William Laud left more letters than did any other seventeenth-century archbishop of Canterbury. The seven volumes of The Works of William Laud, edited by William Scott and James Bliss for the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology between 1847 and 1860, included 548 letters by Laud. Since that time, however, many more letters have emerged in various collections, most notably at the National Archives, Kew (formerly the Public Record Office). Kenneth Fincham has now provided a valuable resource in this collection of 223 letters not found in the Works. Admittedly, seventy-one of these have appeared scattered, as Fincham explains, in other publications, but often without commentary. Fincham's The Further Correspondence of William Laud, along with those letters in the Works, gives us ready access to 771 letters from the archbishop, allowing fuller insight into Laud's character, career, and impact at a time of immense political and religious upheaval in early modern England. These letters affirm the known impression of Laud as detail-oriented and meticulous. And most were penned by a secretary to keep up with Laud's fevered pace. It should also be noted that Laud was careful about not writing indelicately and at times asked his correspondents to burn the letters—so there were many more letters completely lost. In short, Laud worked and wrote continually.

Laud was born in 1573, yet the correspondence we have stretches from 1612 to 1645. We have, therefore, letters from only half of his life, and even then, the distribution is quite uneven. The earliest letter available is from his time as president of St. John's College, Oxford, when he was already forty years old. Yet the great majority of letters are from the time between his elevation to Canterbury to his fall in December 1640. Laud's final letter was penned two days prior to his death in January 1645. As Fincham highlights, the paucity of letters between 1641 and 1645, his years in the Tower, when he had the ability and need to write letters, remains a mystery. While Fincham's Further Correspondence does not rectify that dearth, it does, however, give us a much better vision of the 1620s than previously available. The collection also opens us to new perspectives and a wider array of correspondents. Fincham gives us the only known letters from Laud to Cyril Lucarius, patriarch of Constantinople, and there are new letters to important political actors like Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford and lord deputy for Ireland, and Sir William Boswell, Charles’ agent at The Hague. As Fincham explains, critical themes emerge with these letters: Laud's relationship with Charles, other bishops, and key figures in the regime, his impact on Oxford, and his role in the reformation of the British churches in the 1630s.

These additional letters give us a more nuanced picture of the relationship between Charles and his archbishop and chief minister. There has long been a debate, featuring scholars ranging from Hugh Trevor-Roper to Fincham himself, about who was really in the lead—the king or Laud—in terms of the religious agenda of the 1630s, reforms and alterations that factored in the outbreak of civil war in the ensuing decade. Was Laud executing the king's will, or was the archbishop manipulating Charles to achieve his own goals? These letters give us a better insight into Laud's methods that suited both men. The archbishop kept Charles informed about relatively minor details, resulting in Charles's being quite personally engaged in the life of the church; he was an active authority. Yet Charles trusted Laud, thus enabling the archbishop to advance his agenda for the beauty of holiness. This worked, as the letters expose, because both shared a defined sensibility about order, uniformity, and obedience.

But the letters do not merely give us better insight into their relationship. They also show us Laud as the lynchpin in the ecclesiastical establishment, owing to his relationship to the crown, his formidable energy, and his meticulous administrative style. Laud's letters, therefore, were to a network of figures in the regime, for example Lord Keeper Coventry. Laud comes across as detail-oriented, regularly defensive of clerical privileges, and unflappable in finding endowments for colleges and bishoprics. We also find him quickly moved into influence in both universities, especially as chancellor of Oxford, and the letters reveal his efforts at fund-raising for St. Paul's Cathedral in London. The letters also show us that Laud's relationship with his well-known ally Wentworth was in place by the start of the 1630s, and, factoring in the letters we have with Bishop Bramhall, we see what Fincham describes as a triangular relationship in the reformation of the Irish church. Perhaps the most revealing of his correspondence among his fellow bishops is that with John Bridgeman, a relationship that was fraught at times, in part due to Bridgeman's attempts at bribery and nepotism, but also cooperative and mutually beneficial. Across the dozens of letters between them, the most we have between Laud and any other bishop, we find Laud involved in local church issues and Bridgeman becoming an active collaborator with the archbishop, making proposals and pitching solutions, rather than merely serving as an agent.

This large collection of letters contains notes that only a scholar like Kenneth Fincham could provide. Because of this apparatus, we get much more than passing explanations of terms, but rather a rich sense of historical context. A strength is Fincham's emphasis here on institutional history, the foundations of colleges and cathedrals, the canons and injunctions that guided the church, the universities, and the courts. His familiarity with these sources has resulted in our catching a better glimpse of Laud as archbishop and political actor, a man who was involved in an enormous range of projects both international and local. Fincham also provides a helpful introduction with an economy of references to the secondary literature. This work, then, pairs well with another recently published collection of sources from this series, The Household Accounts of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1635–1642, edited by Leonie James (2019), a work that gives us a picture of Laud's personal affairs. Fincham's The Further Correspondence of William Laud enlarges what we have from Scott and Bliss and will be of immense service to anyone studying early Stuart religious and political history.