Chamber passed a
decree, with a view to prevent English books from being printed
abroad, that in addition to the compulsory licensing of all
English books by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Bishop of London,
or the University Chancellors, no books should be imported from
abroad for sale without a catalogue of them being first sent to
the Archbishop of Canterbury or Bishop of London, who, by their
chaplains or others, were to superintend the unlading of such
packages of books. The only merit of this decree is that it led
Milton to write his _Areopagitica_. The Puritan belief that Laud
aimed at the restoration of Popery has long since been proved
erroneous. One of his bad dreams recorded in his Diary is that of
his reconciliation with the Church of Rome; but there is abundant
proof that he and his faction aimed at a spiritual and
intellectual tyranny which would in no wise have been preferable
to that of Rome. And of all Laud's dreams, surely that of the
Archbishop of Canterbury exercising a perpetual dictatorship over
English literature is not the least absurd and grotesque.

Moreover, in August of this very same year Laud made another move
in the direction of ecclesiastical tyranny. Bastwick and his
party had contended, not only that Episcopacy was not of Divine
institution, or _jure divino_ (as, indeed, Williams, Bishop of
Lincoln, had argued before the King)[91:1]; but that the issuing
of processes in the names and with the seals of the bishops in
the ecclesiastical courts was a trespass on the Royal
Prerogative. What happened proves that it was. The statute of
Edward VI. (1 Ed. VI., c. 2) had enacted that all the proceedings
of the ecclesiastical courts should "be made in the name and the
style of the King," and that no other seal of jurisdiction should
be used but with the Royal arms engraven, under penalty of
imprisonment. Mary repealed this Act, nor did Elizabeth replace
it. But a clause in a statute of James (1 Jac. I., c. 25)
repealed the repealing Act of Mary, so that the Act of Edward
came back into force; and Bastwick was perfectly right. The
judges, nevertheless, in May 1637, decided that Mary's repeal Act
was still in force; and Charles, at Laud's instigation, issued a
proclamation, in August 1637, to the effect that the proceedings
of the High Commission and other ecclesiastical courts were
agreeable to the laws and statutes of the realm.[91:2] In this
manner did the judges, the bishops, and the King cons