Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/182

 State. The Committee of Lords in 1376 appears to have been intended in part to meet the difficulty which had been raised by the anti-clerical petition of 1370. It enabled the responsible leaders to associate with themselves any capable bishop to whom objection might be taken as a holder of office.

So long as the Prince of Wales continued to live, and for a month beyond—that is to say, for the ten weeks between April 28th and July 9th—the Good Parliament used its opportunities with courage and judgment. By the vigour of its action, by the independent spirit of its leading members and its dignified Speaker, and by the character of its discussions and resolutions, it will hardly fail to suggest to the reader a curious, though not a very close, parallel with the earlier Stuart Parliaments. Indeed the varying constitution of the Royal Council during the years 1370 to 1399, the dismissal and recall of ministers, the alternations of policy between the "King's friends" and the clerical party, seem almost out of place before the Wars of the Roses. The fact is that the organism of Parliament developed with marvellous rapidity in the latter part of the fourteenth century. The reigns of Edward III. and his two grandsons were favourable to the growth of parliamentary authority and privilege, and at the beginning of the fifteenth century the great Council of the realm had attained a position of considerable strength, which, however, it soon lost, and did not regain for something like two hundred years.

The first task of the Good Parliament was to apply a remedy to the accumulated abuses of the Court,