Such an alliance would have been deadly for English religion as for English liberty had not its strength been broken by the obstinate resistance in wise as well as unwise ways of the Puritan party. There are few more interesting memorials of the struggle which followed than the 'Martin Marprelate' tracts which still remain in the collection at Lambeth, significantly scored in all their more virulent passages by the red pencil of Archbishop Whitgift. But the story of that controversy cannot be told here, though it was at Lambeth, as the seat of the High Commission, that it was really fought out. More and more it parted all who clung to liberty from the Church, and knit the episcopate in a closer alliance with the Crown. When Elizabeth set Parker at the head of the new Ecclesiastical Commission, half the work of the Reformation was in fact undone.
Under Laud this great engine of ecclesiastical tyranny was perverted to the uses of civil tyranny of the vilest kind. Under Laud the clerical invectives of a Martin Marprelate deepened into the national fury of 'Canterburie's Doom.' With this political aspect of his life we have not now to deal; what Lambeth Chapel brings out with singular vividness is the strange audacity with which the Archbishop threw himself across the strongest religious sentiments of his time. Men noted as a fatal omen the accident that marked his first entry into Lambeth; the overladen ferry-boat upset in the crossing, and though horses and servants were saved the Primate's coach remained at the bottom of the Thames. But no omen brought hesitation to that bold, narrow mind. His first action, he tells us himself, was the restoration of the chapel, and, as Laud managed it, restoration was the simple undoing of all that the Reformation had done.
"I found the windows so broken, and the chapel lay so nastily," he wrote long after in his Defence, "that I was ashamed to behold, and could not resort unto it but with some disdain." With characteristic energy the Archbishop aided with his own hands in the repair of the windows, and racked his wits "in making up the history of those old broken pictures by help of the fragments of them, which I compared with the story." In the east window his glazier was scandalized at being forced by the Primate's express directions to "repair and new make the broken crucifix." The holy table was set altar-wise against the wall, and a cloth of arras hung behind it embroidered with the history of the Last Supper. The elaborate woodwork of the screen, the richly-embroidered copes of the chaplains, the silver candlesticks, the credence-table, the organ and the choir, the genuflexions to the altar, recalled the elaborate ceremonial of the Royal Chapel.