Before the end of the year a peace was made with Scotland; and in a parliament assembled at York in March following, Edward renounced for himself and his successors all claims of superiority over the crown of that country; and shortly after, his sister the Princess Jane or Joanna (called De la Tour, from having been born in the Tower of London) was carried to Berwick by her mother, and there affianced to David, the Prince of Scotland, as yet only in his fifth year. The great Bruce died within a year after (on the 7th of July, 1329),and was succeeded by his infant son as David the Second; about two years after whose accession Edward Baliol made a sudden inroad into the country, and got himself crowned at Scone, but was driven out again in a few weeks. In a second invasion, however, in the following year, 1333, in which he was assisted by the English king, the Scots were defeated by Edward, on the 19th of July, in the great battle of Halidon Hill, near Berwick; upon which that town was forced to surrender, nearly every other stronghold in the kingdom immediately followed its example, and the young King David took refuge in France. Baliol, however, whom these events had again seated on the throne, was again driven out within a year; the war was carried on for some years, in the course of which Edward once, in the summer of 1336, proceeded as far north as to Inverness, carrying fire and sword wherever he appeared; but no permanent occupation or subjugation could be effected; as soon as the English army disappeared the Scots were again in arms; in May 1341 David and his queen returned from France; and at last, in the beginning of 1343, a truce was concluded which left the two countries at peace for nearly four years.
But long before this time a great domestic revolution had changed every thing at the court of England. The arrogance of Isabella and Mortimer, who had early in the new reign been created Earl of March, and the general conviction of their criminal intimacy, had very soon begun to disgust the nation; and the alarm of a powerful party had been excited by the condemnation and execution, in the beginning of 1330, of Edmund earl of Kent, one of the king's uncles, on pretence of high treason, his real crime being, as was universally believed, that he was hated and dreaded by the favourite. Even Edward himself, now eighteen, was staggered by after-reflection upon this act, though he had been induced, in the persuasion of the earl's guilt, to give his consent to it at the time. Already married, too, and a father, for his son Edward, afterwards so famous as the Black Prince, had been born at Woodstock on the 15th of June,1330, he no doubt felt the state of tutelage, or at least of exclusion from all share in the government, in which he was kept by his mother and Mortimer, every day more galling. It is said that the king confided his feelings to the Lord Montacute; and by his advice it was resolved to make an attempt to seize Mortimer at a parliament which was to be held at Nottingham in October. At this parliament the favourite appeared "in such glory and honour," says Stow, "that it was without all comparison. No man durst name him any other than Earl of March; a greater rout of men followed at his heels than on the king's person; he would suffer the king to rise to him, and would walk with the king equally, step by step and cheek by cheek, never preferring the king, but would go foremost himself with his officers." While he took up his own lodgings with the queen and her son in Nottingham Castle, he directed that the highest of the other nobility, including the king's cousin, the Earl of Lancaster, should be lodged in the most distant parts of the town or without it. The conspirators, however, opened their design to Sir William Eland, who had long been keeper of the castle; and he engaged to admit them during the night by a subterraneous passage, leading from a point at a considerable distance on the west side of the rock, of the existence of which Mortimer was not aware. On the night of the 19th of October, accordingly, having concerted their plans with the king, Montacute and his associates entered by this passage. They were joined by Edward on the principal staircase. Advancing in silence, and with their naked swords in their hands, they soon came to a room, where the voice of Mortimer was heard conversing. Leaving the king without, they rushed in, and slaying two knights, who endeavoured to oppose them, laid hold of the earl. The queen, who was in bed in the adjoining chamber, the door of which was open, cried out "Bel filz, Bel filz, Ayez pitié de gentil Mortimer" (Fair son, fair son, have pity upon gentle Mortimer); she then rose, and, rushing into the room, passionately exclaimed that he was a worthy knight, her well-beloved cousin,her dearest friend; but he was quickly secured and hurried off. At a parliament held at Westminster about a month after, he was condemned, with little form of trial, to die the death of a traitor; and he and one of his confederates were hanged together at the Elms at Tyburn, on the 29th of November. "He hung," Stow tells us, "two days and two nights by the king's commandment, and then was buried in the Grey Friars' Church," now Christ's Hospital, in Newgate Street. Yet Mortimer's attainder was reversed in 1352, and his honours restored to his grandson; his great-granddaughter married Lionel Duke of Clarence, the third son of Edward III.; his great-great-granddaughter and ultimately sole heir, Ann Mortimer, by her marriage with Richard Plantagenet Earl of Cambridge, conveyed her right to the crown thence derived to the House of York; her grandson mounted the throne as Edward IV.; and it has been occupied ever since the death of Henry VII. by her descendants. As for Queen Isabella, she was, upon her fall from power, reduced to an income of 3000l.a year (which was afterwards increased to 4000l.), and ordered to confine herself in what some authorities call her manor of Risings near London, others Rising Castle, on the coast of Norfolk, where once a year her son paid her a visit of ceremony, and where she survived almost forgotten by the world for nearly eight and twenty years. She died on the 22nd of August, 1358, and was then buried in the choir of the same church of the Grey Friars where the body of Mortimer had been laid.
