John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers/Chapter 18
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE WORK THAT LIVED.
HE story of Wyclif's life would not be complete if it did not take into account the effect of his work on those who came after him, and the strength of the links with which he bound himself to posterity. We have seen how he was allied in his intellectual origin to the Schoolmen and the earlier Fathers of the Church; it is right that we should ask ourselves what was the measure of the return which he made to humanity for the influences under which he came to maturity. We have watched him, in the spring-time of the Modern Ages, sowing the seed of a new faith and a new devotion, whereof he must have seen for himself, before he died, the first green blades of a harvest that was to cover the land. Yet it is certain that the history of the Anglican Reformation has often been told with less than adequate reference to the ideas and work of Wyclif, and to the first of that historic series of religious movements in Oxford which, perhaps once in every century, have pricked the conscience and remodelled the creed of England.
It may help us to form our final estimate of the man whose career we have been following, to gauge his strength and to understand his dynamic force, if we place ourselves for a moment at a Continental and Roman point of view, and look at Wyclif as he is regarded to-day by some of the more learned, moderate, and perhaps unprejudiced writers of the Church of Rome.
"The History of the Popes," by Prof. Ludwig Pastor, which is recommended in a special brief by Leo XIII., and has been translated into English by Mr. Antrobus, a member of the Brompton Oratory, is a work of great research, containing much that is new to the historical student; and it is so far impartial that it frankly condemns many of the personal acts of Gregory XI., and his successors at Rome, especially during the Papal Schism. The German historian reflects the settled opinion of Roman Catholic writers when he says that "the errors of the Apocalyptics and the Waldenses, of Marsiglio, Ockham, and others, were all concentrated in Wyclif's sect." John Huss, he says again, "was not merely much influenced, but absolutely dominated by these ideas. Recent investigations have furnished incontestable evidence that, in the matter of doctrine, Huss owed everything to Wyclif."
We have seen how it happened that the preachers and scholars of Bohemia learned and adopted the views of the English Reformer, and how the torch of free inquiry was passed over from the hands of Oxford to those of Prague. History is clear enough about the succession of ideas from Wyclif onward, but it would be difficult to show the descent of the scholastic and Wycliffite innovations from the Albigensian heresies, except on the principle of post hoc ergo propter hoc. If the conclusions of Wyclif involved all those of the Vaudois, why not also those of the Arian Visigoths, and all the errors which had at any time germinated in that hotbed of religious crudities, the land of Languedoc? If the facts of transference between England and the continent had been the converse of what we know them to have been, and if Wyclif had taken his ideas from Bohemia, instead of giving his ideas to Bohemia, there would have been more ground for this theory of Waldensian origin. Unquestionably the Waldensian ideas were not obliterated by the Inquisition of Dominic and the crusade of Innocent III., but spread themselves to the eastward in Bavaria and Austria, and were found re-asserting themselves with inextinguishable energy throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Prof. Pastor himself, referring to the disastrous time of the great Schism, says: "It was not only in Southern Germany and the Rhine country, the two centres of Mediaeval heresy, that a great proportion of the population had embraced the Waldensian doctrine; it had also made its way into the north and the furthest east of the empire. Waldensian congregations were to be found in Thuringia, the March of Brandenberg, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Pomerania, Prussia, and Poland."
There is no inducement to deny that some of the ideas of Pierre de Vaud, like some of the ideas of Marsiglio and Ockham, were contributory to the body of independent thought into which Wyclif would be initiated at Oxford in his early manhood. We have seen that Archbishop Langham had thought it necessary to remonstrate with the holders of unsound doctrine at the University when Wyclif was not much over forty-five years of age, and that this doctrine was by no means on all points identical with the conclusions taught by Wyclif ten or twelve years later. How much (if anything) these earlier divagations owed to the Waldensians it is impossible to say, for the inquiry into their character has not been worked out with sufficient detail. If the censors who are bound to begin by regarding Wyclif as a heretic, instead of a restorer of truths which had previously been obscured, mean no more than that some things which he taught had been held on the Continent before he was born, we can readily agree with them.
