26.

By SIR PHILIP WARWICK.

Archbishop Laud was a man of an upright heart and a pious soul, but of too warm blood and too positive a nature towards asserting what he beleived a truth, to be a good Courtier; and his education fitted him as little for it, as his nature:  which having bin most in the University, and among books and scholars, where oft canvassing affairs, that are agitated in that province, and prevailing in it, rather gave him wrong than right measures of a Court.  He was generally acknowledg’d a good scholar, and throughly verst in Ecclesiastical learning.  He was a zealot in his heart both against Popery and Presbytery; but a great assertor of Church-authority, instituted by Christ and his Apostles, and as primitively practised; which notwithstanding, he really and freely acknowledged subject unto the secular authority.  And therefore he carefully endeavored to preserve the jurisdiction, which the Church anciently exercised, before the secular authority own’d her; at least so much thereof, as the law of this our Realm had apply’d to our circumstances; which our common Lawyers dayly struck at; and thro’ prohibitions and other appeals every day lessened; and this bred an unkindnes to him in many of the long robe, however some of them were very carefull of the Ecclesiasticall jurisdiction.

He was a man of great modesty in his own person and habit, and of regularity and devotion in his family:  and as he was very kind to his Clergy, so he was very carefull to make them modest in their attire, and very diligent in their studies, in faithfully dispensing God’s Word, reverently reading the Prayers, and administring the Sacraments, and in preserving their Churches in cleanlines and with plain and fitting ornament, that so voyd of superstition, GOD’s House in this age, where every man bettered his own, might not lye alone neglected; and accordingly he sett upon that great work of St. Paul’s Church, which his diligence perfected in a great measure:  and his Master’s piety made magnificent that most noble structure by a Portico:  but not long after the carved work thereof was broken down with axes and hammers, and the whole sacred edifice made not only a den of thieves, but a stable of unclean beasts, as I can testifie, having once gone into it purposely to observe:  from which contamination Providence some few years since cleansed it by fire.

He prevented likewise a very private and clandestine designe of introducing Nonconformists into too too many Churches; for that society of men (that they might have Teachers to please their itching ears) had a designe to buy in all the Lay-Impropriations, which the Parish-Churches in Henry the VIII’s time were robb’d of, and lodging the Advowsons and Presentations in their own Feoffees, to have introduced men, who would have introduced doctrines suitable to their dependences, which the Court already felt too much the smart of, by being forced to admitt the Presentations of the Lay-Patrons, who too often dispose their benefices to men, rather suitable to their own opinions, than the Articles and Canons of the Church.