In 1328, an event occurred which suddenly gave a new direction to the exertions and ambition of the English king, and changed altogether the policy of the remainder of his reign. Hitherto, the object that may be said to have mainly occupied him had been that inherited from his father and his grandfather, the subjugation of Scotland; his efforts were now to be withdrawn to a much more extraordinary, daring, and magnificent scheme, that of the conquest of France. Upon this attempt he adventured on the strength of a right which he professed to derive through his mother. Isabella, it will be recollected,was the daughter of the French king Philip IV. Philip died in 1314, and was succeeded by his eldest son Louis X. (styled Le Hutin, or the Quarrelsome). Louis died in 1316, and was in the first instance succeeded by a posthumous son, named John, who, however, as he lived only a few days, is not usually reckoned among the kings of France. It was then determined, for the first time, that the French crown, by what was called the Salic law, did not descend to females; and, to the exclusion of the daughter of Louis, Joanna, Countess of Evreux, afterwards Queen of Navarre, his brother became king as Philip V. (surnamed the Long). In like manner, when Philip died in 1322, although he left four daughters, he was succeeded by his next brother, Charles IV. (styled Le Bel, or the Fair). The event which happened in 1328, and which we have described as having been attended with important consequences both to France and to England, was the death of Charles IV. He also left two daughters, but no son. In these circumstances, according to the two last precedents, it seemed that the heir to the crown was to be sought for in the nearest male who could claim through an unbroken male descent; the principle apparently being, as in other cases in which male descent only was recognised, that females should be regarded as nullities, or should not be introduced into the genealogical tree at all. The individual thus circumstanced was indisputably Philip of Valois, whose father, Charles of Valois, was the second son of Philip III. (the Hardy), and the younger brother of Philip IV. (the Fair). Against his right, however, Edward III. set up a principle or rule of succession which was at least new. He admitted that females were excluded from actually reigning in France, otherwise the Queen of Navarre would have succeeded her father Louis X., and would have excluded not only both himself and his present competitor, but also the two last kings, Philip V. and Charles IV. But he contended that, although females could not be called to the throne themselves, they nevertheless conveyed a right of succession to their male descendants; and that he therefore,as the grandson, through his mother, of Philip IV., had a preferable claim to Philip of Valois, who was only the grandson of Philip III. If this had been the whole case, Edward's pretensions might have had some plausibility; it might have been conceived and understood how, in conformity with the general principles of feudalism, a female, though excluded in her own person from a certain office or possession, might still serve as a link for transmitting a right to it to her male descendant. She might be held only as it were to step aside and allow him to take her place in a function which her sex was deemed to disqualify her from discharging. But the real weakness and inadmissibility of Edward's claim lay in the necessity he was under of qualifying this principle upon which he founded it by a limitation entirely opposed to the genius and spirit of the feudal system, and which would have made the law of descent a self-contradictory mass of confusion and absurdity. For, if a female universally might transmit a right which she could not herself exercise or enjoy to her male descendant, then in the present case, before Edward, who was the grandson, through a female, of Philip IV., would come all the existing and possible male descendants of the three subsequent kings, Louis X., Philip V., and Charles IV., all of whom left daughters, though no sons. To this conclusion the principle upon which Edward took his stand, stated broadly and without limitation, would incontrovertibly have led. He therefore drew an ingenious distinction, and maintained his own right as the son of the daughter of Philip IV. to be preferable to that of the son of any daughter of any of the kings that had since reigned, on the ground that he alone had been born in the lifetime of his grandfather. The novelty and gratuitous nature of this assumption would alone have formed its sufficient answer and refutation. But it was fraught with the most absurd and inconvenient consequences. If there be one principle which more than another may be said to belong to the essence of the feudal system of descent, it is that the position and rights of a line in relation to other lines are not tobe affected by the date of the birth of any individual forming a link of it. Thus, no priority of birth can enable a nephew to come in before a son. So absolutely does this principle operate, that, even if there be no son in existence at the time of the death of a married man, his next relation does not inherit, or only inherits conditionally, till the time has passed within which it is possible that his widow should bring him a son. We had an instance in the case of the descent of the English crown on the death of the late king, William IV., when the present queen assumed the government at first only as it were provisionally, or with reservation of the rights of any possible unborn cousin. But the claim set up to the crown of France by Edward III., on the death of Charles IV., would have contravened this essential principle in the most flagrant and wholesale manner. It would have excluded in his favour more than half a dozen lines, all otherwise entitled to come in before that to which he belonged—those, namely, of the descendants, actual or possible, of the two daughters of Charles IV., of the four daughters of Philip V., and of the daughter of Louis X., all of which kings had reigned since his ancestor Philip IV. And this transposition it would have made permanently; these seven lines would all have been extruded out of their proper places by his for ever, or at any rate until some one of them, possibly the last of all, should be again suddenly lifted over the heads of all the rest, and made the first, by the operation of the same strange principle which Edward contended had now produced that effect in his favour.
Strange as were the principles or grounds upon which Edward advanced his claim to the French crown, his means of enforcing it seemed at least proportionally inadequate, and his chances of success still more slight and visionary. It was not a case of the heads of two great national parties, dividing between them the adherence and support of the community. Edward had no party in France; the kingdom the succession to which was disputed was wholly with his opponent. The English crown had even been stripped in the course of the lastcentury and a half of the greater part of the territories which it anciently possessed in France. Bretagne, Normandy, Anjou, Maine, and Touraine had all been wrested from it in the disastrous reign of John; and the loss of Poitou had followed in that of his equally unfortunate son Henry III. Of all the vast continental possessions of that great king the second Henry, there remained only the Duchy of Aquitaine or Guienne; and even that had fallen more than once into the hands of the French monarchs, and the prevalent popular feeling was probably already more French than English. Edward's bold project, therefore, was nothing less than to effect the conquest of France by the sole force of England; and that, too, while he had already upon his hands the war with Scotland, the object of which was also the subjugation of that kingdom, and the annexation of its crown to his own. The latter scheme, indeed, he found himself obliged to abandon soon after he had involved himself in his contest with France. But Scotland continued, nevertheless, for a time to divide his attention, if not his ambition; and at least, it may be said, to occupy his left arm.
Strangest of all was the measure of success he attained. In September, 1339, he entered France from Flanders, with a small army of fifteen thousand men, and immediately proceeded to lay waste the country. In January following, by the advice of his ally Jacob von Artaveldt, the famous brewer of Ghent, and leader of the democratic interest in Flanders, he publicly assumed the title of King of France, and quartered the French lilies with the English lions. On the 24th of June, 1340, he obtained a great naval victory over the fleet of Philip off Blakenberg. Hostilities were then for some time suspended: but arms were resumed in the summer of 1345 with much more formidable preparations on both sides. On the 26th of August, 1346, was won the ever memorable victory of Creci by seven or eight thousand English from a hundred or a hundred and twenty thousand French, in which eighty of the enemy's banners were captured, while in the carnage of that and the followingday above thirty thousand of them were slain, including twelve hundred knights and eleven persons of princely rank, among the rest the aged John, King of Bohemia, from whom the Princes of Wales are said, though doubts have been lately cast upon the old story, to have borrowed their plume of three ostrich feathers, with the mottoIch dien(I serve). The young Prince of Wales, called the Black Prince from the colour of his armour, shared, at any rate, among the foremost, boy as he was (he had just entered his fifteenth year), in the peril and glory of the day. Assisted by the Earls of Warwick and Oxford, he commanded the first division of the little army which bore the brunt of the battle. The king himself remained with the reserve. Pressed by the multitude of the enemy, "they with the prince," says Froissart, "sent a messenger to the king, who was on a little windmill hill. Then the knight said to the king, Sir, the Earl of Warwick and the Earl of Oxford, Sir Reynold Cobham, and other such as be about the prince your son, are fiercely fought withal and are sore handled; wherefore they desire you that you and your battle will come and aid them; for if the Frenchmen increase, as they doubt they will, your son and they shall have much ado. Then the king said, Is my son dead or hurt, or on the earth felled? No, Sir, quoth the knight; but he is hardly matched; wherefore he hath need of your aid. Well, said the king, return to him, and to them that sent you hither, and say to them that they send no more to me for any adventure that falleth, as long as my son is alive; and also say to them that they suffer him this day to win his spurs; for, if God be pleased, I will this journey[13]be his, and the honour thereof, and to them that be about him." The king's answer, when it was brought to them, only gave new life and courage to the heroic combatants. "This Saturday," the old chronicler further writes, "the Englishmen never departed fro their battles for chasing of any man, but kept still their field, and ever defended themself against all such as came to assail them. This battle ended about evensongtime. On this Saturday, when the night was come, and that the Englishmen heard no more noise of the Frenchmen, then they reputed themself to have the victory, and the Frenchmen to be discomfited, slain, and fled away. Then they made great fires, and lighted up torches and candles, because it was very dark. Then the king availed[14]down from the little hill whereas he stood, and of all that day then his helm came never off on his head. Then he went with all his battle to his son the prince, and embraced him in his arms and kissed him, and said, Fair son, God give you good perseverance: ye are my good son: thus ye have acquitted you nobly: ye are worthy to keep a realm. The prince inclined himself to the earth, honouring the king his father. This night they thanked God for their good adventure, and made no boast thereof; for the king would that no man should be proud, or make boast, but every man humbly to thank God." As for Philip of Valois, he had only been able to escape with his life from this disastrous field. "In the evening," says Froissart, "the French king, who had left about him no mo than a threescore persons, one and other, whereof Sir John of Hainault was one, who had remounted once the king, for his horse was slain with an arrow, then he said to the king, Sir, depart hence, for it is time; lese[15]not yourself wilfully; if ye have loss at this time, ye shall recover it again another season. And so he took the king's horse by the bridle, and led him away in a manner per force. Then the king rode till he came to the castle of La Broyes; the gate was closed, because it was by this time dark. Then the king called the captain, who came to the walls, and said, Who is it that calleth there this time of night? Then the king said, Open your gate quickly, for this is the fortune of France. The captain knew that it was the king, and opened the gate, and let down the bridge. Then the king entered, and he had with him but five barons, Sir John of Hainault, Sir Charles of Montmorency, the Lord of Beauvieu, the Lord Daubigny, and the Lordof Montford. The king would not tarry there, but drank and departed thence about midnight; and so rode by such guides as knew the country, till he came in the morning to Amiens, and there he rested."
