“I think you have a plot to see whether I will be universalis episcopus, that you and your brethren may take occasion to call me Antichrist.” William Laud's well-known effort at wit written to Thomas Wentworth, Leonie James argues, speaks more closely to the archbishop's intentions than historians have recognized. Specifically, scholars such as Gordon Donaldson, John Morrill, and Hugh Trevor-Roper have missed Laud's surprisingly successful efforts to penetrate and reshape the Scottish church. In part, she notes, this has resulted from the scattered and fragmentary sources. In part, also, Laud proved a master at damage control and at dissociating himself from unpopular policies—with the result that modern historians have characteristically “succumbed to his spin” (112). James seeks to show that Laud's counterreform program, an ideological crusade undertaken with vast ambition and remarkable energy, extended to the north and lay at the core of his objectives, every bit as much as Ireland and England.
Laud’s concern with Scotland started relatively early when he served as a minor figure in King James's1617 Scottish visit, itself a strenuous campaign to transform Scottish religious ceremony. If the Scottish project lay in abeyance thereafter (James chose not to pursue further with his Anglicizing objectives; Charles's early years were preoccupied with the revocation), the matter resurfaced in the summer of 1629. And from the early 1630s until just before the opening of the Long Parliament in late 1640, Laud actively and continuously intervened in Scottish affairs. Laud thus unexpectedly emerges a major figure in Scottish political and religious life, right through the Bishops’ Wars when he served as a key advisor in negotiations with the Covenanters.
In part, Laud’s success lay in his ability to connect with and work through sympathetic bishops such as John Maxwell, bishop of Ross, in Scotland and John Barmhall, bishop of Derry, in Ireland—sidelining the more Calvinist archbishops, John Spottiswoode of Saint Andrews and James Ussher of Armagh. Laud thereby succeeded in acting outside institutional structures or any formal legal authority; Laud manifestly regarded Spottiswoode as an inferior. The key to Laud's extraordinary power lay clearly enough in his close relationship with Charles, and thereby his ability to work through the royal prerogative. The prerogative of course, unlike any episcopal authority, could reach everywhere within the multiple Stewart realms. Laud's counterreform would then prove authoritarian no less in its implementation than in its result. Crucially, he shared the king's views and still more his sensibility. Both sought to clericalize and monarchize church organization, ceremony, iconography, and theology. Both envisioned a church at one socially engaged with governing the realm and with its power further buttressed through an immense endowment.
James reviews at length the creation of the new Scottish canons and the new prayer book during the 1630s. Laud’s role looms at every stage. He would be fussing with the canons even during the final weeks before they were printed. The new directives worked to subvert the Presbyterian dimension of the Scottish church, not least with the implicit elimination of the General Assembly. At the same they were centrally concerned to restrain preaching and emphasize the sacraments—the much-proclaimed “beauty” of the sacred. James's discussion of the prayer book inevitably builds on Gordon Donaldson's authoritative The Making of the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637 (1954). Her concern is directed less to the elements that emerged than to Laud's ongoing presence in the process. If the result was by no means “Laud's book,” his role was considerable. In the end, James concludes, Laud proved capable of making “blatant and consequential changes during the drafting of both books” (110). To be sure, Laud (and Charles) ideally wanted to impose English canons and liturgy full stop. Yet if the archbishop did not achieve his full purpose, his involvement and impact remain unassailable. A modern reader may well find himself wondering to the extent to which the new order of the 1630s was Scottish at all.
Laud went on to play central role in the efforts to contain the Scottish Revolution, working closely with the marquis of Hamilton. The archbishop received detailed reports, unlike the king, and it would remain Laud’s decision as to what might best be shared. In many respects, this arrangement simply continued earlier procedure, and provides a measure of the archbishop's extraordinary, arguably unique, status. If from early 1638 Laud realized the developing dangers to himself and worked cover his tracks, he nevertheless remained the indispensable link to the king.
The Scottish dimension would play a major role in Laud’s downfall: unsurprisingly, Scottish charges against Laud were cast so as to appeal to the English parliament and the wider public. In the end, Laud's impeachment and trial were propelled by the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant, and yet, ironically, English sensibilities led to charges in which Scottish complaints played virtually no role at all.
The volume prompts a number of questions. If Laud’s agenda were truly universal, extending to Anglophone churches abroad, foreign churches in London, even to the universities, what about the colonies? James altogether declines to discuss Laud's policies or even his attitude toward the churches in British North America. The study would also have profited significantly from the work of Jason Peacey about public culture and the emergence of the popular press during this period. Readers may wonder what James means when she speaks of “Anglo-Scottish forces in the early Long Parliament” (170).
Nevertheless, the volume does offer insight into the range of Laud and Charles’s authoritarian program. Even if it does not recast the paradigm or reframe our understanding, it remains a competent, workman-like study. Laud may have had his limits, but Scotland was not one of them.
