William Laud and Katherine Jefforts Schori

http://hillsofthenorth.blogspot.com/2008/01/william-laud-and-katherine-jefforts.html

[Hills of the North] 19 Jan 2008--Today Anglicans mark the life of Archbishop William Laud, who at Tower Hill this date in 1645 lost his head. More than 360 years on, Laud remains a controversial figure in English and Anglican history.

Laud's detractors tend to ignore his great strengths—his bureaucratic acumen, his scholarship, and his affection for a truly English church—to name but three. They tend to share the understandable, but unjustified, suspicions of those who accused him of “popery,” and of maneuvering the English church toward Rome. They emphasize his short stature as evidence of a (pre-Napoleon) Napoleonic complex. They remind us of his cruelty—sadism in their view—evidenced by his removing the ears of Prynne and others who did not succumb to his will. They cite Laud’s apparent failures in human relationships and disinterest in the opposite sex as evidence of his lack of humanity, noting that he remained single throughout his life, married, as it were, solely to his work. (Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch asserts that Laud's diaries reveal him to be an unhappy homosexual.) Not displeased with his getting what they view as his just desserts, his detractors tend to gloss over the legal injustice that permitted his death.