Within two months after the defeat and rout of the French at Creci, another great victory broke the power of the Scots. As soon as King David found Edward fairly engaged in his continental war, he made preparations for crossing the borders. Setting out from Perth at the head of an army of three thousand men-at-arms, and thirty thousand others mounted on hackneys, he advanced by Edinburgh and Roxburgh, entered Cumberland, took the pile, or castle, of Liddel, and then, burning and wasting as he passed, directed his course into the bishopric. The energetic English king allowed no one of his family to be idle, any more than himself, and seems to have made it a principle to accustom his sons at the earliest possible age to at least the consciousness of the duties of their high position, and the sense if not the actual exercise of authority and power; he had left the nominal guardianship of the kingdom in the hands of his second son Lionel, a boy only eight years old; the actual charge and direction of affairs he had intrusted to his queen, the admirable Philippa. In those days, when the chivalrous spirit was at its height, heroism was the virtue of both sexes, as well as of all classes; a few years before this, the principal military personage that had figured in a war for the possession of the duchy of Bretagne was the famous Jane, Countess de Montfort; while her husband, one of the rival claimants, lay fast bound in a French prison, she took what would have been his place in the command of fortresses, at the head of armies, and in the thick of battles;[16]and now QueenPhilippa was to do the same thing in the absence of Edward. The English force that had been hurriedly assembled to meet the Scots amounted to a body of fifteen or sixteen thousand men, and a considerable part of it was composed of the clergy of the northern counties—the class of persons that could be most easily spared or got at, and quite as ready and as apt for the work to be done as any others. "The queen of England," says Froissart, "who desired to defend her country, came to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and there tarried for her men, who came daily fro all parts. When the Scots knew that the Englishmen assembled at Newcastle, they drew thitherward, and their couriers came running before the town; and at their returning they brent certain small hamlets thereabout, so that the smoke thereof came into the town of Newcastle; some of the Englishmen would a issued out to have fought with them that made the fires, but the captains would not suffer them to issue out." The two armies, however, at last encountered, on the 17th of October, at Nevil's Cross, in the neighbourhood of the city of Durham. On the English side, after the divisions were all drawn up in array—the first under the command of the Bishop of Durham, the second under that of the Archbishop of York, the third under that of the Bishop of London, the fourth under that of the Archbishopof Canterbury, each warlike prelate, however, having a lay lord as his coadjutor—"the queen," Froissart informs us, "went fro battle to battle, desiring them to do their devoir,[17]to defend the honour of her lord the King of England, and, in the name of God, every man to be of good heart and courage, promising them that, to her power, she would remember them as well, or better, as though her lord the king were there personally. Then the queen departed fro them, recommending them to God and to Saint George. Then, anon after, the battles of the Scots began to set forward, and in like wise so did the Englishmen; then the archers began to shoot on both parties; the shots of the Scots endured but a short space, but the archers of England shot fiercely, so that when the battles approached there was a hard battle; they began at nine and endured till noon. The Scots had great axes, sharp and hard, and gave with them many great strokes; howbeit, finally the Englishmen obtained the place and victory." The slaughter was considerable on both sides, but far the greatest on that of the Scots, fifteen thousand of whom, including many of their chief nobility, were left dead on the field. The greatest loss of all, however, was the capture of their young and gallant king. Refusing to fly, he had, after receiving two dangerous wounds from arrows, one of which pierced his head, been dragged or fallen from his horse; but still he fought on; till at last, overpowered by numbers, he was disarmed and carried off by John Copland, a gentleman of Northumberland, who did not, however, secure his prize without a violent struggle, in which the king, deprived of his sword, wounded him with his gauntlet. David Bruce remained in captivity in England for more than ten years.
Meanwhile Edward was engaged abroad in the memorable siege of Calais, the garrison of which, after a blockade of nearly a year, was forced to surrender by famine, on the 4th of August, 1347. All our readers are no doubt familiar with the scene of the appearance in the English camp of Eustace de St. Pierre and his five fellow-townsmen,come to offer themselves, barefoot and bare-headed, and with halters about their necks, as sacrifices to appease the anger of their long-baffled conqueror, in which Queen Philippa again shines forth so nobly. The story rests upon the authority of Froissart, but has no air of improbability or even of much fanciful embellishment. When Sir Walter Manny, we are told, "presented these burgesses to the king, they kneeled down, and held up their hands and said, 'Gentle king, behold here, we six, who were burgesses of Calais, and great merchants, we have brought to you the keys of the town and of the castle, and we submit ourself clearly into your will and pleasure, to save the residue of the people of Calais, who have suffered great pain: Sir, we beseech your grace to have mercy and pity on us through your high nobless.' Then all the earls and barons, and other that were there, wept for pity. The king looked felly on them, for greatly he hated the people of Calais for the great damages and displeasures they had done him on the sea before. Then he commanded their heads to be stricken off. Then every man required the king for mercy, but he would hear no man in that behalf. Then Sir Walter of Manny said, 'Ah, noble king, for God's sake, refrain your courage; ye have the name of sovereign nobless, therefore now do not a thing that should blemish your renown, nor to give cause to some to speak of you villainy; every man will say it is a great cruelty to put to death such honest[18]persons, who by their own wills put themself into your grace to save their country.' Then the king wried away from him, and commanded to send for the hangman, and said, 'They of Calais had caused many of my men to be slain; wherefore these shall die in like wise.' The queen, being great with child, kneeled, down, and sore weeping said, 'Ah! gentle sir, sith I passed the sea in great peril, I have desired nothing of you: therefore now I humbly require[19]you, in the honour of the son of the Virgin Mary, and for the love of me, that ye will take mercy of these six burgesses.' The king beheld the queen, and stood still in a study aspace, and then said, 'Ah, dame, I would ye had been as now in some other place; ye make such request to me that I cannot deny you; wherefore I give them to you to do your pleasure with them.' Then the queen caused them to be brought into her chamber, and made the halters to be taken fro their necks, and caused them to be new clothed, and gave them their dinner at their leisure; and then she gave each of them six nobles, and made them to be brought out of the host in safeguard, and set at their liberty." Calais, thus won, remained an English town for more than two centuries—till it was lost in the reign of Mary, in the year 1558.
