On trial for treason in the early 1640s, Archbishop William Laud argued, ‘I kept strictly to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England established by law’. Countering accusation after accusation that he was an innovator, a traitor to the religion rightly established in the sixteenth century, Laud maintained that he was a conservative defender of the Church of England and indeed of the legacy of Elizabeth Tudor. In the early 1640s, the archbishop was following a pattern in this rhetoric, a strategy employed by both the junior clergy (as discussed in the preceding chapter) and the bishops themselves. Anthony Milton has argued that it was the junior Laudian clergy who were on the front lines of apologia, that it was polemicists like Peter Heylyn and John Pocklington who, on the ground, were producing critical de fences - sometimes comprehensive, sometimes not - for the Laudian programme. In this chapter I wish to interrogate that model and examine arguments from both the Personal Rule and the tumultuous 1640s. Specifically, our goal will be to analyse what the higher clergy, specifically Laud and the bishops, did to justify their actions. Ultimately, we will find that it was not left to the junior clergy alone to produce apologia. In fact, not only did the higher clergy make an argument, they made the same argument as the junior clergy.