William Laud

William Laud (1573-1645), Archbishop of Canterbury under Charles I.

Reforms and Persecution

Laud pushed the Church of England toward “High Church” practice — more ceremony, more hierarchy, more emphasis on the sacraments. To Puritans, this looked like Catholicism by another name. He used the ecclesiastical courts to silence dissent, punishing preachers who deviated from his program with fines, imprisonment, and mutilation (ear-cropping was a favored penalty).

His crackdown drove a wave of Puritan emigration to Massachusetts and other colonies in the 1630s. Those who stayed grew increasingly radicalized.

Downfall

When the English Civil War broke out, Parliament impeached Laud in 1640 and imprisoned him in the Tower. He was tried and executed in 1645.

In the novel

Laud is dead before the novel’s action begins, but his legacy defines the religious landscape the characters inhabit. The Puritan world that shaped Daniel Waterhouse’s upbringing — the dissenting churches, the suspicion of hierarchy, the memory of persecution — exists in direct reaction to what Laud represented.