THERE is little obviously to like in William Laud. In his biography of the Archbishop, Hugh Trevor-Roper admits that "He was a public figure without a private life." We are, however, given two glimpses of the private man behind the public office: according to John Aubrey, he was a great lover of cats. He also kept a tortoise (whose shell is still preserved at Lambeth Palace).

We cannot celebrate his life without first admitting his faults. Although he rescued the Church of England from disintegration, the harshness of his methods was certainly wrong.

Not for nothing did the headmaster of Westminster School describe him as "that little meddling hocus-pocus". For this remark, contained in a private letter, the Revd Lambert Osbaldeston was sentenced to stand in the pillory before his pupils, with his ears nailed to the post - a vindictive sentence, which he managed to escape by fleeing from the court, and going to ground in Drury Lane.

Mutilation was a common penalty handed down by the Court of High Commission, the instrument of Laud's jurisdiction. William Prynne, a puritan pamphleteer and MP, had his ears cropped (twice) and was branded with the letters S L, standing for "seditious libeller". Given his punitive policy, Laud would have been wise to cultivate allies, but he rebuffed any friendly advances, on one occasion retorting to a well-wisher that he "had no leisure for compliments".

On a wider canvas, his interventions were even more disastrous. His attempt to impose the Book of Common Prayer upon the Scottish Church provoked rebellion, precipitating the Civil War and, ultimately, his own arrest and execution.

All this must be conceded before we acknowledge our debt to his industry and determination. Unlike his predecessor at Canterbury, George Abbot, and many of the leading laity, he recognised the risk the Church faced of being blown off course by the wind from Geneva. Richard Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, a scholarly apologia for the Anglican via media, was now mocked by a new generation of zealous, but mostly uneducated, preachers. Laud's remedy was to enforce upon the clergy the use of the Prayer Book, and to ban any preacher who did not hold the bishop's licence. Order and discipline halted the Church's slide into a chaotic free-for-all.

His most deeply resented reform - the removal of the communion table from the body of the church to the east end, behind a fixed rail - was much more than an exercise in ecclesiastical retro-design. It was a weekly reminder to the congregation of the sacramental theology uttered by their priest, when he conducted worship according to the Book of Common Prayer.

We are also indebted to Laud for his benefactions to scholarship. During his time as President of St John's College, and, later, as Chancellor of Oxford University, he introduced reforms that were badly needed in a body that had been described by the Italian scholar Giordano Bruno as a "Constitution of ignorant pedants".

Laud founded the Chair of Arabic Studies in Oxford. He acquired for the university numerous classical and oriental manuscripts from the Levant. He persuaded the King's printers, Barker and Lucas, to set up a Greek fount, to make possible the printing of classical texts. He resisted his patron, the rapacious Duke of Buckingham, who wished to dissolve Sutton's Hospital, a foundation for the education of the poor, and use its wealth to pay for a standing army. To this day, the pupils of Charterhouse School benefit from his intervention.

It may be hard to like the man, but we are not called to like our brothers in Christ. His place in the Kingdom, like our own, depends upon a greater love.

The Revd Adrian Leak is an Honorary Assistant Priest at Holy Trinity, Bramley, in the diocese of Guildford.

WILLIAM LAUD 1573-1645 Archbishop and reformer

WILLIAM LAUD, son of a master tailor, was born in Reading, and educated at Oxford. Ordained in 1601, he became successively President of St John's College, Oxford, Dean of Gloucester, Bishop of St Davids, Bishop of Bath & Wells, Bishop of London and, finally, Archbishop of Canterbury. He carried through vigorous reforms of the Church of England, steering it away from its prevailing Calvinist theology and enforcing the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer. His close alliance with the King in the Civil War resulted in his arrest on a charge of high treason. He was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1645. The church remembers him on the anniversary of his death, January 10