The point is important, because there are some who have attempted to make Wyclif responsible for all the acts committed by Protestant combatants in the fifteenth century, with about as much reason as is displayed in the charge that he fomented the revolt of the peasants in England. The Czechs and the Germans must be held responsible for their own religious wars; and assuredly there is enough to account for the fact and for the bitterness of these wars without attributing them in any measure to the imported seditions of the Oxford professor. Wyclif did not even seduce the people of Bohemia and Germany from their spiritual obedience and orthodoxy. They were Waldensians or Beghards before they had heard his name. They were heretics, and well on the way to being rebels, before the Church of Rome began to turn against herself the fatal weapon of her own corruption. "Too little attention," to cite Professor Pastor once more, "has hitherto been bestowed on the revolutionary spirit of hatred of the Church and the clergy, which had taken hold of the masses in different parts of Germany. Together with the revolt against the Church, a social revolution was openly advocated. A chronicler, writing at Mayence in the year 1401, declared that the cry of 'Death to the Priests' which had long been whispered in secret, was now the watchword of the day."
It is evident that, both on the Continent and in England, these two revolutions were proceeding side by side, and that, although they assisted each other, they' were due to different predisposing causes. That they should have been confounded together by the authorities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was no more than natural; and it would have been strange if the champions of orthodoxy had not availed themselves of every opportunity of impressing upon temporal rulers and magnates that their interests were attacked by the teachers of heresy. The papal legates in the fifteenth century, adopting the language of popes and cardinals, invariably preached the extermination of heretics on the ground that they undermined all authority, that they would rob not merely the Church but also the Kings and the nobles, that they encouraged the refusal of taxes and other dues to rulers who could not stand a test of morality, and that their doctrines would soon reduce the wealthy to beggary and the State to anarchy. If there had not been at the same time an internecine war of pope against pope, bishop against bishop, and priest against priest, this dead set against the heretics in every country would have been far more effectual. As it was, the rulers of the earth were filled with panic, and the persistence of the new ideas was maintained in spite of every effort to stamp them out.
Historians of the Roman Church have recognised the magnitude of the disaster which fell upon Christendom at the time of the Schism, though perhaps they have not always seen it in its true proportions. The demoralisation consequent on the "Babylonian Captivity," and on the return of Gregory to Rome, contributed not a little, as we have seen, to the immunity of Wyclif, and enabled him to put forth his plea for reform, from his vantage-ground of Oxford, with an authority and a deliberation which he could not otherwise have hoped for. If Rome had been free and unfettered, it is urged by her historians, she would have nipped such heresy as Wyclif's in the bud; the tide of "rationalism" might have been completely turned, and the unity of the Church might never have been broken. No doubt there would have been a notable difference in the Christian world if Pope Boniface had never given himself away in his quarrel with Philip of France; if the captive popes at Avignon had had the courage to confine themselves to the spiritual sphere, and to abandon their secular ambitions; if Gregory had not hurried back to the seething intrigues of Rome, against the judgment of his cardinals, and under the patronage of the well-meaning but irresponsible nun, Catherine of Siena. The unity of the Church might indeed have been preserved; and if we could suppose it probable, or even possible, that this might have been done by a spontaneous reform of abuses from within—by the expulsion of strained dogma and depraved morals without forcing saintly men like John Wyclif into the position of heretics—it is manifest how great a disaster the acknowledged guardians of the Church would have avoided.
In any exhaustive history of the English people and the Anglican Church in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it would be necessary to bring to the front every incident and detail bearing upon the relations of the Church and the people, to study every indication of popular enthusiasm or prelatical tyranny, and to develop anew every fading feature of a deeply interesting picture. The work would be well worth doing, and to do it thoroughly would compensate the labour of a lifetime. Here it is not possible to go beyond some further suggestion of the magnitude, importance, and permanence of Wyclif's achievement. He had not only embodied and vocalised the aspirations for reform which he found at Oxford in his early days: he had infused into the movement so much of new energy and virility that the Reformation in England was virtually effected at the moment of his death, and there was nothing to come but the outward and political manifestations of its completeness. Lollardy, in fact, was Protestantism in all its essential features—predestinarianism, constructive pantheism, as its ecclesiastical censors are wont to complain,—but in any case the Protestantism which won for England the open Bible and the prayer-book, which overthrew the monasteries, the Orders, the Roman obedience, and the mass. It was not Cranmer, nor Cromwell, nor Henry VIII. and his two Protestant children, who banished papal authority from the Anglican Church. They were the accidents, or at most the instruments of a victory already accomplished. For the true moment of victory, and for the effective Reformer, we must look back to the fourteenth century.
