Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/434

420 against Ypres, to oblige the Ghentese; but the siege was prolonged, and the King of France, at the entreaty of the Count of Flanders, was approaching with a fine army. The men of Ghent retired; the bishop made one furious assault, and then withdrew. Part of his forces made themselves masters of Bourbourg, and obtained permission to carry their booty to Calais. The bishop threw himself once more into Gravelines, and, after holding it a short time, demolished its fortifications, and returned to England.

That this campaign of the militant bishop did not equal the expectations which his former demonstration had raised, appears partly owing to his own precipitancy, but far more to the machinations of his powerful enemies. Like most unsuccessful commanders, he fell under the censure of the Government. He was accused before Parliament of having taken a bribe of 18,000 francs to betray the expedition, and of having broken his contract with the king by returning before the year of his engagement had expired. Of the former charge he was cleared on full inquiry, but he was condemned on the latter to forfeit all his temporalities till he had paid the full damages to the king. Four of his principal knights were also condemned to pay 20,000 francs into the treasury for having sold stores and provisions to the enemy to that amount.

Not to interrupt the narrative of events which extend over into other years, we may here note one of the most remarkable incidents of this reign. This is the death of Wycliffe, who was struck with apoplexy while performing public service in his parish church, and died on the last day of the year 1384.

John Wycliffe had not only put in active motion the principles of the Reformation by his preaching, and his public defences against the attacks of the authorities of the Church, but he had made those principles permanent by the translation of the Bible. Not that Wycliffe's was the first translation of the Scriptures into English. There appear to have been several versions, and some of them at comparatively early periods. Sir Thomas More, in his "Dialogues," says: "The hole Byble was, long before Wickliffe's days, by vertuous and well-learned men translated into the English tong, and by good and godly people with devotion and solemness well and reverently red." In Strype's "Cranmer" it is also said: "It is not much above one hundred years ago since Scripture hath not been accustomed to be read in the vulgar tongue within this realm; and many hundred years before that it was translated and read in the Saxon's tongue; and when this language waned old and out of common usage, because folk should not lack the fruit of reading it, was translated again into the newer language, whereof yet also many copies may be found."

But these earlier translations of the Bible had remained in the libraries of monasteries, and, by the little education of the people, and the conservative vigilance of the Church, had been the sole study of a few learned men. Wycliffe, by his position as theological professor at Oxford, had excited a wide interest and inquiry about the Scriptures; by his patronage at court, and the persecutions of the prelates, they had been made the subject of a vast curiosity, and this curiosity he had taken care to gratify by multiplying copies through the aid of transcribers, and by the poor priests, the converts to his doctrines, reading them and recommending them everywhere amongst their hearers. The English Bible was never more to become a rare or merely curious book. It is said that when the good Queen Anne's countrymen who attended her here at the court were expelled by the Lancaster faction, they carried back copies of Wycliffe's Bible and writings, which had been her favourite reading; they thus fell into the hands of Huss and Jerome of Prague, accompanied by the anti-papal doctrines of the great English reformer; and in this manner scattering the first seeds of the Reformation in the queen's native country, were destined to prepare the way for Luther, and to produce such immense changes throughout the civilised world.

In England these doctrines and this translation never again ceased to be the object of anxious inquiry. "The new doctrines," says Dr. Lingard, the Catholic historian, "insensibly acquired partisans and protectors in the higher classes, who alone were acquainted with the use of letters; a spirit of inquiry was generated, and the seeds were sown of that religious revolution which in little more than a century astonished and convulsed the nations of Europe."

Wycliffe, who had sown these seeds, survived all the enmity and assailments of the enemies which his attack on the corruptions of the Church had naturally created. A fine picture might be painted of Wycliffe on his sick bed when in Oxford, in 1379, he was seized with a dangerous illness. The mendicant friars, whose vices and errors he so severely exposed, crowded round his bed, attended by four aldermen of the city commissioned to visit him, and called upon him to recant his errors. But Wycliffe, who seemed at the point of death, seized with a sudden energy, started up in his bed, and, shaking his clenched hand at these astonished men, exclaimed, "I shall not die, but live many years to expose the absurdities, the falsities, and the crimes of the mendicant friars."

We are not to suppose, however, that Wycliffe had arrived at the clear conceptions of reformed religion which are established at the present day. Neither he nor Luther after him were able to shake off at once all the reverence for the rites and tenets in which they and their fathers for ages had been educated. Any one seeing old Lutheranism as it is yet practised on the Continent would scarcely be able to distinguish it from Popery. Socrates, even while about to drink poison as the punishment for his preaching doctrines subversive of the paganism of Greece, yet desired his friends, as soon as he was dead, to sacrifice a cock for him to Esculapius; thus manifesting the hold which his hereditary ideas still had upon him. So Wycliffe and Luther retained many things which subsequent reformers have seen it necessary again to reform. It is doubtful even whether Wycliffe disapproved of either pilgrimages or the worship of images: purgatory he believed in to the last; and, though he denounced the Pope as antichrist, and the priests as "the proctors of Satan," in his treatise "On the Truth of Scripture," he asserts that it is worse than paganism to refuse obedience to the apostolic see, and says that "prelates and priests, ordayned of God, comen in the stede of apostles and disciples, and that the Pope is the highest vicar that Christ has heare in earth."

These discrepancies demonstrate that this great man was, during his whole career, after he began to perceive.