Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/164

 later came the terrible disgrace at Rochelle. The conquests made at Crécy and Poitiers were lost piecemeal, and a splendid English army led by Lancaster, whilst attempting to cross France from Calais to Bordeaux, was half destroyed by cold and famine. The Commons presented a petition to the monarch complaining that though, twenty years before, he had been called "the king of the sea," the English navy was now ruined by incapacity and mismanagement. Grievous taxation, direct and indirect, had been levied for the prosecution of the war, and it was shrewdly suspected that considerable sums had remained in the hands of officials. Corn was at famine prices. The whole country was discontented and enraged; the King's advisers became thoroughly unpopular, and the Government was brought into contempt.

John of Gaunt, it must be admitted, had been tried and found wanting; for though some of the mischances which fell upon him were independent of his control, he was certainly not without responsibility for the worst of them. Beginning with a strong policy, full of ambition and fire and intrigue, he was apparently one of those men who are born to make a noise in the world disproportionate to their effective power. Whether through fault or through misfortune, he failed as a general, as an administrator, and as a manager of men. Having assumed the title of King of Castile, he brought on his country the most humiliating revenges from the Spanish fleet. Having taken over the command in France from his more warlike brother, he lost thousands of men