Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/308

 itself to an orthodox clergyman in search of a mitre; that, on the other hand, his attendance upon the King, the repute of his preaching in London, his dealings with the Duke of Lancaster and the Prince of Wales, the frequent recourse of Parliament to his opinion and advice, say between 1366 and 1380, would have sufficed to obtain him a bishopric if he had been laying himself out to secure one—if he had economised his liberalism instead of speaking his mind and eventually disregarding the wishes of the Duke on a question of principle; and that, in point of fact, when the sinecure prebend of Aust was conferred upon him in 1375, on his return from Bruges, he conscientiously declined it. The friars, as we shall see, had by no means shot their last bolt; but up to the year 1380, at any rate, Wyclif had the best of the argument in every sense. The comparative success of his attack upon the Roman system in England, as well as upon the alien Orders and the national hierarchy, is sufficiently accounted for by the organic weakness of Rome in the fourteenth century, by the patriotic resistance of Englishmen to encroachments from a vassal of France, and by the revulsion of public feeling against ecclesiastical and monastic scandals. Historians who were prejudiced in favour of the papal cause—and it is to be remembered that men like Netter, Harpsfield, and even the Dominicans who confuted Wyclif after his death, had the making of his history in their own hands—admit that the provisions and other exactions of Rome went a long way towards ensuring him the measure of success which he actually gained.