compatible with the security of any tolerable government.
A rumour having gone abroad that the King intended to enforce the laws against heresy, notices were found fixed against the doors of the London churches, that if any such measure was attempted, a hundred thousand men would be in arms to oppose it. These papers were traced to Sir John Oldcastle, otherwise called Lord Cobham, a man whose true character is more difficult to distinguish, in the conflict of the evidence which has come down to us about him, than that of almost any noticeable person in history. He was perhaps no worse than a fanatic. He was certainly prepared, if we may trust the words of a royal proclamation (and Henry was personally intimate with Oldcastle, and otherwise was not likely to have exaggerated the charges against him), he was prepared to venture a rebellion, with the prospect of himself becoming the president of some possible Lollard commonwealth.[1] The King, with swift decisiveness, annihilated the incipient treason. Oldcastle was himself arrested. He escaped out of the Tower into Scotland; and while Henry was absent in France he seems to have attempted to organize some kind of Scotch invasion; but he was soon after again taken on the Welsh Border, tried and executed. An Act which was passed in 1414 described his proceedings as an 'attempt to destroy the King, and all other manner of estates of the realm, as well spiritual as temporal, and also all manner of policy,
- ↑ Rot. Parl. iv. 24, 108, apud Lingard; Rymer, ix. 89, 119, 129, 170, 193; Milman, vol. v. p. 520–535.
