without guilt and his cause was false. No one ever did more harm to the Church of England than Archbishop Laud, not even Bonner or Gardiner or Queen Mary I. Laud died in 1645 when his sad history was concluded on Tower Hill, but his works lived on. The effects of his policies were far reaching. Many of our present problems in the Church of England find their origin in the effects of the policies of William Laud. He was the father of the extreme Ritualist movement and through that, of the Tractarian Movement, and through that, of the extreme Anglo Catholic Movement which has made such advances in our present day.