Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/142

 as it were in the triumph of the French king—a vassal to the monarch who still claimed to be overlord of Norman England. Already the French were our hereditary foes, and the Vicars of Christ, assuming universal dominion, were now virtually instru. ments in the hand of the enemy. The more haughtily the Plantagenets asserted their independence, the more inadmissible and ridiculous the assumption of the Popes would appear to every patriotic Englishman. King John's tribute of a thousand marks had been paid for the last time to Pope John XXII. After 1333—at any rate after the Pope's death in 1334—it was never paid again. Benedict claimed it, but it was refused, and even the payment of Peter's pence was discontinued (at any rate partially) for a time. Benedict was honest, virtuous, and weak. Clement VI. (1342-1352) was the exact opposite of his predecessor, the precise negation of Christian virtues; and his conduct in holding the jubilee of 1350 for the sake of its golden harvest, whilst all Europe was writhing under the plague, was surely the head and front of his offending. No fervent Christian, no Englishman who loved his country, could do otherwise at this time than hold the political and even the spiritual claims of the Popes at Avignon in contempt and disregard.

If the papal jubilee of 1350 doubled the horrors of the plague in the eyes of all right-judging persons, the effect which had already been produced by that fatal epidemic is almost inconceivable. It over-shadowed the life, and must in some measure have affected the character, of every one who lived