The history of England between the reigns of Richard II. and Henry VIII. seems to be more fully dominated than historians have generally admitted by the great forces of religious, moral, and social upheaval which had come to maturity in the lifetime of Wyclif. The outcome of the religious upheaval was Lollardy. The effect of the moral upheaval was an earnest, evangelical spirit, a somewhat stern and harsh puritanism, a more pure and consequently more refined conduct on the part, especially, of the poorer clergy and their congregations. By the social upheaval there was created in England, between the Plantagenet and Tudor epochs, nothing less than the English people—a people emancipated, dignified by independent industry, annealed by common interests and resolutions, energetic, honest, and self-respecting. These were the operative forces which in fact produced the people of England as we know them to-day, which worked with silent and subtle machinery amidst the transient din and chaos of the fifteenth century.
We are apt to be misled by such terms as the "Wars of the Roses," the "Lancastrian and Yorkist parties," the "Lollards" described as a mere persecuted sect, and "Jack Cade's rebellion." We have had, perhaps, too much of the mere story of White Rose and Red Rose, and too little of the history which explains who they were that fought, and why they fought, and what depended on the issue of each battle. In this sense, the history of the English people may almost be said to have been begun by Green. Up to his time it had been a sealed book; the seals are broken, but even now the pages are no more than half exposed. Green shows us how, from the Peasants' Revolt, from the persecution of Courtenay and the death of Wyclif, Lollardy was dispersed but not destroyed—how, stricken down and left for dead by the authorities, the spirit of religious independence revived amongst its friends and permeated many classes of the population. "All the religious and social discontent of the time floated instinctively to this new centre; the socialist dreams of the peasantry, the new and keener spirit of personal morality, the hatred of the friars, the jealousy of the great lords towards the prelacy, the fanaticism of the Puritan zealot, were blended together in a common hostility to the Church, and a common resolve to substitute personal religion for its dogmatic and ecclesiastical system." The reaction of this spirit on the political movements of the day followed as a matter of course. "Nobles, like the Earl of Salisbury, and at a later time Sir John Oldcastle, placed themselves openly at the head of the cause, and threw open their gates as a refuge for its missionaries. London in its hatred of the clergy was fiercely Lollard. It was in vain that the clergy attempted to stifle the new movement by their old weapon of persecution. The jealousy entertained by the baronage and gentry of every pretension of the Church to secular power foiled its efforts to make persecution effective. Powerless as the efforts of the Church were for purposes of repression, they were effective in arousing the temper of the Lollards into a bitter and fanatical hatred of their persecutors. The Lollard teachers directed their fiercest invectives against the wealth and secularity of the great Churchmen. In a formal petition to Parliament they mingled denunciations of the riches of the clergy with an open profession of disbelief in transubstantiation, priesthood, pilgrimages, and image worship, and a demand, which illustrates the strange medley of opinions which jostled together in the new movement, that war might be declared un-christian."
How large a part Wyclif had borne in the assertion of this influence, political as well as religious, the reader of the preceding pages will be in a position to judge.
Lollardy was, in fact, the keystone of the arch whereon the newer liberties of Englishmen are supported. In the reign of Richard II. the followers of Wyclif were virtually under royal protection; they were respectfully listened to by Parliament and King; their patron, Salisbury, was potent at Court; and not even Courtenay or Arundel was able to take any effective measures against them. For a time, in spite of all that the Church could do, they steadily increased in number and strength, and for the remainder of the fourteenth century they enjoyed comparative immunity. But the instability of the King ruined both himself and all who depended on him. Richard had thoroughly alienated the Church. His quarrel with and banishment of Archbishop Arundel, which may have been to some extent justified by the intrigues of Arundel and his brother, hastened his own deposition and death. The head of the English clergy and the head of the House of Lancaster were exiles at the same moment, and it was at the invitation of Arundel, representing a powerful party in London, that the son of John of Gaunt returned to England and usurped the Crown. Henry IV. never forgot how much he owed to the Church; and indeed the three Lancastrian Kings continued for the next sixty years to rely upon the clergy and to play into their hands.
