Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/418

404 Gaunt hastened to undo all that the Black Prince had effected. He caused his own steward, Sir Thomas Hungerford, to be made speaker of the House of Commons. He restored his faction there, and soon had Sir Peter de la Mare, the late speaker, arrested; and the celebrated William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, deprived of his temporalities, on charges of embezzlement which could not be proved, and dismissed from court. The duke went so far as not only to implore that the Lord Latimer, but Alice Perrars, should be freed from the censures passed upon them by the late Parliament in the name of the king, and restored to their former condition and privileges. The present Parliament, however, was not so completely packed by John of Gaunt but that it possessed a spirit of opposition, which insisted that the accused should be put upon their trial; and the bishops demanded the same justice towards William of Wykeham, one of the greatest men of the age, the architect of Windsor Castle, the founder of Wykeham's College at Winchester, and of New College at Oxford.

It is said that we owe it to the resentment of John of Gaunt against the bishops that he took up so earnestly the cause of Wycliffe, the great English reformer, and thus became a most effectual champion and guardian of the Reformation. Wycliffe, who was a parish priest at this time, living at Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, and the prebendary of Aust, in the collegiate church of Westbury, in the diocese of Worcester, had been a member of a legation sent by Edward to Pope Gregory XI., which met at Bruges; and it is remarkable that this glimpse of the papal court is said to have had the same effect on him as the visit of Luther afterwards to Rome. He became a decided Church reformer, and holding the theological chair of Oxford, had ample opportunity of making public his ideas. His denunciations of Church abuses, and opposition to many of its doctrines, had caused him to be cited by a convocation of the clergy to appear at St. Paul's on the 3rd of February, 1377, to answer to the charges against him. Here he was attended by John of Gaunt and the earl marshal, Lord Percy. These noblemen and the bishops became mutually very hot on the question, and the Duke of Lancaster is reported to have threatened to drag Courtney, the Bishop of London, who presided, by the hair of the head out of the church. A riot was the consequence, the Duke of Lancaster protecting Wycliffe; and the people, who were very jealous of Lancaster's overgrown power, resenting his insult to the bishop, broke both into his house and that of Lord Percy, killing Lord Percy's chaplain, and doing immense damage to the duke's palace. The two noblemen escaped across the water to Kennington, where the widow of the Black Prince, the "Fair Maid of Kent," and her son Richard, the heir apparent, resided. The riot ran so high that the debates of Parliament were interrupted, and the mob reversed the duke's arms as a traitor.

The king, completing the fiftieth year of his reign and the sixty-fourth of his life, published a general amnesty for all minor offences; still, however, through the influence of Lancaster, excluding the great Wykeham of Winchester. He was now fast failing, and passed his time between Eltham Palace and his manor of Shene, near Richmond. The last days of this groat monarch were like those of many others who during their lives ruled men with a high hand. It was desolate and deserted. The great nobles and courtiers were looking out for the rising sun, and paying it their assiduous adoration. By some this was held to be the Duke of Lancaster, against whoso designs on the throne the people had culled on the king, before the death of the Black Prince, to guard; and he had named his grandson Richard, then not six years old, his successor. By others Richard was deemed the true fountain of future favour, and all deserted the dying king, except his deeply-interested mistress, who, after securing everything else of value that she could, drew the diamond ring from the finger of the dying monarch, and departed. The servants had gone before to plunder the house, and only a solitary, faithful priest, preferring his duty to the things of this world, hastened to the bedside of the departing monarch, held aloft his crucifix, and remained in that position till the once mighty king had breathed his last.

Englishmen look with pride to the reign of Edward III., as one of those which stamped the martial ascendancy of their race; and unquestionably it is an era of great military glory. But, beyond the glory, what was the genuine advantage won by Edward III. and his heroic son? Neither in France nor Scotland, the scenes of his feats of arms, did he retain a foot of the land which he conquered, except Calais and its little circle of environs. In fact, in France he had lost much territory which he inherited. Of all the time—a great and invaluable lifetime—spent, of all the human Lives destroyed, and the taxes wrung from his people, consumed, there remained no fruits but the little district of Calais, destined to furnish fresh cause of feud, and a heritage of eternal hate towards this country in France. Truly, we cannot wonder at the hereditary repugnance of Frenchmen towards the English, were this only grounded on the wars of this and succeeding reigns, in which we marched our armies like destroying demons time after time over the whole country, burning towns and villages, laying waste the country, plundering and murdering, as if the object were not conquest but extermination. With us the name of Dane has come down as a fierce and sanguinary savage—the scourge of our ancestors; to the French the English of these ages must stand in their history in the same characters of savagery and wanton cruelty. As we have said, nothing could be so insane as this wholesale carnage and ruin inflicted on the French and Scotch if conquest were the object. But the ideas so plain and prominent to us do not seem to have entered the conception of men of those times, that to win a land you must win the people, and to win a people you must conciliate them; offering them even greater advantages than they possess under the dynasty you would displace, and releasing them from old oppressions. None of these things revealed themselves to the warriors of those feudal ages. Indeed, the true and sound policy of the Edwards was to annex Scotland, combining the island into one noble kingdom; and to have achieved this they should, of all things, have kept their attention and their resources undivided, and have made the name of England an attraction to their northern brethren, not a horror.

But, so far as Edward III.'s foreign expeditions led abroad his great and fictions nobles, they ensured a long and settled quiet at home. That quiet, it is true, was not free from oppressions and from great plunderings of