Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/316

 of the Chancellor, and the elaborate treatises in which Berton himself, Tyssyngton, and others proceeded to combat the views of Wyclif when the Committee of Doctors had failed to silence him. Either the success or the rejection of the appeal would be consistent with the action of the Duke of Lancaster, who is said to have enjoined his friend not to speak further of the new question which he had raised.

It is impossible to help smiling at the magniloquent phrase which Netter, the confessor of Henry V., applies to the grandfather of his monarch in this connection. Hitherto he has had no good word for John of Gaunt, but rather the contrary. Now that the Duke has begun to grow cool towards the heresiarch, he is styled nobilis dominus dux egregius, et miles strenuus, sapiensque consiliarius Dux Lancastriæ, sacræ ecclesiæ filius fidelis. The corrector of William Courtenay and William of Wykeham would scarcely have recognised himself under such a legend. There is no doubt that by this time John of Gaunt was exhibiting far less zeal in the cause which he formerly had so much at heart. He may have found the Church directly and indirectly a good deal stronger than he expected. He may have foreseen that he would need the help of the hierarchy in other and more attractive schemes which were forming themselves in his mind. And observe, by the way, that it was the influence of the Church which set the crown on the head of his son in 1399, and would have set it on his own head if he had lived to the age of sixty. At all events he must have found that to govern through the mother and the Council of the