Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/186

 of 1377 had a word to say against his arbitrary conduct.

During the session of this Parliament Edward III., who had celebrated the jubilee of his birth by formally recognising English as the national language, celebrated the jubilee of his accession to the throne by a general pardon; but John of Gaunt contrived that the Bishop of Winchester should be excluded by name from the benefits of the proclamation. A story which was current at the time, or not long afterwards, professed to give a personal (and perhaps it would have been an adequate) reason for the relentless animosity with which the Duke of Lancaster pursued the disgraced Bishop. William of Wykeham is said to have declared that Queen Philippa had told him on her death-bed how, when she was confined at Ghent in 1340, she had given birth to a daughter, and had overlain it in the night. Fearful of her husband's anger, he being absent at the time, she had substituted a boy for the dead child. This boy, according to the Bishop, or to the inventor of the fable, was the wrong-headed and obstreperous John of Gaunt, who had manifestly been born for a Flemish burgher, and not for an English prince.

Unquestionably if such a story reached the Duke of Lancaster's ears, it might account for his hatred of Wykeham. Of course it cannot be accepted, for various and sufficient reasons. Chaucer has been quoted as an authority for the light in which the overlying of children was regarded in those days; for he says in The Parsons Tale that "if a woman by negligence