The remaining course of the war with France may be very summarily sketched. After the fall of Calais a succession of armistices or truces suspended hostilities for about six years. Meanwhile King Philip had died in 1350, and been succeeded by his eldest son John. By this time Edward had come to perceive how little impression his brilliant but insulated successes had made upon the real strength of his adversary—how little a way—or, rather, no way at all—he had advanced towards the conquest of France by the mere winning of a great battle or two, and the capture and retention of a single town. In the end of the year 1353, therefore, he renewed more formally an offer which he had already made to Philip, of renouncing his claim to the French crown on condition of being acknowledged as sovereign of Guienne, Poitou, and the other territories in France which the English kings had hitherto held as vassals. The negotiations consumed some time, but ended in nothing: several months were then spent in preparations for the renewal of the war; at last, in October, 1355, the Black Prince, who had been for some years intrusted with the government of Guienne, took the field at the head of an army of sixty thousand men, with which, advancing from his capital of Bordeaux, he made a circuit through Armagnac and Languedoc, spreading devastation wherever he went, and laying, it is affirmed, more than five hundred towns and villages in ashes in the space of seven weeks. In the summer of the next year he proceededto repeat the same experiment in a different direction: this time the force with which he set out amounted to only about twelve thousand men, and with these he boldly crossed the Garonne, and penetrated into the heart of France. For some weeks he pursued his destructive course without opposition; but, at last, when making for Poictiers, and within a short distance of that city, he suddenly found himself enveloped by a French army, commanded by King John, more than four times as numerous as his own. Then, on the 19th of September, was fought the battle of Poictiers, making that other name worthy to be associated for ever in story and in song with Creci, of which both the extremity of peril and the glorious deliverance were now more than renewed. The French host was beaten back at all points, and in the end utterly routed, scattered, and annihilated by Prince Edward and his handful of English. Most of the chief nobility of France were either slain or captured: King John himself fell into the hands of the victors. The illustrious captive was treated with noble courtesy both by the Black Prince and by the king his father; but, although the extraordinary fortune of Edward had now placed in his power the persons of the kings of both the countries which he had so long been endeavouring to subdue, it soon appeared that he was still as far from the conquest of either as ever. King David was liberated by a treaty concluded in 1357; and in 1360 peace was made with France by the treaty of Bretigny, in which Edward renounced his claim both to the French crown and to the possession of Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, and Maine, on condition of being acknowledged the full sovereign of Guienne, Poitou, and Ponthieu. This treaty set King John at liberty; but three years after, on finding himself unable to pay the instalments due upon the sum that had been agreed upon for his ransom—three million gold crowns—he honourably returned to his imprisonment; and he died in England, in the palace of the Savoy, London, in the beginning of April, 1364. His eldest son immediately mounted the throne of France as Charles V. Charles, from the commencementof his reign, had betrayed a disposition to extricate himself as soon as an opportunity should occur from the obligations of the treaty of Bretigny, the renunciations stipulated by which had never, in fact, been actually made on either side. Meanwhile the course of circumstances favoured his views. The King of England was no longer the man he had been either in ardour or in energy; his heroic son had also fallen into ill health, the effect of exposure in an expedition, to be lamented on every account, which he had made in the winter of 1366-7 into Spain, to assist Pedro the Cruel in his contest for the throne of Castile with his illegitimate brother Enrique; and much disaffection had been excited both in Poitou and Guienne by the severe exactions of the English government, rendered necessary by the expenses of this expedition, and by the debts incurred in the late war. In the beginning of the year 1369 Charles openly took his ground by summoning the Black Prince, as Duke of Aquitaine, to appear in his court as a vassal, and answer the complaints of the people of that duchy. The most memorable event of the short war that followed was the sad and atrocious massacre by the English prince of the inhabitants of Limoges, the capital of his country of the Limosin, after he had recovered the town, which had a short time previously been taken by, or had given itself up to, the French general, the Duke of Berri. "It was great pity," says Froissart, "to see the men, women, and children that kneeled down on their knees before the prince for mercy, but he was so inflamed with ire that he took no heed to them, so that none was heard, but all put to death as they were met withal, and such as were nothing culpable: there was no pity taken of the poor people, who wrought never no manner of treason, yet they bought it dearer than the great personages, such as had done the evil and trespass. There was not so hard a heart within the city of Limoges, an if he had any remembrance of God, but that wept piteously for the great mischief that they saw before their eyen; for mo than three thousand men, women, and children were slain and beheaded that day. God have mercy ontheir souls! for I trow they were martyrs." Disease by this time seems to have debilitated and perverted the very moral nature of the prince. He was soon after obliged to sheathe his sword, and come home to England, where he lingered, in such debility and suffering as allowed him to take very little actual share in public affairs, although his name remained influential, till his death on the 8th of June, 1376. The war in France, meanwhile, had prospered so ill, that by the year 1374 Edward, who had retained and still used the title of king of that country, had lost all the territory he had ever possessed there, with the exception only of Calais, Bordeaux, and Bayonne, and a few detached localities between those two last-named towns. No peace, however, was ever made while Edward lived. After the death of the Black Prince the chief ascendancy in the government was acquired by his younger brother John of Gaunt (that is, Ghent, the place of his birth), Duke of Lancaster. The king himself, who had lost Queen Philippa in 1369, had, in the weakness of old age, sunk under the dominion of a female favourite, Alice Perrers or Piers. She was a married woman, and had been lady of the bedchamber to Queen Philippa; and she is said to have been eminently distinguished by her wit and talent, as well as by her beauty, an influence to which Edward had all his life been extremely sensible, although in his better days he had at least never allowed it to master the soldier or the king. This artful woman, however, soon acquired so much power over him, and abused it with so much insolence, that shortly before the death of the Black Prince the parliament had passed an ordinance declaring that, whereas complaint had been made before the king that some women had pursued causes and actions in the king's courts by way of maintainance, and for hire and reward, which thing displeased the king, the king forbade that any woman should do it hereafter, "and in particular Alice Perrers, under the penalty of forfeiting all that the said Alice can forfeit, and of being banished out of the realm." Alice, notwithstanding, still remained about the king's person;while Edward, wasting with disease, lay, to quote the words of Stow, "neglecting the benefit of time that God had given him, like as he should never have died; trusting the fond fables of the oft-named Alice when she affirmed he should recover his health, so that at that time he talked rather of hawking and hunting than of any thing that pertained to the saving of his soul; only he granted pardon of death for offences throughout his kingdom to the inhabitants." "Being now," continues this old chronicler, "suddenly taken with the day of his death, he began to have manifest signs thereof; what Alice Piers then did any man may judge, although we set them not down in writing; for, as soon as she saw the king had set foot within death's door, she bethought her of flight; yet before she went, that all men might perceive that she loved not the king for himself, but for that which was his, she took the rings from his fingers which for the royalty of his majesty he was wont to wear. Thus yielding him such thanks for his benefits, she bade him adieu, and so withdrew herself from him. The king, keeping thus at the point of death, was left not only of her the said Alice Piers, but of other the knights and esquires, who had served him, allured more with his gifts than his love. Amongst a thousand, there was only present at that time a certain priest (other of his folks applying the spoil of what they could lay hands on), who, lamenting the king's misery, and inwardly touched with grief of heart for that, amongst so many counsellors which he had, there was none that would minister to him the word of life, came boldly unto him, and admonished him to lift up the eyes as well of his body as of his heart unto God, and with sighs to ask mercy of him, whose majesty he well knew he had grievously offended; whereupon the king, listening to the words of the priest, although he had a little before wanted the use of his tongue, yet then taking strength to him, seemed to speak what was in his mind; and then, what for weakness of his body, contrition of his heart, and sobbing for his sins, his voice and speech failed him, and, scarce half pronouncing the word Jesu, he with this last word madean end of his speech, and yielded up the ghost." He died at Richmond in Surrey (then called Shine or Sheen), about seven o'clock on the evening of Sunday the 21st of June, 1377; leaving the throne to his grandson, Richard II., son of Edward the Black Prince, by his wife Joan, called the Fair Maid of Kent, the daughter of his great uncle Edmund, Earl of Kent, and previously the wife of Thomas Holland, who in her right had assumed the title of Earl of Kent in 1360, but died in the end of the same year, upon which his widow immediately gave her hand to the Prince of Wales.
