Sensing the visual (mis)representation of William Laud

When William Laud (1573-1645) was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, he and his associate clergy defended episcopal authority by citing apostolic inheritance, but apostolic succession, with its appeal to history and lineage, was problematic. In parliamentary debates in 1640, both those sympathetic to the episcopacy and its detractors observed that appeals to apostolic antiquity presented bishops in ways that might be construed as popish. These parallels between episcopacy and the papacy were made more apparent in anti-Laudian pamphlets. In the early 1640s, a series of satirical attacks on Laud were printed and these texts comprise numerous woodcuts. Visual culture flirts with Laud’s image to present a negative iconography. This article will focus upon "Canterburie His Change of Diot" (1641) to address some of the difficulties in interpreting the relationship between Church and State in mid-seventeenth century pamphlets and how visual imagery connects these representations with ideas of Popery, regicide and the body politic