God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [217]
Public executions were intended to be instructive and convicted felons were expected to make good deaths. In scaffold speeches the condemned admitted the justice of their fate, turning their deaths into useful lessons for others. Strafford had refused to do this, as some plebeian criminals are known to have done, and so did Laud.11 But Laud embraced more fully the alternative – accepting his fate as a martyr to persecution. With pathos, the old man, now in his early seventies, asked for listeners” patience as he read his text, fearing that his failing memory would let him down: ‘Let us run with patience that race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him, endured the Cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the Throne of God’. He accepted his Cross, despised the shame and hoped for salvation.
I was born and baptized in the bosom of the Church of England in that profession I have ever since lived, and in that I come now to die… What clamours and slanders I have endured for the labouring to keep an uniformity in the external service of God according to the doctrine and discipline of the Church all men know, and I have abundantly felt.
In his commitment to the doctrine and discipline Laud was making appeal to the rhetoric of the defenders of the Prayer Book in 1641 and 1642: ‘the Pope never had a harvest in England since the Reformation, as he hath now upon the sects and divisions that are amongst us’.12
He also prayed that God would give grace of repentance to the bloodthirsty people of the nation, or defeat them in:
their devices… contrary to the glory of Thy great name, the truth and sincerity of religion, the establishment of the King and his posterity after him in their just rights and privileges, the honour and conservation of Parliaments in their just power, the preservation of this poor Church in her truth, peace, and patrimony, and the settlement of this distracted people under their ancient laws, and in their native liberty.
Here again, the echoes of 1642 were strong, in the paper-thin differences between the proclaimed positions of the ‘two sides’. Laud professed himself a champion of parliaments, although critical of some particulars, but ‘There is no corruption in the world so bad as that which is of the best thing in itself, for the better the thing is in nature, the worse it is corrupted’. This threat to Parliament lay in popularity, particularly in the City of London, not royal tyranny:
[in] this great and popular City, which God bless, here hath been of late a fashion taken up to gather hands, and then go to the honourable and great court of the Kingdom, the Parliament, and clamour for justice, as if that great and wise court (before whom come the causes which are unknown to many) could not, or would not do justice, but at their call and appointment; a way which may endanger many an innocent man, and pluck innocent blood upon their own heads, and perhaps upon this City also, which God forbid. And this has lately been practiced against myself.
Laud, on his own account, was a martyr to the cause of 1642 – security of the Church of England and the liberties of Parliament under the crown – something Charles himself was to embrace four years later. Clearly this was contentious, and even among sympathizers accounts of what he had said differed.13
Laud enjoyed one of the only advantages of execution by getting in first with the interpretation of the meaning of his own death: martyrdom to a cause defined clearly in 1642. The polemical counterpart of a claim to martyrdom was, of course, hypocrisy, a charge which was duly levied in a flurry of pamphlets. Laud had not moved in his opinion about the policies of the 1630s, and neither had his critics.14 Pym’s legacy was perhaps more ambiguous, since he had ended his life as champion