The children borne to Edward III. by his wife Queen Philippa were, Edward the Black Prince, in 1330; Isabel, who became the wife of Ingelram de Coucy, in 1332; Joan de la Tour, in 1335; William of Hatfield, in 1336; Lionel, afterwards Duke of Clarence, in 1338; Blanche de la Tour, who died in childhood in 1340; John of Ghent, afterwards Duke of Lancaster, in 1340; Edmund, afterwards Duke of York, in 1341; Mary, afterwards Duchess of Bretagne, probably in 1342; Margaret, afterwards Countess of Pembroke, in 1346; William, in 1349; and Thomas, afterwards Duke of Gloucester, in 1355.
It has been observed, in regard to Edward III., by Sir James Mackintosh, that "though his victories left few lasting acquisitions, yet they surrounded the name of his country with a lustre which produced strength and safety; which perhaps also gave a loftier tone to the feelings of England, and a more vigorous activity to her faculties." "During a reign of fifty years," it is added, "Edward III. issued writs of summons, which are extant to this day, to assemble seventy parliaments or great councils: he thus engaged the pride and passions of the parliament and the people so deeply in support of his projects of aggrandisement, that they became his zealous and enthusiastic followers. His ambition was caught by the nation, and men of the humblest station became proud of his brilliant victories. To form and keep up this state of public temper was the mainspring of his domestic administration, and satisfactorily explains theinternal tranquillity of England during the forty years of his effective reign. It was the natural consequence of so long and watchful a pursuit of popularity, that most grievances were redressed as soon as felt, that parliamentary authority was yearly strengthened by exercise, and that the minds of the turbulent barons were exclusively turned towards a share in their sovereign's glory. Quiet at home was partly the fruit of fame abroad."
WICLIFFE
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Beyond that of most of our great men, has the fame of Wiclif[20]undergone fierce dispute within the last few years. From regarding him with reverence as "the Morning Star of the Reformation," it has come to be more than questioned whether he was a reformer at all, or whether a certain superior craft was not the motive that incited him throughout his career. It will be convenient to leave the consideration of this matter till we have looked at the leading events of his life, when we shall be better prepared to estimate his character. To assume a controversial tone—as it would be scarcely possible to avoid doing if we entered into the discussion of the various views and statements that have been put forth respecting him—is not at all our intention. Wehave examined the several statements; we shall be content with expressing our own opinions.
There is some uncertainty about both the year and the place of John Wiclif's birth: the place which seems most probable, however, is a little village pleasantly situated near the junction of the rivers Greta and Tees, about six miles from Richmond in Yorkshire; the year 1324. What is known of his life commences with the year 1340, when he entered as a commoner at Queen's College, Oxford, then newly founded: his name is in the list of the first scholars. From Queen's he soon removed to Merton College, at that time highest in repute at the University; where he greatly distinguished himself. The theology taught at this period was that of the schoolmen, who, as Bacon afterwards said of them, "did, out of no great quantity of matter, spin out those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books...admirable indeed for the fineness of the thread, but of no substance or profit." In this scholastic discipline Wiclif became so deeply versed, that his contemporary Knighton, a bitter enemy and a competent judge, declared he was without an equal (in scholasticis disciplinis incomparabilis.) Nor was he skilled in this alone; he appears to have pursued, with almost equal success, the whole round of moral, philosophical, and legal studies as then taught. According to the standard of his time he was an eminently learned man.
The earliest of Wiclif's publications, so far as is known, was written in 1356; it was first printed in 1840. The work itself does not occupy more than fourteen small pages, and is of little value on its own account, but deserving attention, as Wiclif's first work, written when he was thirty-two years old, a period in a man's life when his character is fixed and his tone of thought determined, and when consequently the opinions he has formed will almost certainly colour the actions of the remainder of his life. We may therefore spend a few minutes in looking at this production and at the circumstances which called it forth. In 1349 a fearful pestilence occurred in England. It had marched slowly from the east,ravaging every country it passed through. Nearly the whole of Europe was visited by it. The voice of the terrified nations affirmed that only a tithe of the human race had escaped; that all children born since it were deficient in the number of their teeth; that even the brute creation was not spared, their corpses being so many as to fill the air with a horrible taint. So severe indeed was the visitation, that, in this country at least, it long served as an epoch from which legal documents were dated. The Scriptures told that pestilence had of old been the scourge wherewith an offended God had punished the sins of the nations; and the people devoutly believed that this had been sent for such a purpose. The plague ceased, but sober men saw with sorrow that the rulers and the priests had not heeded the heavenly warning, and to the faithful the wickedness that stalked abroad seemed like an awful defiance of the divine power. Under such circumstances and prompted by some such feelings was it that Wiclif wrote 'The Last Age of the Church.' Taking for his guide the prophecies of Abbot Joachim, a mystic who lived in the twelfth century, and combining therewith a cabalistic computation of the Scriptural prophecies, and turning also to the verses of the Sybil, he thought the end of the world was at hand, and announced its speedy dissolution. He was mistaken, and lived to see that he was mistaken. But although his prophecy failed, there is much in the tract that shows the man as he then was, and throws a bright light on his future career. It proves that he had thus early come to have identified in his mind religion with the whole life of man, to look upon it as reaching to all his duties and employments, that he, indeed, regarded it as the animating principle of the whole of the political and social institutions. It proves that he had cast an anxious look around him, and, dissatisfied with the state of the world, he was more dissatisfied with the ministers of religion, whom he boldly and broadly charges with a disregard of their higher functions, and an indulgence in a greedy and unholy rapacity. It may in a word be said, that the object of the tract is to declare the troubles thatwill fall upon the church and the world, on account of the simony of the priests, and the encroachments and exactions of the papal power.
