the wall, and a
cloth of arras hung behind it embroidered with the history of the Last
Supper. The elaborate woodwork of the screen, the richly-embroidered
copes of the chaplains, the silver candlesticks, the credence-table,
the organ and the choir, the genuflexions to the altar, recalled the
elaborate ceremonial of the Royal Chapel.

High-handed however as the Archbishop's course had been, he felt dimly
the approaching wreck. At the close of 1639 he notes in his diary a
great storm that broke even the boats of the Lambeth watermen to pieces
as they lay before his gate. A curious instance of his gloomy
prognostications still exists among the relics in the library--a quarry
of greenish glass, once belonging to the west window of the gallery of
Croydon, and removed when that palace was rebuilt. On the quarry Laud
has written with his signet-ring in his own clear, beautiful hand,
"Memorand. Ecclesiae de Micham, Cheme, et Stone cum aliis fulgure
combustae sunt. Januar. 14, 1638-9. Omen avertat Deus."

The omen was far from averted. The Scottish war, the Bellum Episcopale,
the Bishops' War, as men called it, was soon going against the King.
Laud had been the chief mover in the war, and it was against Laud that
the popular indignation at once directed itself. On the 9th of May he
notes in his diary: "A paper posted upon the Royal Exchange, animating
'prentices to sack my house on the Monday following." On that Monday
night the mob came surging up to the gates. "At midnight my house was
beset with 500 of these rascal routers," notes the indomitable little
prelate. He had received notice in time to secure the house, and after
two hours of useless shouting the mob rolled away. Laud had his revenge;
a drummer who had joined in the attack was racked mercilessly, and then
hanged and quartered. But retaliation like this was useless. The
gathering of the Long Parliament sounded the knell of the sturdy little
minister who had ridden England so hard. At the close of October he is
in his upper study--it is one of the pleasant scholarly touches that
redeem so much in his life--"to see some manuscripts which I was sending
to Oxford. In that study hung my picture taken by the life" (the picture
is at Lambeth still), "and coming in I found it fallen down upon the
face and lying on the floor, the string being broken by which it was
hanged against the wall. I am almost everyday threatened with my ruin in
parliament. God grant this be no ome