Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/442

 was steadily increased and strengthened? Surely not. The contract made in 1399 between the son of Gaunt and the representative of Rome in England was perhaps the only thing which could at that time have retained the Anglican Church within the Latin communion. When the Lancastrians had gone, the monarchy sought and discovered new bonds of national allegiance, and the Church was no longer indispensable. Crown and Church, henceforth, could not be simultaneously powerful, and the monarch sacrificed the Church in order to purchase the loyalty and obedience of the people. There was at any rate so much of political philosophy under the policy of Edward IV., and still more under the policy of Henry VIII. and his counsellors—virtual if not expressed, and in effect if not in deliberate purpose.

The sum of the whole matter, so far as the reader of the present volume is specially concerned in the historical developments of the fifteenth century, is this: If the Roman authority in England, and the English hierarchy as representing Rome, had been fatally undermined in the fourteenth century—if, buttressed up by the Lancastrian Kings, the prelatical system shook to its fall under the Tudors—if, when the political moment arrived, the nation stood ready for the change, ready and eager for the expulsion of the monks and the rupture with Rome—all this was mainly and primarily due to the innovating spirit of the Schoolmen, and above all to the life and work of John Wyclif. He sowed the seed that raised this harvest; he spoke the hardy words that grew into counsels of courage and perfection; he spread