These feelings were brought out more strongly a few years later. In 1360 he engaged in what a recent historian calls "a fierce but ridiculous controversy with the different orders of friars." To the stern moral dignity of Wiclif the controversy did not seem a ridiculous one, and indeed it hardly seems to us more ridiculous than that of Luther with Tetzel and the Dominicans. These friars had been established in England for more than a century, and had obtained considerable influence. Although vowing poverty, they had acquired great wealth; under the guise of sanctity they had concealed, it was affirmed, gross depravity. They had almost from the first been at enmity with the secular clergy, and were especially obnoxious to the University of Oxford. Before Wiclif, they met with a steady opponent in Fitz-Ralph, chancellor of Oxford, and afterwards Bishop of Armagh, who carried his charges against them to the papal throne. Fitz-Ralph died in 1360, from which time Wiclif pursued the war fiercely, and only ceased to prosecute it with his life. Of the works he produced against them at this period it is not certain that any remain. Two pieces, one which he presented to the court of Richard II., and the other which seems to have been written a year or two before his death, were printed by Dr. James in 1608, and serve to show the nature of his quarrel. It was not, as Dr. Lingard implies, merely a charge against them for depending upon alms, which Wiclif asserted to be repugnant to the Gospel; though upon that he strongly insisted, but rather that they misled the unwary, by holding out to them false hopes of pardon, and by their untrue representations obtained their property from them, leading them to trust to these worthless pardons thus purchased by money, instead of setting before them the great Gospel truth. He charges them with doing this that they might obtain the wealth of their dupes. They become, he says in his bitter and plain-spoken language, "confessors, preachers, and rulerscommonly of all men, and they teachen them not their foul sins, for winning of stinking muck and lusts of their own bellies, that is foul worm's meat and a sack of dirt." And elsewhere, "St. James directs to visit the fatherless and motherless children, and widows in their tribulation, and to keep man unfouled from the world, that is, from pride, covetise, and vanities. But friars do all the contrary, for they visiten rich men, and by hypocrisy getten falsely their alms, and withdraw from poor men; but they visiten rich widows for their muck, and maken them to be buried at the Friars, but poor men come not in there." This was Wiclif's quarrel, and this continued to be his quarrel with them, that while intent only on driving a lucrative and disgraceful trade, they were deceiving the souls of those who trusted to them: no ridiculous controversy that, to a man of Wiclif's mind! As he said, so doubtless he thought—"Friars be worse enemies and slayers of man's soul, than is the cruel fiend of hell by himself. For they under the habit of holiness lead men and nourish them in sin, and be special helpers of the fiend to strangle men's souls." It is not our business to palliate the violence of Wiclifs language, but only to represent his feelings, and a cold statement in the calm phraseology of our day would poorly express the vehemence of his indignation. These words were not probably written till long afterwards, but these were no doubt his sentiments then. His controversy with the friars marks the commencement of his career as a reformer.
The year following that in which he engaged in this controversy he was chosen master of Baliol College, and presented to the living of Fillingham, a valuable benefice in the diocese of Lincoln. Four years afterwards he was appointed warden of Canterbury Hall, by Archbishop Islip, the founder of that college.[21]Originally the archbishop had appointed Woodhall, a friar, to be warden, and had founded eleven scholarships, three to be held by monks, and eight by clerks, or secular clergymen. At this time the dispute between these orders was at its height, and the peace and security of the infant establishment were soon disturbed by the bickerings of its inmates. To such a length were they carried, that Islip felt himself called upon to interfere, and he determined to prevent the probability of a recurrence of the quarrel by removing the monks, and substituting for them seculars. Islip did not live long after this change; and, on the succession of Langham to the vacant see, Woodhall appealed to him, as visitor of Canterbury Hall, to remove Wiclif, who, he affirmed, had procured his appointment at a time when Islip was incapable from sickness of judging aright. He was successful; but Wiclif in his turn appealed from the new archbishop to the pope; his holiness, however, ratified the decision of Langham, but not till after a delay of nearly four years. Meanwhile Wiclif had done nothing to propitiate the papal power, but he had done some things to offend it. In 1365 Urban V. renewed the papal claim to a domination over the sovereignty of England, which had been conceded to the holy see by John; and he demanded the payment of an annual tribute of a thousand marks, together with the arrears of the last thirty years. Edward III. was little disposed either to acknowledge his subjection or to pay the money. He submitted the claim of the pontiff to his parliament, which on the next day, and without dissent from laymen or clergy, declared his submission to the pope to be beyond the power of any sovereign to render, and engaged,if the demand were persisted in, to oppose it with the whole power of the nation. Urban was intimidated by an opposition so much more resolute than he expected. A monk, however, published a tract, in which he reasserted the right of the pontiff to the tribute, and ventured to declare, that England was justly forfeit on account of the non-payment of it; and hence he presumed to assert that the clergy were absolved from their subjection to the English king. To controvert his argument he challenged Wiclif by name. The reformer was not the man to submit quietly to such a challenge. He speedily replied to it, though, as he declared, he was not ignorant that the object of his antagonist was to involve him in difficulties with the pope, and to obtain for himself, and his order, the papal favour. Wiclif gives a statement of the debate in parliament, and of the reasons there adduced against the grant; and then, in his own name, shows that the papal claim, and the grant on which it was founded, were dishonest, and that therefore, as the conditions were bad, the consequences that were asserted to result logically from them were bad also. Wiclif in this tract calls himself the king's chaplain, and it is a proof of the eminence to which he had attained, that he should be singled out for this encounter, unless it arose from his prior controversy.
In 1368, before the dispute respecting the wardenship of Canterbury Hall was determined, Wiclif exchanged the rectory of Fillingham for that of Ludgershall, also in the diocese of Lincoln. After the award of the pontiff was received, Woodhall remained two years before he could obtain the king's confirmation, which was, it is said, then only procured by a bribe of two hundred marks. But another and more important dignity was at this time conferred upon Wiclif by the University. In 1372 he was elected Professor of Theology, and at the same time he took the degree of D.D. This is a most important period in his life. It is evident that he had already attained a high position in the esteem of those who were most competent to judge of his abilities, but it is probable that his election to this office may have arisen from theirgratitude for his services in opposition to the growing influence and power of the monks, and his fervid declaration against the continuous encroachment of the pope. But if it were for these less immediatelyreligiousservices that he received the appointment of professor of divinity, it is not to be doubted but, in accordance with his repeatedly declared sentiments of the responsibility of the ministers of religion, he would address himself devoutly to the important duties of the office he had undertaken. He appears, indeed, from this time to have more earnestly and more rigorously set himself to the study of the Scriptures. In those days the Scriptures were not unknown to the teachers of religion, as has been sometimes asserted, but the knowledge of them does not appear to have been general or exact. Wiclif's quotations from them were now more frequent; his expositions of them always exhibited them as the ultimate rule. It is probable that from this time we may date the establishment of his main doctrinal views, and also his departure from the received theology. It is not possible in our brief space to extract from the works that appear to belong to this period, but we may say that, if they have been correctly dated, he now distinctly set forth those truths which caused him to be branded as a heretic. His lectures on the Decalogue afford striking proofs of the clearness and vigour of his powers, and exhibit his leading views of religion with much distinctness. These views were very different from those generally received, and must have excited much surprise—much enmity, and much deep attachment. As we shall have to speak of his opinions more hereafter, we may conveniently leave any further remarks upon them for the present.
