Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 63.djvu/251

 doubt whether other means more effective at the court of Avignon were not resorted to (but cf., p. 70). It was not until 14 July 1367 that Urban gave way and provided Wykeham as bishop-elect to the vacant see. He was accordingly consecrated at St. Paul's on 10 Oct., and two days later Edward invested him (as bishop by papal provision) with the temporalities (, p. 36). The battle was thus drawn in the king's favour. Wykeham reported his consecration to the pope in most respectful terms (, p. 74). He was not enthroned at Winchester until 9 July 1368.

As soon as Wykeham's episcopal position had been secured, he succeeded (17 Sept.) Archbishop Langham as chancellor. He was unlucky in becoming chief minister at a time when the glories of the reign were already past and a period of national humiliation was opening. As a statesman he made no mark, though the attempt to hold him responsible for the loss of Ponthieu in 1369 probably did him injustice (Chron. Angliæ, p. lxxvi; Fœdera, iii. 832, Rec. ed.) The reverses in France provided the opponents of clerical ministers, headed by the Earl of Pembroke, with a sufficiently plausible case, and Wykeham was driven from office. He resigned the great seal (14 March 1371) to Pembroke's henchman, Sir Robert Thorpe; and Lord Scrope, who was in the confidence of the absent Duke of Lancaster, became treasurer (Fœdera, vi. 683). Wykeham had now more leisure to devote to his episcopal duties and the disposition of the vast revenues he now enjoyed. His annual income as bishop of Winchester has been reckoned as equal to 60,000l. at the present day (, p. 59). The outgoings, however, were also great. The repair of the dilapidated manor-houses of the see, with some new buildings of his own, cost him more than twenty thousand marks (, p. 319). By April 1371 he had begun a ‘new work’ in his cathedral, possibly the reconstruction of the nave (ib. pp. 101, 276; Register, ii. 127). If so, the operations were soon suspended, and not resumed until 1394. Wykeham's strained relations with the prior and monks of St. Swithun's, who resented his attempt to reform them, may have interrupted the work (ib. ii. 502). His zeal in correcting abuses in the religious and charitable houses in his diocese involved him in a long conflict with two masters of the hospital of St. Cross at Winchester, who shamelessly plundered its property and denied his right to interfere. It was only after the proceedings had dragged on for more than six years that a papal delegate finally gave judgment in favour of Wykeham, who took the hospital into his own hands until the death of the master, entrusting the work of building up its shattered resources to his kinsman Nicholas de Wykeham (, pp. 65–82). His experience of the disregard of founders' intentions in such institutions was very nearly inducing him, he tells us, to distribute his wealth among the poor with his own hand, but he bethought him that a society of learned men ‘having God before their eyes’ would observe his statutes, and decided to found a school at Winchester, and a college at Oxford in close connection, for the relief of poor scholars and the training of secular clergy to fill the gaps caused by war and pestilence. As early as 1369 he began buying the land for his college at Oxford, and by 1376 seventy poor scholars, with Richard Toneworth, fellow of Merton, as warden, were lodged at his expense in various halls on the site of his future cloister (, p. 121). Three years before he had engaged Richard de Herton to instruct his poor scholars at Winchester ‘in arte grammatica’ (Register, ii. 195). But the storm which broke upon him in 1376 temporarily interrupted his plans and dispersed his Oxford scholars (Chron. Angliæ, p. lxxx).

The failure of John of Gaunt and the lay ministers who had replaced Wykeham in 1371 to stem the tide of national disaster brought about a reaction. In the parliament of 1373 the commons demanded a conference with eight lords opposed to Lancaster's influence, of whom Wykeham was one (Rot. Parl. ii. 316). The pope sought his support with the king for the peace negotiations at Bruges (, App. p. viii), and in the combination with which the duke found himself confronted in the Good parliament Wykeham occupied a leading position. He was a close friend of the Black Prince, who made him one of his executors, and he had been driven from office by the party which was now arraigned by the nation (Fœdera, vii. 165). The commons included him among the nine special councillors appointed to guide the king, and he opposed Lord Latimer's request for ‘counsel and a day’ to prepare his answer to the charges brought against him (Chron. Angliæ, pp. lxviii, lxxxii). Even this is hardly sufficient to account for the extreme exasperation shown against him by John of Gaunt, with whom he had been hitherto on friendly terms.

Idle as was the rumour that Queen Philippa had confessed to Wykeham that the duke was a supposititious child, Lancaster seems