Laud’s greatest passion was ambition, if anything in a nature so contracted could be said to assume the proportions of a fullblown passion.  He had a marvellous capacity for dealing with small things, and all that came under his ken he studied to the minutest detail.  He was a believer in dreams, and owned to being greatly troubled by them.  “Thursday, I came to London,” he once wrote in his diary; “the night following, I dreamed that I was reconciled to the Church of Rome.  This troubled me much, and I wondered exceedingly how it should happen.  Now was I aggrieved with myself (not only by reason of the errors of that Church, but also) upon account of the scandal which from that my fall would be cast upon many eminent and learned men in the Church of England.  Going with this resolution, a certain priest met me, and would have stopped me.  But moved with indignation I went on my way.  And while I wearied myself with these troublesome thoughts I awoke.  Herein I felt such strong impressions that I could scarce believe it to be a dream.”

To a becoming gravity the archbishop failed to unite a saving sense of humour.  His temper was hasty, but also vindictive, and he never forgot an injury, to which fact the notorious Puritan, William Prynne, was well able to testify.  Laud first incurred the enmity of this man and his friends by his attempts to introduce some measure of ceremonial into the churches under him.  When he began his reform, the places of public worship were nothing but buildings where discourses and diatribes against Popery were to be heard in luxuriously upholstered seats.  “There wants nothing but beds to hear the Word of God on,” said Bishop Corbet.  The notion of a priesthood had died out of people’s minds.  They looked upon their clergy as preachers merely—­the cure of souls was an obsolete term.

Archbishop Grindal had caused the altars to be destroyed, and the places where they had stood whitewashed, so that no trace of them might remain.* Laud had the communion tables removed from the middle of the churches into the place formerly occupied by the altar, railed in, and distinguished by altar-like adornments.  Finally, it became customary to designate them by the ancient name of altar, while the officiating minister resumed the name of priest.  The people, now become thoroughly Protestantised, murmured, and thought they saw indications of a return to Rome.** Some protested that all this superabundant care for externals was eating the life out of Protestantism; the bugbear of others was the appeal, now becoming customary, to the Fathers of the Church, rather than to the Protestant divines of the continent.*** St. Augustine was suspect, Calvin they knew to be orthodox.

* Articles to be inquired of in the Archdiocese of York—­“Whether in your churches and chapels, all altars be utterly taken down and clean removed even unto the foundation; and the place where they stood paved, and the wall whereunto they joined whited over, and made uniform with the rest, so as no breach or rupture appear.”  In case any altars remained, the churchwardens were “to remove them and certify.”