Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/207

 arguments, after the friars had found a willing listener in Courtenay, and after the Duke of Lancaster had begun to stumble in his ambitious course. When the Reformer may be said in fighting phrase to have thrown away his scabbard, or at what particular moment the Pope and the Sacred College determined to crush their formidable enemy, it would be difficult to say.

The bulls which arrived in England in November, 1377, demanding that proceedings should be taken against Wyclif, were dated May 22d of the same year. The charges on which they were ostensibly based had reached Avignon from England before the close of 1376. It is in every way probable that this first open breach between Wyclif and the authorities of the Church was brought about by the initiative of the friars before June, 1376, whilst John of Gaunt was not a member of the King's Council. The temporary eclipse of the powerful Duke would naturally seem to afford a good opportunity for moving against the heretic whom he had protected. The death of the Prince of Wales, and the renewal of his brother's influence, would be quite enough to make the astute Pope withhold his bulls for a time. It was clearly hopeless to move against a friend of the Duke's and to hazard a new decretal amongst these wrong-headed and contemptuous English, at a crisis when holy bishops like Wykeham and Courtenay were stripped of their honours and goods, or made to eat their words in public for the very offence of publishing a papal bull.

Before long the Pope would hear of the famous