The persecution of the Lollards now began in earnest, and Arundel devoted the rest of his life to an unwearying effort to destroy both them and their teaching. In Oxford the memory of Wyclif was still affectionately and courageously preserved. The University, which had successfully resisted the authority of the Bishops of Lincoln, afterwards contested the claims of the Archbishops of Canterbury to exercise a right of visitation. Arundel, with shrewd judgment and calculation, had turned his attention to Oxford from the beginning of his primacy, probably considering that the best way to deal with a flood is to cut off the springs that feed it. It was ostensibly on the solicitation of a strong party in the faculties of law and divinity that he announced his intention to come down and assert his right in 1397; but he was foiled by the production of a bull from Boniface IX., declaring the University exempt. It is characteristic of that age of lame and ineffectual resolutions, that the popes themselves were found impeding the efforts of their legates to crush out a most formidable heresy—for it is evident that there was an intimate relation between the prosecution of the Oxford Wycliffites and the question of archiepiscopal visitation. Officious appeals on both points reached Arundel simultaneously, and he went so far as to declare, in a letter to the Chancellor, that he had been informed "that almost the whole University was affected by heretical pravity."
The phrase seems to have stuck in the gizzard of the Chancellor and Regents, for we find it again in a letter under the University seal, apparently addressed to the Archbishop some time later. This document bears witness to the manner in which Wyclif's repute was still cherished by the men who personally remembered him. "His conversation from his youth to his death was so praiseworthy and honest in the University that he never gave any offence, nor was he aspersed with any mark of infamy or sinister suspicion; but in answering, reading, preaching, and determining, he behaved himself laudably, as a valiant champion of the truth, and catholicly vanquished by sentences of Holy Scripture all such as by their wilful beggary blasphemed the religion of Christ. This doctor was not convicted of heretical pravity, or by our prelates delivered to be burned after his burial. For God forbid that our prelates should have condemned a man of so great probity for a heretic, who had not his equal in all the University, in his writings of logic, philosophy, divinity, morality, and the speculative sciences."[1]
Certainly there is more evidence of courage in this letter than is apparent in the attitude of some of the Wycliffites in 1382 and the following years. Not long afterwards, in 1407, Arundel held a Provincial Synod at Oxford, having possibly found a more amenable Chancellor—for the dispute concerning his right of visitation was not yet adjusted. It was ordered on the authority of the Church that no works of Wyclif should be used in the universities, and that all works written in Wyclif's lifetime should pass under the censorship of the universities and the Archbishop before they were used in the schools. Apparently Oxford faced the Primate without flinching, until the accession of Pope John XXIII. in 1410. John sent Arundel a bull reversing that of Boniface in the matter of visitations; and it was about the same time that the Archbishop prevailed on Congregation to nominate a committee of twelve doctors in order to draw up a list of Wyclif's errors. The will was everything in a search of this kind, and out of fourteen works examined—and subsequently burnt at Carfax—the committee were fortunate enough to light upon two hundred and sixty-seven instances of false teaching.
By the time that the Council of Constance met in 1414 to put an end to the scandal of the Schism, to burn John Huss, and to lay a solemn curse on the memory of Wyclif, somebody had increased this catalogue of errors to more than three hundred. The formal record of the Council in regard to the condemnation of Wyclif is as follows:
"By the authority of the sentence and decree of the Roman Council, and of the mandate of the apostolic see, the Council proceeded with the condemnation of John Wyclif and his memory: and, having published injunctions to cite all who would defend the said Wyclif or his memory, and nobody appearing for that purpose, and having moreover examined witnesses of the impenitence and final obstinacy of the said Wyclif, and the things being proved by evident signs attested by lawful witnesses, the holy Synod did declare and define the said John Wyclif to have been a notorious heretic, and to have died obstinate in heresy, excommunicating him and condemning his memory; and did decree that his body and bones, if they could be distinguished from those of the faithful, should be disinterred, or dug out of the ground, and cast at a distance from the sepulchre of the church."
