10th January, which must mean… yes, of course: the 378th anniversary of the day on which William Laud became the most recent Archbishop of Canterbury to die by violence.
He was preceded in this by Saint Ælfheah — pelted, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, by Vikings “with bones and the heads of cattle … struck on the head with the butt of an axe”:
…Thomas Becket, obviously — hacked up in the cathedral by four knights in 1170 after Henry II supposedly said, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
…Simon of Sudbury, who made the mistake of being Lord Chancellor as well as archbish, trying to introduce a new tax when everyone was already skint, and being in the wrong place at the wrong time during the Peasants’ Revolt
(While Richard II ‘negotiated’ with Wat Tyler, some of the mob barged into St John’s Chapel in the Tower of London, dragged Simon off to Tower Hill and took eight goes at him with an axe before they succeeded in beheading him. Simon’s mummified head is now kept at St Gregory’s Church in Sudbury, obviously. His tomb in Canterbury Cathedral contains his corpse and a lead cannonball instead of his head. I mean, why ever not?)
…and then there was Thomas ‘laugh-a-minute’ Cranmer — bit too keen on letting kings get divorced, Protestantism and all that; burnt at the stake in 1556 on the orders of Queen Mary.
Anyway, Laud was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 by Charles I — and that fact, and the date of his death, are what you might call a clue. He’d been very supportive of Charles, not least over the dissolution of Parliament.
Laud didn’t do himself any favours by being a little bit too keen on uniformity in church services, and on doing things like having his opponents convicted of seditious libel, which meant they could have their ears ‘cropped’ and have the letters SL branded on their faces.
So, in 1641, the largely Puritan Parliament demanded a veto over royal appointments and a purge of bishops. Charles said no, but made one concession: he showed his gratitude for Laud’s loyalty by letting them arrest him for treason.
Laud spent three years in the Tower before he was tried, but there was no verdict, so Parliament passed a Bill of Attainder (which declares a person guilty without the need for all that frightfully inconvenient legal stuff), so he went to have his block knocked off.
…and, if this has made you curious as to how recently a serving Archbishop of Canterbury has done someone else in, it so happens that I can help:
