William Temple and William Laud

William Temple (1881–1944) and William Laud (1573–1645) seemingly have little in common beyond the fact that they were both archbishops of Canterbury. The worlds they inhabited, 300 years apart, invite contrasts not comparisons: democracy, industrialization, the threats from communism and fascism of Temple’s time against divine right monarchy, fears of absolutism and wars of religion in Laud’s day. So, too, many of their priorities. To take just one example, among Temple’s greatest achievements was fostering international protestant ecumenism, while his predecessor Laud had shunned active membership of the reformed churches in continental Europe. Their social backgrounds and personalities could not have been more different. Temple was born into the Victorian aristocratic and ecclesiastical establishment, while Laud was of mercantile stock, with an uncle who became Lord Mayor of London. Temple was a charismatic leader – self-assured and jovial, bubbling with humanity, a powerful speaker and an accomplished conciliator – who won widespread respect and affection as ‘the people’s archbishop’ and whose integrity was never in doubt. It has been suggested, too, that Temple also displayed a marked reluctance to adopt unpopular positions and face down intractable opposition. ¹ Laud, on the other hand, was an austere and insecure individual, often graceless and irascible, partisan rather than a unifier, who worked with his master Charles I to reform the British churches in the 1630s in full knowledge of the growing opposition they were provoking. Puritans regarded Laud as a crypto-papist, covertly unpicking the sixteenth-century Reformation, and they took some satisfaction at his public execution in 1645. In view of these stark differences, the fact that Temple drew on Laud’s career and expressed some regard for him in Christianity and Social Order deserves investigation. What was it about Laud that Temple found useful, even appealing? Does Temple’s understanding of Laud stand up to modern scholarly scrutiny?

Temple began Christianity and Social Order with a chapter entitled ‘What right has the Church to interfere?’, in which he challenged the assumption of his readership that the Church exercised little political influence and ought to exercise none, a view that he described as ‘entirely modern and extremely questionable’. Temple acknowledged that this assumption had ‘a real foundation’, based, in part, on the knowledge that in times past the Church had strayed sometimes beyond its competence – for example in economics, ‘where technical and moral questions were involved’. To illustrate the point, Temple cited the example of Laud as an active opponent of engrossing and enclosure, but then turned the argument round to applaud Laud for this: he was ‘a friend of the poor with a genuine passion for justice, and a stalwart opponent of that “progress” which enslaves them’. To this Temple added the ringing declaration that Laud ‘has been too harshly judged’ at the bar of history, for all his petulance and arrogance. So Laud’s example helped Temple demonstrate that the Church has interfered – and should interfere – in wider society and exercise its ‘moral voice’. It followed that the Church’s claim in 1942 to be heard on politics and economics was ‘no new usurpation, but a re-assertion of a right once universally admitted and widely regarded’. Laud also made a brief appearance in Chapter 3, ‘Has the Church claimed to intervene before?’, where Temple suggested that unbounded economic individualism associated with Calvinism helps us understand the hostility Laud faced in his attempts to check ‘the encroachments of landlords’ and the enclosing of common land. ²

Temple’s account of Laud was taken from the influential work by his lifelong friend R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, which he cited in the footnotes to his comments on Laud. ³ Indeed, it seems likely that Temple’s knowledge of Laud did not really extend beyond Tawney’s writings. ⁴ Tawney drew attention to Laud’s public opposition to enclosure and depopulation expressed at the council board or in star chamber during the 1630s, where he habitually pressed for the highest fines; Laud condemned one engrosser, who held back grain in a time of shortages until the price had risen, by quoting Isaiah 3.15, as ‘grinding the faces of the poor’. In correspondence with the warden of All Souls College in Oxford, Laud stated unequivocally that he was ‘a great hater of depopulations in any kind, as being one of the greatest mischiefs in this kingdom’. He also won the reputation of putting rank and hierarchy aside, so that transgressors, whatever their social background, received the same blind justice of the law. ⁵ The evidence is by no means complete – what were Laud’s views, for example, on usury, a subject that much concerned Temple? – but there was enough here to make a coherent whole. Laud was an archbishop whose Christian ethics led him, fearlessly, to champion the weak and vulnerable against their oppressors, which must have gratified Temple and certainly served his wider argument. Moreover, Temple popularized Tawney’s view that Laud was the last of his kind for more than a century: after 1660, the Church concerned itself with moralism and theology, leaving the state to supervise business and society. ⁶

Christianity and Social Order was aimed at a national audience, whom Temple was anxious to convince of the Church’s right to press for social reform. The furore following his Albert Hall speech of September 1942 on banking demonstrates how unpersuaded many remained. One clerical correspondent wrote to The Times that the business of the Church ‘is not to reconstruct society but to convert individuals’. Another picked up Temple’s reference in Christianity and Social Order to a remark of Lord Melbourne about religion interfering with the affairs of private life, with the tart statement that, as Melbourne had ‘so nearly’ remarked, ‘things are come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of public life’. ⁷ For all of Temple’s appeal to history, including the role of Laud, the case for church ‘interference’ in politics remained a flashpoint, as it still does to this day.