The papal claims occupied much of the attention of Edward III., especially in the latter part of his reign. An embassy had been sent to the pope, Gregory XI., in 1373, respecting the appointment of bishops, the reservation of benefices, and other matters in which Edward and his parliament declared that the pontiff had largely encroached on the ancient customs. Some partial concessions were made, but the English king was farfrom being satisfied with the extent of them, and it was resolved in 1374 to send another embassy. The name of Wiclif stands second on the list of commissioners, the first name being that of the Bishop of Bangor, who had been employed in the previous negotiation; with them were united five other persons. The conference was held at Bruges, where the papal nuncios met them. Wiclif appears to have stayed in this city from August, 1374, till July, 1376. What results were obtained are not exactly known. For Wiclif himself the consequences were probably of much importance. At this time, it will be remembered, the pope's residence was at Avignon, and the papal court had attained to a rather bad eminence. It is not probable that, with his strong feelings of the responsibility of the office of a minister of religion, Wiclif would become more attached to the dignitaries of the church from the closer intercourse he would now have with them. His visit to Bruges may have produced as strong an impression on his mind as was wrought on that of Luther by his journey to Rome. In fact, according to Dr. Vaughan, "his rebukes, which had hitherto been directed toward the head of the church but distantly and by implication, are applied in that quarter, soon after this time, with unsparing severity."
During his absence at Bruges the king marked his satisfaction with his conduct, by conferring on him the rectory of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, and a prebendal stall in the collegiate church of Westbury, in the diocese of Worcester. The principal commissioner, on the other hand, received his reward from the pope, who translated him to the see of Hereford, and a few years after to that of St. David's. A few months only elapsed after the return of Wiclif, when he was summoned to appear before a convocation to answer the charge of holding heretical doctrines. What was the exact nature of the heresies does not appear; they were probably not definitely stated, owing to a strange scene that occurred. The convocation was held at St. Paul's, February 19, 1377, and that edifice was crowded by the populace, as well as by the clergy, long before the reformer made his appearance.When he arrived it was between two of the most powerful nobles in the land, one the king's eldest surviving son, the celebrated John of Gaunt, the other Lord Percy, the Lord Marshal of England. With Gaunt Wiclif had probably become acquainted at Bruges, for, during his stay there, the duke had visited that city, as ambassador, to conduct some negotiations with the minister of the French monarch; and no doubt Wiclif, from his official position, would have some intercourse with him. The support of the duke and of Lord Percy arose most likely from political rather than religious motives. The dignity of these nobles scarcely sufficed to procure an approach through the crowd to Courtney, bishop of London, who presided on the occasion. Some slight tumult occurred in making their way, which, being perceived by the bishop, he called out "Lord Percy, if I had known beforehand what masteries you would have kept in the church, I would have stopt you out from coming hither." To this rough salutation the Duke of Lancaster replied, "He shall keep such masteries here, though you say nay." Percy desired Wiclif "to sit down, as he had many things to answer to, and needed to repose himself;" but the bishop declared it to be unreasonable that one cited before his ordinary should sit, and peremptorily affirmed that "he must and should stand." Gaunt replied that Percy's motion was but reasonable, and continued, "As for you, my Lord Bishop, who are grown so proud and arrogant, I will bring down the pride not only of you, but of all the prelacy in England." The bishop told him to "do his worst;" and after some further bickering, the duke vowed that sooner than submit to such words he would "pluck the bishop by the hair out of the church." The bystanders had been growing excited by these outrageous proceedings; and now, fancying the duke would proceed to violent acts, they rose in a body for their bishop, and the duke and his followers were compelled to a speedy flight. The Londoners, not content with driving the duke and his friends from the church, assembled in a tumultuous mob and proceeded to his palace, but he had made his escape, and they contentedthemselves with reversing his arms. They then proceeded to the house of Lord Percy, which they damaged, but they did not succeed in finding its owner: an unlucky priest, however, whom they found, and imagined to be Percy in an assumed habit, they hung. The mayor and aldermen were afterwards removed from their offices for not suppressing the riot, but none of the rioters appear to have been punished. It does not seem that Wiclif took any part in these discreditable proceedings, nor that the mob attempted to injure him. Of course, he would be far more obnoxious than ever to his opponents, and from this period they appear to have pursued him with more determined hate.
After this meeting Wiclif devoted himself to his parochial duties, but in a few months he was summoned from them to answer new charges. Probably some of his more inveterate enemies had forwarded to Rome statements of his heterodox notions, for on the 22nd of May, 1377, the pope issued four bulls against him, addressed respectively to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, and the University of Oxford, and with these was sent a letter to the king, stating that information had been received from creditable persons that John Wiclif, rector of Lutterworth, and professor of theology, had been actively engaged in propagating certain detestable and erroneous notions utterly subversive of the church. These bulls authorise the incarceration of Wiclif, and his examination upon the various matters stated: the results of the examination were to be transmitted to the pope for his determination. The charges preferred are probably nearly similar to those that would have been brought forward at the convocation but for the unexpected disturbances. These charges, or "conclusions" as they are called, show that the pontiff was most moved by their appearing to question his pre-eminence. They state that Wiclif denied the political supremacy of the pope, and asserted that the whole race of men agreeing had not power to ordain such supremacy—that it was beyond the power of God himself to confer it. That he denied the efficacy alike of benediction and of excommunicationassumed by priests; that absolutions are valueless except as they agree with the law of God; and that the spiritual power of the ministers of religion does not differ in degree. These bulls vary only in trifling particulars. They impress alike on all to whom they are sent the urgent necessity of extirpating such detestable heresies, which they liken to those of Ganduno and Marcillus, condemned fifty years before by Pope John XXII. These men opposed the papal see on political grounds; and it is plain from the tone of the bulls that it was the attack on his temporal authority that disconcerted Gregory. Before these documents could arrive Edward III. had ceased to live, and his decease afforded Wiclif a little breathing time. The other parties to whom they were addressed did not take any public proceedings in connexion with them till several months had elapsed. The University of Oxford seriously demurred at receiving the bull, and, when they had received it, took no steps for furthering the object of it. The Archbishop of Canterbury, however, had no such scruples; he addressed a letter to the Chancellor of Oxford, directing him to make inquiries respecting the errors referred to in the papal mandate, and to forward to him the result of his investigations, with his own judgment thereon, sealed with the University seal: he also directs him to cite Wiclif to appear at St. Paul's to answer the charges, on the thirtieth court-day from the 18th of December, 1377. Wiclif appeared not at St. Paul's, but at Lambeth; but the result was not more hurtful to him than on the previous occasion. Gaunt was no longer supreme in the court, but the reformer had now another friend there. The Dowager-Princess of Wales, the king's mother, at this time possessed much influence, and she used it on this occasion on Wiclif's behalf. The Londoners, too, appear to have been now as much opposed to the bishops as they had before been to Wiclif's friends. They attended, and, by their clamours against the proceedings, created much confusion; and before the tumult could be appeased, a messenger from the princess commanded the bishops to abstain from any decision injurious toWiclif; they, as Walsingham indignantly says, "became soft as oil in their speech; so were they stricken with fear, you would think them as a man who hears not, or one in whose mouth are no reproofs." Before this convocation was held Wiclif had circulated an answer to the papal "conclusions;" which, somewhat altered or corrected, he put in at his trial. These modifications, and his answers or explanations to the "conclusions," have been declared to be "quibbles and evasions unworthy of a sensible or of an honest man." But the proofs adduced by the reverend historian, especially as coming from one so learned in the theology of the schools, are strangely inadequate to sustain so grave a charge. The explanations are undoubtedly strained, but the conclusions are strained too, and the whole bears the appearance of a scholastic wrangle. It would not be worth while to examine these answers here, could we afford the space, but we must repeat that to us they appear anything but evasive, although not consistent with our modes of reasoning. It does not appear that Wiclif had really expressed his opinions in anything like the form they bear in the pope's mandate; they were "conclusions" gathered out of his writings. In judging Wiclif in this matter it should not be forgotten either, that the only authority for the paper ascribed to him is Walsingham, who was most unfriendly to him, and it may be not literally exact. Wiclif concludes his paper by assuring his judges that he is a true son of the church; that he has not advanced any opinions without warrant from Scripture and the writings of holy doctors, as he is ready to show; but that he is most willing to retract whatever can be proved to be erroneous. The answers were admitted as sufficient by the bishops, and he was dismissed with a warning to avoid in future such questionable matters. By Wiclif the result was considered as a triumph, and the warning disregarded. He was immediately afterwards attacked on the subject of the papal infallibility by an anonymous writer whom he calls a "Motley divine" (Mixtus theologus), who appears to have been not a little startled by Wiclif's daring, and inconsequence to have thought it necessary to reassert the authority and infallibility of the pontiff in the strongest terms. Among other things he declared, according to Wiclif, that as the pope could not commit mortal sin, whatever he ordained must be just. To which Wiclif replied, that if so, he might remove any book from the Scripture, and introduce any novelty in its place; and thus, making the very Scripture heresy, establish heresy in its stead. From this Wiclif advances to more direct and stronger attacks on a power so enormous and so capable of abuse, and urges the more influential classes to cast off so intolerable a thraldom. He attacks with equal vigour his other positions, but the full swell of his indignation is reserved for the impious declaration that the pope and clergy could as fully absolve from sin as the Almighty himself. It is evident that he had now arrived at the point when he was prepared to oppose to the utmost the papal power.