Twelve years later, Pope Martin found that the decree of the Council had not been obeyed in England. He wrote an urgent letter on the subject to Richard Flemmyng, Bishop of Lincoln, whom we have encountered already as one of the younger disciples of Wyclif, and who in 1407 was still something of a Wycliffite, though he presently began to receive preferment. Flemmyng, in his old age, was full of zeal for orthodoxy, and brought himself to the point of desecrating his old master's grave and burning his bones.
Orthodoxy would willingly have stamped out everything that Wyclif wrote, with a great deal more into the bargain. Even Caxton, seventy or eighty years after the date of Arundel's Synod at Oxford, never ventured to touch a Wyclif manuscript. Indeed there are comparatively few religious works amongst the fourscore printed books attributed to him and his personal assistants. A Latin psalter appears to be the only complete book of the text of Scripture which found its way into print in the fifteenth century, though there are books of devotion, collections of papal indulgences, and a few orthodox sermons, which bear witness to the fact that the ignoring of Wyclif was not due to any secular exclusiveness amongst the early printers.
The effort to suppress the writings of Wyclif was not confined to England. Two years after the adoption of Arundel's constitutions the Pope appointed a Conference of learned men from the universities of Bonn, Paris, and Oxford to discuss the expediency of burning those heretical writings. Fortunately the hint from Rome was not taken; and it must be remembered that the authority of Rome was still impaired by the Papal Schism. The Conference was candid enough to say that there were "many true, good, and useful things" in Wyclif, of which the students in the schools ought not to be deprived. The universities were not heroic—enough or were perhaps too heroic—for the popes and archbishops; and in fact it is to them, and especially to the University of Prague, that we owe the preservation of many of Wyclif's works.
The statute of 1401, reviving the punishment of the stake for obstinate heretics, was one of the first acts of the reign of Henry IV., and Arundel had at once availed himself of it by passing censure on the Lollard priest, Sawtre, and handing him over to be dealt with by the secular arm. The enactment of this statute did not lead to many burnings in England; but it is a mistake to conclude that it had effected the purpose of those who obtained it. No doubt to some extent it would drive heresy beneath the surface, and close the mouths of the wilder sort of heretics, whose noise had been in excess of their courage. But Lollardy remained an open profession, and if the spirit of the age had allowed many scandals, such as those exhibited by the deaths of Sawtre, Badby, and Lord Cobham,[2] the bishops and judges would certainly not have lacked victims amongst the followers of Wyclif, who courted the utmost terrors of the law. It was an age in which many parts of England were involved in almost constant civil war. The Lancastrians and the Church had made common cause, and their enemies combined against them with arms in their hands. In all the revolts that marked the reign of Henry IV., the Lollard's everywhere took an active and a prominent part. The bitter hostility of the clergy towards the men whose very existence was a reproach against them was well illustrated by the conduct of some of the highest authorities of the Church and religious Orders, when they heard that Salisbury had been slain in battle. "His gory head was welcomed into London by a procession of abbots and bishops, who went out singing psalms of thanksgiving to meet it"; and amongst these exulting professors of Christianity there were probably some who had taken part in the barefoot litany of 1382, which celebrated the condemnation of Wyclif.
It was war to the knife between the Lancastrians and the Lollards—so completely had the earlier traditions of the first Duke of Lancaster been abandoned by his family. Parliament was still subject to the violent and rapid fluctuations which we have already observed in the reigns of Edward and Richard. If it was by no means always on the side of the clergy, still it was nearly always prejudiced against the Lollards as a fighting party. The survival of pure Wyclifiism was conspicuous enough in the repeated demands made by the House of Commons for the appropriation of Church property to secular and popular uses. Demands to this effect were made by the Lack-Learning Parliament in 1404, by the Parliament of 1410, and at least once thereafter. Shakspeare may be cited in this connection, not indeed as an historical authority, but for an illustration of the well-known facts. In the opening lines of Henry the Fifth, Chicheley says to his brother prelate:
"My lord, I'11 tell you, that self bill is urg'd
Canterbury.
