The use of the surplice, the custom of bowing at the name of Jesus, commanded by Queen Elizabeth in 1559, and the distinctive dress of the priests, had been laid aside, when Laud, in 1604, performed his exercise for Bachelor of Divinity, into which treatise he introduced those tenets which were soon conceived, or misconceived, to be tainted with Romanism.
Nevertheless, from the time when he was president of his own college, St. John’s, to the moment of his promotion to the see of Canterbury, there was little real obstruction to Laud’s elevation, notwithstanding that the whole of his career was one of controversy and contention, until he rose to the highest pinnacle of ecclesiastical greatness, and fell, subsequently, into the very depths of adversity.
This slight sketch is necessary to show how naturally Laud might be expected to succeed in gaining an influence over Buckingham, since he had been always engaged in winning over those of opposite opinions, and in the great battle of controversy. Cheerful, not too severe, nor even sufficiently strict, in his notions of morality, as appears from his conduct relative to Mountjoy, Earl of Devonshire--a short, stout man, with a plump and merry visage, the very opposite of a Puritan or Calvinist minister--no man knew better than Laud how to lay aside the gravity which was unseasonable; accessible in his manners, staunch as a churchman to the interests of his order, but perfectly indifferent, personally, to the gifts of fortune, Laud delighted the great Duke, weary of fame, and perhaps of life, by the sweetness of manner and vivacity of temper which become so well men of high attainments. They were henceforth friends, until the thread of Buckingham’s existence was cut short by the assassin’s blow.
It is impossible to estimate too highly the effects of this intimacy upon the character of the Duke. He seems to have yielded readily to the remonstrances of Laud against the misappropriation of church revenues; and indeed, according to another authority, his own disposition accelerated the effect produced by these impressions. Buckingham was not the rapacious oppressor described by the contemporary slanderers of his time. “Oppression and avarice,” observes Nichols, in his history of Leicestershire, “_he knew not_.”