Under date 14th August 1634, Prynne read and gloated over those remarkable entries: 

“That very morning at Greenwich there came one to me seriously, and that avowed ability to perform it, and offered me to be a cardinal,” and two days later—­

“I had a serious offer made me to be a cardinal.  I was then from court, but so soon as I came hither (21st August) I acquainted His Majesty with it.  But my answer again was that somewhat dwelt within me, which would not suffer that, till Rome were other than it is.”

No doubt, in declining the cardinalate, if indeed the offer were not a figment of his own brain, Laud would have been diplomatic enough not to allow his reasons to transpire, and probably the Pope never knew them.  The importance of the statement lies for posterity entirely in the anti-Roman tendency which he expressed in his diary.  For the archbishop himself, to have committed the matter to writing, whether it were true or imaginary, proved fatal, the entries serving his enemies as the text of one of the chief indictments against him, when he was brought to trial.  Nothing he could plead made any impression on the minds of his accusers.  His refusal of the purple ought to have vindicated him; but they maintained that for the offer to have been made to him at all, he must have been friends with the Pope.  Moreover, had he not objected to the term “Idol of Rome”? and had he not expressed doubt if not denial of the Pope’s being anti-Christ?  These things were more than enough for fanatics whose piety consisted chiefly in denunciations and impolite epithets.  It was as clear as daylight to their minds that the archbishop had “a damnable plot to reconcile the Church of England with the Church of Rome.”

Presumably, Mr. Prynne’s ears were for something in the overwhelming potency of the argument.  But another and scarcely less important article of the indictment related to some pictures of the Life and Passion of our Lord, which Laud had once had bound up in Bibles.  He had been so greatly pleased with the result that he ordered them to be called the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Bibles.  The Puritans thought they saw in this strong proof of his “popish and idolatrous affection,” their ignorance of human nature actually leading them to imagine that on seeing an image or picture of a divine person men would be forthwith moved to prostrate themselves in adoration of the material of which it was composed, no other explanation of the word “idolatrous” being possible in this connection.

But we must now return to the year 1636, when popular passion ran so high that the opinion of an onlooker is our only means of arriving at a fairly accurate appreciation of events.  Panzani, who although wrong in his inferences was correct as to facts, describes the archbishop and his works with great moderation.  In his letters to Cardinal Barberini, he tells him that Laud is “short in stature, aged about sixty,