On the Day July 23 1637

Scots React to Laud's Interference

Khen Lim




Image source: regenerationandrepentance.wordpress.com

After James I brought the world its most cherished Bible, his son Charles I did all he could to become England’s first and only monarch to be beheaded and before that, he tried hard to strongarm the Churches of England and Scotland to kneel to him and to do that, he fatally appointed a tyrannical monster to the chair of Archbishop of Canterbury.

As senior bishop of the Church of England, William Laud took the second highest office in the land with a penchant for the minutiae when it comes to ceremonious worship intricacies but for a Protestant head, his desire to get as close to Catholic formulation was he could was uncomfortable to and an affront to the Presbyterians and Puritans. This matter was so unabashedly pursued that many had thoughts that their new king was reconnoitring a return to papal rule. Laud’s overt Catholic overtones were just the beginning of how things got from bad to worse.

In contrast to how the previous rule had a listening ear, Laud was dead to the Puritans. In fact his evidently heavy persecuting hand not only landed Puritans like Alexander Leighton, William Prynne, John Bastwick and Henry Burton in gaol but they were also badly tortured and mutilated along the way. In many cases, their ears were cropped and faces branded. Puritans like them only wanted to expunge all erroneous or superstitious Catholic elements from the Church of England but for that, they ran headlong into Charles and then Laud. Their revolt against the king was exclusively about preserving their Puritan faith for which they suffered tremendously.

Despite Cranmer’s popular Book of Common Prayer book first introduced in 1548 during Edward VI’s reign (Charles’ god-granduncle), Laud believed his new version was better than his revered – and martyred – predecessor’s. He sought to use it to compel everyone to its former practice and power. He was so determined to make people bow at the Name of Christ and compel them to adhere to his newly-introduced services that it all turned horribly pear-shaped instead.

Throughout England and Scotland, the people were outraged and mortified that they could not have their services untouched. Some of the congregations were so furious and upset that wisely, their bishops retained their old formats. In Edinburgh, Scotland, the situation was especially pronounced at the St Giles’ Cathedral where Charles had his Scottish coronation service in accordance to Anglican rites hardly four years ago. There, the church leaders decided that on this day in 1637, they would unwaveringly inaugurate Laud’s revised – but reviled – Anglican Book of Common Prayer. In the land of Presbyterianism, this book of canons was a serious threat to its intended demise and it came the way of a royal edict through to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Image source: from-bedroom-to-study.blogspot.com

To their dismay, as James Hannay, Dean of Edinburgh carried out the new rituals, the congregation turned uproarious, branding him a ‘devil spawn.’ Right at that very instant, a market-woman in her late thirties by the name of Jenny Geddes was so incensed that she hurled her stool directly at him, shouting, “Devil cause you colic in your stomach, false thief: dare you say the Mass in my ear?”

By then, everyone else in the congregation was either screaming abuse or throwing Bibles, sticks, stones or stools. Inevitably, officers summoned by the Provost threw out the rioters but it was too late. Laud’s insensitivity by now had effervesced into something far larger and less controllable as serious riots now flowed on to the streets and erupted in other cities as well. The Provost and magistrates found themselves under siege in the City of Chambers and quelling could only come once negotiation began with the rioters themselves.

But these negotiations went nowhere. In his now-infamous pigheadedness, Charles threw the Scottish petitions out of the window and so none of their demands were met, ensuring another round of riots but this time, leading to talk of civil war, until the National Covenant was signed the following year in 1638 in which there was to be an unconditional revocation of so-called innovations like the Prayer Book until or unless it has been scrutinised by the Scottish Parliament and the General Assembly of the Church. But when the bishops and archbishops were expelled from the Church of Scotland later in the same year, Charles launched the Bishops’ Wars that spiralled out of control to eventually become the Wars of Three Kingdoms.

Nobody really could tell how the details all piece together in trying to link the riots to the eventual civil wars. In fact some even cast doubts as to whether Jenny Geddes did exist and was the catalyst behind the civil war or not or if it was possibly an imagined icon of Scottish pugnaciousness in the face of English interference. If it were, it was hard to tell since there is a memorial in her name at St Giles’ today with a sculptured three-legged cuttie-stool.

The beheading of William Laud in 1645 (Image source: executedtoday.com)

As for William Laud, 1640 was not a good year. He was arrested for treason and thrown into gaol at the Tower of London amidst the English Civil War between Charles’ Royalists and Cromwell’s Roundheads. In the spring of 1644, his trial produced no verdict but when Parliament took up the issue, an attainder was passed, resulting, in the following year, in his beheading on Tower Hill just as Anne Boleyn did a little more than a century earlier.

His autocratic, insensitive and ill-advised intrusion into Scottish church polity and tradition via what he believed were high church services proved costly to his life. Perhaps the cruellest irony for Laud was that the judge who presided over his trial was none other than William Prynne sans ears and featuring cheeks branded with the letters ‘S.L.’ to originally mean ‘Seditious Libeller’ but which he turned it around to become ‘Stigmata Laudis,’ meaning ‘Sign of Laud.’

Imagine that.