“I Dreamed Of The Burial Of I Know Not Whom”

Abstract

Six weeks after Lancelot Andrewes's funeral in 1626, William Laud recorded a haunting event in his Diary: “I dreamed of the burial of I know not whom, and that I stood by the grave.” In ways that Laud does not or cannot confess, this dream figures his relationship with Andrewes, particularly his enormous anxiety about Andrewes's influence. Preached on 19 June 1621, Laud's first extant sermon, according to a contemporary, “is after the manner of the bishop of Winchesters [Andrewes's] preaching.” This sermon records Laud's anxiety in the defensive maneuvers that create a strategic misreading by transforming Andrewes into a restricting father figure, a repressive force associated with the Mosaic Law, King David, and the legalistic Old Testament deity. Issues of repression and the Hebrew Law's strictures about sexual conduct must have exacerbated Laud's anxiety because he associated the site where he preached this sermon, Wanstead in Essex, with one of the most ill-conceived decisions of his life – his agreeing to marry Charles Blount and Penelope Devereux. Wanstead produced anxiety in Laud for other reasons, since it had been owned by the Marquess of Buckingham. When Laud became Buckingham's friend and protégé, their relationship brought the older man's carefully denied and generally repressed homosexuality dangerously near the surface of his consciousness.