Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/441

 die out again. The love of truth and independence, the hatred of religious tyranny and the revolt against it, would not be suppressed by such a feeble reign of terror as the Lancastrians, the schismatic popes, and the plethoric English clergy were able to set up; nor would they disappear because the country was plunged for another generation into a wanton and disastrous war.

A mighty change had passed over the nation between 1380 and 1450. The men who followed Cade to London, the soldiers who gathered under the banners of York, Warwick, and Salisbury (and who in the course of the civil war displayed their hatred of the prelacy by assassinating several bishops who fell into their hands), were sons and heirs of the Lollards who had revolted against Henry IV. and Henry V. Whether they professed to be Lollards or not—and some of them professed it—they were one with their fathers in revolting against the Lancastrian and ecclesiastical tyrannies, against the restrictions of liberty, the overbearing of the nobles, and the persistent aggressions of the Church and the Crown. No doubt they revolted blindly—but it was under the compulsion of a blind necessity, and with an instinctive faith in the principles which they had imbibed in their youth.

And finally, when the Tudors sat firmly on the throne of England, when Parliament was in abeyance, and the tyranny of the monarch had become greater than ever, was it merely fortuitous that the papal hierarchy and the monasteries should have been swept away whilst the prerogative of the Crown