Which in the eleventh year of the last king's reign
Was like, and had indeed against us pass'd
But that the scambling and unquiet time
Did push it out of further question....
For all the temporal lands which men devout
By testament have given to the Church
Would they strip from us; being valued thus
As much as would maintain, to the king's honour,
Full fifteen earls, and fifteen hundred knights,
Six thousand and two hundred good esquires;
And, to relief of lazars and weak age,
Of indigent faint souls, past corporal toil,
A hundred almshouses, right well supplied;
And to the coffers of the king beside,
A thousand pounds by the year. Thus runs the bill.
Ely. This would drink deep.
'T would drink the cup and all."
ARCHBISHOP CHICHELEY, FOUNDER OF ALL SOULS. 1414-43.
BY J. FABER.
should take an oath to destroy Lollardy, and to assist the bishops therein; that "heretics convict" should forfeit their lands, goods, and chattels; that the justices should have power to inquire into offences against the Act, and to issue a capias with other stringent provisions of the same kind.
Archbishop Chicheley, who succeeded Arundel in 1414, did his best to eclipse the zeal and fame of his predecessor. In 1416 he enjoined all his suffragans and archdeacons in the province of Canterbury "diligently to inquire twice every year after persons suspected of heresy." Wherever heretics were reported to dwell, three or more of that parish should be obliged "to take an oath that they would certify in writing to the suffragans, archdeacons, or their commissaries, what persons were heretics, or kept private conventicles, or differed in life and manners from the common conversation of the faithful, or asserted heresies or errors, or had any suspected books written in the vulgar English tongue, or received, favoured, or were conversant with any persons suspected of error or heresies." The diocesans, upon information received, were to "issue out process against the accused persons, and if they did not deliver them over to the secular court, yet they should commit them to perpetual or temporary imprisonment, as the nature of the cause required, at least until the sitting of the next Convocation."
This device of the Archbishop's amounted, clearly, to nothing short of a petty Inquisition in every parish, and the words in italics show how easily it might be converted into an instrument of the most outrageous tyranny over the innermost thoughts and feelings. There we have another instance of what has so frequently been displayed in the history of mankind: spiritual authority, pushed to a logical extreme, pronounces its final edict in the sentence, "I kill you because I do not like you." It was the μὴ εἶναι of Aristotle, translated into an Athanasian curse.
Archbishop Chicheley has been roundly accused of instigating Henry V. to renew the war with France in order to relieve the strain at home, and to turn aside the danger with which the Church was menaced. Of course these were amongst the natural effects of the war, which produced another "scambling and unquiet time," and did much to postpone the religious and other evolutions in England, already more than due.
Though the evidence becomes fainter as we advance more than half a century beyond Wyclif's death, yet there is ample proof of both the religious and the political survival of Lollardy in England. It may be true that we do not hear much more of the term in the pages of the fifteenth-century chronicles; but, unfortunately, some of these chronicles are more distinguished for what they omit than for what they include. And, after all, if every scrap of direct evidence on the subject had been brought together, the fact would remain that we need no proof of this kind to assure us that the spirit and conviction of the Lollards, having once taken hold of so large a fraction of the nation, could not possibly 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 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 wide the pages which, in the awakened conscience of every independent Christian, were to replace the authority of fallible men.
In a word, Wyclif was no mere forerunner of the Protestant Reformation, but the Reformer in chief. In the intellectual domain, in the field of ideas and of spiritual activity, he originated the movement which had its issue in the sixteenth century, when the Tudor monarchs rode but did not raise the storm. For one reason or another Wyclif was long excluded from his proper place in history; but the nineteenth century, bringing together for the first time all the main contemporary documents, has been able to take the true bearings of the epoch of religious reform. And perhaps no one hereafter will attempt to explain the conduct of Henry VIII., of Thomas Cromwell, and the martyred bishops, without beginning his story from the last of the Schoolmen, and from the golden prime of the University of Oxford.
