SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1660 25 
for stubbornly and in the end irresistibly was em- 
bodied in the man who was the principal counsellor 
of Charles I, William Laud. Laud became Atch- 
bishop of Canterbury in 1633 and died on the scaffold 
in 1645. In the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial 
Series, under date of April 28, 1634, Laud appeats at 
the head of a Commission with apparently the widest 
powers ‘ for making laws and orders for government 
of English colonies planted in foreign parts’; and 
two years later, under date of April 10, 1636, he heads 
another Commission ‘ for government of all persons 
within the colonies and plantations beyond the seas 
according to the laws and constitutions there.’ 
Clarendon wrote of Laud as a man of great parts 
and courage and exemplary virtues, but who, being 
assured of the righteousness of his ends, never studied 
the easiest ways to them. ‘He did court persons too 
little.” 1 The scrupulous fairness of Dr. Rawson 
Gardiner has corrected for us the picture of Laud 
drawn by Macaulay, but none the less Gardiner wrote 
that of all the men of the time Laud was the least fitted 
to be entrusted with political power; such was his 
belief in the unbounded efficacy of external forms and 
institutions combined with his complete ignorance of 
human nature. Laud was no bigot as regards men’s 
beliefs, ‘ but the liberty which he claimed for men’s 
minds. he denied to their actions.’ 2 
‘ Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion (1826 ed.), vol. i, pp. 159 and 
165. 
2 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of 
James I to the Disgrace of Chief Justice Colle (1863), 2 vols., vol. ii, 
chap. x, p. 41, and Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage (1869), 2 vols., 
vol. i, pp. 195-6.