That this power would soon have been brought to bear upon him, if Gregory had lived, is not to be doubted, but he was saved by the breaking out of the "Great Schism of the West." Pope Gregory XI. died on the 27th of March, 1378, and while the Italian cardinals elected and obeyed Urban VI., those attached to the interests of France chose Clement VII. Urban was acknowledged in England, but he had too much employment at home to prosecute an English heretic. For the next three years, therefore, Wiclif was left undisturbed. He spent most part of this time at Lutterworth, diligently pursuing the course he had already commenced.
The comparative tranquillity in which he now found himself, he left not unimproved. He had now resolutely bent the whole of his energy against the doctrine of the pope's infallibility, and he gladly seized the opportunity of exhibiting the absurdity of the tenet, afforded by the rival claimants. His 'Schism of the Popes,' which he now published, is a keen piece of controversy, and from the circumstances must have been very effective at the time it was produced. All reserve is now cast aside in his attacks on the rival heads of the church, whom hecontrasts with Christ and his apostles, and assimilates to Simon Magus.
From this time it may be said that he left the consideration of the political bearings of the papal usurpation, and directed his attention to the religious aspect of it. Henceforth, indeed, his writings and teaching were almost entirely religious. Very much of the confusion respecting Wiclif's opinions at various periods, and the support they gained for him from different parties of influence in the country, has arisen from inattention to the ground on which he received that support. The commencement of his career was signalized by his attacks on the mendicant friars. At that time they were opposed, as they had long been, as interlopers by the secular clergy, and Wiclif was hailed as a powerful champion by them and by the University of Oxford. Their admiration of him arose frompartyconsiderations, though his dislike to the friars rested on a far wider basis. During the greater part of the reign of Edward III. the king and the parliament were engaged in a determined struggle against papal encroachments. It was prolonged through the whole of his reign and the greater part of the reign of his successor, before it terminated successfully for the English monarch. When so learned and able a clergyman stepped forth as an opponent of the pope's supremacy, it is not surprising that he should be received with welcome, and be firmly upheld by the sovereign and his advisers, so long as he confined himself to thepoliticalbearings of the subject; and if he exceeded those limits a little, it would not in such an age be taken much heed of. Again, when with a more earnest zeal he set his face against the corruptions of the clergy of all ranks—when he denounced as hirelings such as sought after "filthy lucre" and neglected the spiritual advancement of their charges, and pronounced them the most desperate of sinners, backed as his animadversions were by the purity and even austerity of his own life—he would be sure to obtain the suffrages of serious men of all classes, who would bitterly regret the contradiction between the lives and the profession ofsuch priests. Nor is this an imaginary sketch. It appears to have been exactly the course of events in his life and teaching. His doctrinal views were either not propagated, or they did not attract much attention till the latter part of his life. Then a devoted band rallied round him, and, when those who had used him for temporary purposes had cast him off, they clung to him with an ever growing intensity of affection.
Nothing is more manifest in tracing his opinions than the increasing attention he gave to the Scriptures. In his last years they were the test to which he brought every doctrine, almost every opinion, or matter of practice. As his regard for the Scriptures increased, his anxiety to impart a knowledge of them to others increased also. At this time, of course, the version used in the church was the Latin Vulgate. There had been at various times portions of the Old and New Testament translated into the Saxon and English languages, but no complete translation had, it is probable, been made. Wiclif resolved to enable his countrymen to read the Word of God in their own tongue—a noble resolution nobly performed. Aided no doubt by some of the learned disciples who now surrounded him, he diligently commenced his undertaking, and in due time completed it. Before the invention of printing the publication of a book was a very different matter to what it now is. The only mode of making known the contents of a work then was by transcribing and circulating many copies, and this was the way in which Wiclif published his Bible. That it was diligently circulated there can be no question—from the number of copies of it remaining; and from the certainty that he would be anxious to diffuse as widely as possible the authority to which he so constantly appealed, and on the acknowledgment of which the acceptance of his views depended.[22]
Wiclif's version was not made from the original Greek, but from the Vulgate, of which it is a faithful representation.The language is firm and nervous, and was no doubt perfectly intelligible at the time it was written. But nearly five centuries have passed since then, and many changes have taken place in our English. There is however, even now, little difficulty in understanding it, if the uncouth spelling be disregarded, and it is read with the pronunciation of the northern counties, as we have ascertained in several trials with different listeners. The New Testament has been three times printed: by the Rev. J. Lewis, the author of his Life, in 1731; by the Rev. H. H. Baber, in 1810; and again, and more carefully, in Bagster's 'Hexapla,' 1841. This last work contains the six principal English translations from that of Wiclif to the Authorized Version; and it is interesting to trace the influence of Wiclif's on all the succeeding versions. Most who examine them in this work, as they stand side by side, will agree with Professor Blunt, that "on comparing it with the authorized version of King James, it will be found that the latter was hammered on Wiclif's anvil." Besides its vast importance in a higher point of view, there can be no doubt that Wiclif's translation of the Scriptures did very much to fix our language. Except Mandeville's 'Travels,' it was the first English prose work of any importance. Wiclif's Old Testament has never been printed—it has been spoken of for some years as in preparation for printing at the Clarendon Press.