A.D. 1412. tion of Oldcastle. Sir John Oldcastle, otherwise called Lord Cobham, Сí. 6. a man whose true character is more difficult to distinguish, in the conflict of the evidence which Insurrec has come down to us about him, than that of Sir John 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.* 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 Oldcastle his proceedings as an 'attempt to destroy the king, executed. and all other manner of estates of the realm, as well spiritual as temporal, and also all manner of heresy. policy, and finally the laws of the land.' The sedition was held to have originated in heresy, and for the better repression of such mischiefs in time to come, the lord chancellor, the judges, the justices of the peace, the sheriffs, mayors, bailiffs, and every other officer having government of people, were sworn on entering their office to use their * Rot. Parl. iv. 24, 108, apud LINGARD; RYMER, ix. 89, 119, 129, 170, 193; MILMAN, vol. v. p. 520-535. tried and Fresh act against CH. 6. best power and diligence to detect and prosecute all persons suspected of so heinous a crime.* A.D. 1414. Thus perished Wycliffe's labour,-not wholly, because his translation of the Bible still remained a rare treasure; a seed of future life, which would spring again under happier circumstances. But the sect which he organized, the special doctrines Final ter- which he set himself to teach, after a brief blaze the Lollard of success, sank into darkness; and no trace remained of Lollardry except the black memory of contempt and hatred with which the heretics of the fourteenth century were remembered by the English people, long after the actual Reformation had become the law of the land.† mination of movement. Causes of So poor a close to a movement of so fair failure, promise was due partly to the agitated temper of the times; partly, perhaps, to a want of judg * 2 Hen. V. stat. 1, cap. 7. sent Oldcastle. We can hardly suppose that such an expression as my old lad of the castle,' should be accidental; and in the epilogue to the Second Part of Henry the Fourth, when promising to reintroduce Falstaff once more, Shakspeare says, 'where for anything I know he shall die of the sweat, for Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man.' He had, therefore, certainly been supposed to be the man, and Falstaff represented the English conception of the character of the Lollard hero. I should add, however, that Dean Milman, who has examined the records which remain to throw light on the character of this remarkable person with elaborate care and ability, concludes emphatically in his favour. ment in Wycliffe; but chiefly and essentially Cн. 6. because it was an untimely birth. Wycliffe A.D. 1414. not to be for the not ripe. saw the evil; he did not see the remedy; and Which is neither in his mind nor in the mind of the world regretted, about him, had the problem ripened itself for times were solution. England would have gained little by the premature overthrow of the church, when the house out of which the evil spirit was cast out could have been but swept and garnished for the occupation of the seven devils of anarchy. The fire of heresy continued to smoulder, exploding occasionally in insurrection,* occasionally blazing up in nobler form, when some poor seeker for the truth, groping for a vision of God in the darkness of the years which followed, found his way into that high presence through the martyr's fire; but substantially, the nation re- The relapsed into obedience-the church was reprieved action. for a century. Its fall was delayed till the spirit in which it was attacked was winnowed clean of all doubtful elements-until protestantism had recommenced its enterprise in a desire, not for a fairer adjustment of the world's good things, but in a desire for some deeper, truer, nobler, holier insight into the will of God. It recommenced not under the auspices of a Wycliffe, not with New birth the partial countenance of a government which was tantism. crossing swords with the Father of Catholic * Two curious letters of Henry VI. upon the Lollards, written in 1431, are printed in Archæologia, vol. xxiii. p. 339, &c. • As God knoweth,' he says of them, never would they be subject to his laws nor to man's, but would be loose and free to of protes A.D. 1525. CH. 6. Christendom, and menacing the severance of England from the unity of the faith, but under a strong dynasty of undoubted catholic loyalty, with the entire administrative power, secular as well as spiritual, in the hands of the episcopate. It sprung up spontaneously, unguided, unexcited, by the vital necessity of its nature, among the masses of the nation. of Christian Association Leaping over a century, I pass to the year Brethren, 1525, at which time, or about which time, a London. society was enrolled in London calling itself enrolled in Spirit of the country. The Association of Christian Brothers."* It was composed of poor men, chiefly tradesmen, artisans, a few, a very few of the clergy; but it was carefully organized, it was provided with moderate funds, which were regularly audited; and its paid agents went up and down the country carrying Testaments and tracts with them, and enrolling in the order all persons who dared to risk their lives in such a cause. The harvest had been long ripening. The records of the bishops' courts† are filled from the beginning of the century with accounts of prosecutions for heresy with prosecutions, that is, of men and women to whom the masses, the pilgrimages, the indulgences, the pardons, the effete paraphernalia of the establishment, had become * Proceedings of an organized society in London called the Christian Brethren, supported by voluntary contributions, for the dispersion of tracts against the doctrines of the church: Rolls House MS. HALE'S Precedents. The London and Lincoln Registers, in FOXE, vol. iv.; and the MS. Registers of Archbishops Morton and Warham, at Lambeth. A.D. 1525. intolerable; who had risen up in blind resistance, Cн. 6. and had declared, with passionate anger, that whatever was the truth, all this was falsehood. The bishops had not been idle; they had plied their busy tasks with stake and prison, and victim after victim had been executed with more than necessary cruelty. But it was all in vain: punishment only multiplied offenders, and the reek' of the martyrs, as was said when Patrick Hamilton was burnt at St. Andrews, 'infected all that it did blow upon.' definite from the books. There were no teachers, however, there were Absence of no books, no unity of conviction, only a confused guidance. refusal to believe in lies. Copies of Wycliffe's Difficulty Bible remained, which parties here and there, want of under death penalties if detected, met to read ;† copies, also, of some of his tracts were extant; but they were unprinted transcripts, most rare and precious, which the watchfulness of the police made it impossible to multiply through the press, and which remained therefore necessarily in the possession of but a few fortunate persons. The protestants were thus isolated in single groups or families, without organization, without knowledge of each other, with nothing to give them coherency as a party; and so they might * KNOX's History of the Re- the evangelists, in English, conformation in Scotland. Also we object to you that divers times, and specially in Robert Durdant's house, of Iver Court, near unto Staines, you erroneously and damnably read in a great book of heresy, all [one] night, certain chapters of taining in them divers erroneous FOXE, vol. iv. p. 176. |