There is no question that William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury 1633–45, had a decisive impact on his own time and an enduring influence on the subsequent history of the reformed Church of England. His correspondence is a secure way into the mind and activities of the man, and this volume prints 223 of Laud's letters, drawn from thirty-eight archives, which did not appear in the nineteenth-century edition of his Works. This great seven-volume collection of The Works of the most reverend father in God William Laud DD sometime lord archbishop of Canterbury was edited by William Scott and James Bliss and published by the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology between 1847 and 1860. Volumes VI and VII printed 433 letters written by Laud; volume V contained another 114 letters, 109 reprinted from Laud's own history of his chancellorship of Oxford, and five others relating to his claims to hold a metropolitical visitation of Cambridge university; and volume IV reprints one additional letter. In short, the Works contain a grand total of 548 letters.

Since 1860, much more of Laud's correspondence has come to light, some of it in the Public Record Office (now part of The National Archives), whose holdings were being calendared as the Works of Laud were being assembled, others in private or corporate hands, as revealed in successive volumes of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and in the catalogues of libraries, cathedral archives and local record offices. As many of these as could be traced are gathered together in this volume. Of these 223 letters, 71 (33 per cent) have already been published in extenso, but scattered in many different publications and formats, usually without commentary or footnotes, but another 150 (67 per cent) are printed for the first time here. Taken together, our 223 letters represent an additional 29 per cent of the known corpus of Laud's correspondence, swelling the overall number to 771 letters.

The correspondence published in Laud's Works drew on national collections in London and Oxford, on the holdings of Laud's college of St John's Oxford, on letters already in print, and on the wonderfully rich personal archive of Sir Thomas Wentworth, future earl of Strafford.