out of which
the Ecclesiastical Commission was to spring.

Such an alliance would have been deadly for English religion as for
English liberty had not its strength been broken by the obstinate
resistance in wise as well as unwise ways of the Puritan party. There
are few more interesting memorials of the struggle which followed than
the 'Martin Marprelate' tracts which still remain in the collection at
Lambeth, significantly scored in all their more virulent passages by the
red pencil of Archbishop Whitgift. But the story of that controversy
cannot be told here, though it was at Lambeth, as the seat of the High
Commission, that it was really fought out. More and more it parted all
who clung to liberty from the Church, and knit the episcopate in a
closer alliance with the Crown. When Elizabeth set Parker at the head of
the new Ecclesiastical Commission, half the work of the Reformation was
in fact undone.

Under Laud this great engine of ecclesiastical tyranny was perverted to
the uses of civil tyranny of the vilest kind. Under Laud the clerical
invectives of a Martin Marprelate deepened into the national fury of
'Canterburie's Doom.' With this political aspect of his life we have not
now to deal; what Lambeth Chapel brings out with singular vividness is
the strange audacity with which the Archbishop threw himself across the
strongest religious sentiments of his time. Men noted as a fatal omen
the accident that marked his first entry into Lambeth; the overladen
ferry-boat upset in the crossing, and though horses and servants were
saved the Primate's coach remained at the bottom of the Thames. But no
omen brought hesitation to that bold, narrow mind. His first action, he
tells us himself, was the restoration of the chapel, and, as Laud
managed it, restoration was the simple undoing of all that the
Reformation had done.

"I found the windows so broken, and the chapel lay so nastily," he wrote
long after in his Defence, "that I was ashamed to behold, and could not
resort unto it but with some disdain." With characteristic energy the
Archbishop aided with his own hands in the repair of the windows, and
racked his wits "in making up the history of those old broken pictures
by help of the fragments of them, which I compared with the story." In
the east window his glazier was scandalized at being forced by the
Primate's express directions to "repair and new make the broken
crucifix." The holy table was set altar-wise against