We might infer from Temple’s account that Laud typified the regular involvement of the Church in political and economic affairs in the first century after the Reformation. In one sense, this would be quite accurate. Laud’s views were conventional enough – as Temple rightly observed, Laud was no innovator ⁸ – and his attacks on the social ills of the day are matched by the ‘commonwealth’ writers of Edward VI’s reign, headed by Hugh Latimer, and by the sermons and treatises from a number of Laud’s own contemporaries in the ministry. ⁹ In contrast to the latter, of course, Laud held public office as a privy councillor, serving on the subcommittees for trade and for foreign affairs, a commissioner for depopulation and briefly first lord of the treasury – in short, a prominent member of the Caroline regime of the 1630s, which, officially at least, shared much of his conservative social vision. Thus, some of its welfare initiatives, such as the Books of Orders of the early 1630s, in fact owed little or nothing to Laud. ¹⁰ On the other hand, we should acknowledge that Laud was an exceptional figure among churchmen in the century after the Reformation. In his pomp in the 1630s, Laud was more powerful than any other bishop since the days of Cardinal Wolsey in the 1520s, a consequence of the steadfast support he received from Charles I. If Laud’s voice carried weight, it was because he was an informed and tireless presence in government who stood high in the king’s favour. Many of his predecessors at Canterbury had fared less well: Parker was excluded from the privy council and Grindal suspended from office by Elizabeth I, while Abbot had crossed swords with James I and was temporarily rusticated to Kent by Charles I. His successors, Sheldon and Sancroft, were to fall out with Charles II and James II.

The notion of clerical ‘interference’ in the state was not quite as uncontroversial in Laud’s day as Temple suggested. The increasing number of clergy appointed to be local magistrates led to repeated attempts through the House of Commons to bar clerical JPs. At court, for the first time since the Reformation, a bishop served as head of the judiciary (1621–6) and another as lord treasurer (1636–41), with Laud busy in the inner counsels of state, leading to fears of an irresistible rise of the clerical estate at the expense of the laity. The collapse of Charles I’s government in 1640 gave Laud’s opponents their chance. Critics such as Lord Falkland in the Commons and Baron Saye and Sele in the Lords argued that the secular responsibilities of bishops distracted them from their prime function of shepherding souls and preaching to the people. From prison, Laud responded that a bishop ‘may preach the gospel more publicly and to far greater edification’ at the council board than in a pulpit. In the political dogfight that preceded civil war in 1642, the removal of 26 bishops from the House of Lords would also serve the interests of Charles’s opponents, by eliminating an important bloc that tended to back the king’s line. So, early in 1642, bishops lost their seats in the Lords, and all clergy (bishops included) were declared ineligible to be local magistrates. This situation was only reversed by an act of parliament in 1661, following the restoration of Church and state under Charles II. ¹¹

Laud’s social ethic has not received much sustained attention since Temple’s time. The standard biography, after all these years, is still that by Hugh Trevor-Roper published in 1940, which Temple may have known, and which broadly adopted Tawney’s analysis of Laud’s social teaching. ¹² In recent years, Laud has been the centre of much lively scholarly enquiry – his theology (was he an Arminian?), his close working relationship with Charles I (who ran the Church: king or archbishop?) and his influence on the Church of England after his death (founder of high church Anglicanism?) – but his social teaching has almost entirely dropped out of sight. Symptomatic of this is the very short comment on Laud’s social ethics in the very long and otherwise excellent entry on Laud in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). A closer scrutiny of Laud’s working papers may offer new insights on his social thinking.

This article began by drawing attention to the evident contrasts between Temple and Laud. It is reasonable to conclude with a few striking similarities. In his comments on the galley proofs of Christianity and Social Order, Keynes noted that Laud was one of very few Archbishops of Canterbury before Temple to engage with economics. ¹³ Both Laud and Temple were major ecclesiastical politicians, dominant in their time and men of remarkable energy. Each was consistent over the decades to his principles as he sought to reform and renew church and society, and each has bequeathed an enduring legacy to Anglicanism.