Excerpt from Lewis Sergeant's "John Wycliffe" G.P. Putnam & Sons 1893.
Chapter 6, pag-e 100 - "Wycliffe as Politician"
Chapter VI
Wyclif as Politician.
Wyclif had displayed his best qualities at Oxford, where he was devotedly loved. He was essentially strong in all the relations of life, save in the unfortunate particular of physical health. If there be one note in his character more prominent than the rest, it is that of spontaneous and effective championship. He was the champion of seculars against regulars, of the University against Pope and hierarchy, of the ignorant masses against obscurants, of the nation against the Papacy, of the new truth as he had seen it against friars, bishops, and papal bulls. Men of all classes, from peasant to Parliament and King, looked to him at one time or another for strength, inspiration, or protection, and they did not look in vain. His energy never failed him, and his confidence was inexhaustible and inflexible.
Even before he threw himself into politicsΓÇöbefore he became chaplain to the King and made the acquaintance of John of Gaunt, who was some twenty years his juniorΓÇöWyclif seems to have been as widely known as a man could be in those days, with no higher title to fame than that he was a learned Oxford doctor, a bold and vigorous preacher, and an upholder of the poor. He was fast winning his way to the hearts of his countrymen, and creating that deep impression on the men of his day, friends and enemies alike, which was to make his mark for all time.
Of Wyclif's characteristic opinions on matters of Church and State, there will be more to be said hereafter. Meanwhile his ideas had been molded and his conclusions were being shaped by a series of events as striking as any which have occurred within the limits of our history as a nation.
Still fresh and vivid in the fourteenth century must have been the impression stamped upon the minds of Englishmen by the marvelous developments of the Church of Rome during the past hundred years. The encroachments of the Papacy from the time when Innocent III had laid England under tribute would seem almost as recent and familiar to Wyclif in his teens as the records of the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny are to the men of the present contemporary events, the successor of Innocent and Boniface was not at Rome but at Avignon, figuring as it were in the triumph of the French kingΓÇöa vassal to the monarch who still claimed to be overlord of Norman England. Already the French were our hereditary foes, and the Vicars of Christ, assuming universal dominion, were now virtually instruments in the hand of the enemy. The more haughtily the Plantagenets asserted their independence, the more inadmissible and ridiculous the assumption of the Popes would appear to every patriotic Englishman. King John's tribute of a thousand marks had been paid for the last time to Pope John XXII. After 1333ΓÇöit was never paid again. Benedict claimed it, but it was refused, and even the payment of Peter's pence was discontinued (at any rate partially) for a time. Benedict was honest, virtuous, and weak. Clement VI. (1342-1352) was the exact opposite of his predecessor, the precise negation of Christian virtues; and his conduct in holding the jubilee of 1350 for the sake of its golden harvest, whilst all Europe was writhing under the plague, was surely the head and front of his offending. No fervent Christian, no Englishman who loved his country, could do otherwise at this time than hold the political and spiritual claims of the Popes at Avignon in contempt and disregard.
If the papal jubilee of 1350 doubled the horrors of the plague in the eyes of all right-judging persons, the effect which had already been produced by that fatal epidemic is almost inconceivable. It overshadowed the life, and must in some measure have affected the character, of every one who lived through it. At the universities in particular it would long continue to be a memorable landmark, if only for its effect in largely diminishing the number of students. A man of Wyclif's devout and sympathetic disposition could not fail to be deeply moved by what he had seen had heard of the pestilence, and of the ecstasies of repentance, self-torture, and reaction which followed closely in its train.
From the capture of Calais to the treaty of Bretigny (1347-1360), Wyclif would be penetrated, in common with his countrymen, by the military achievements of Edward III. and the Prince of Wales, by the collapse of the French armies, and by the annexation of some of the fairest provinces of France. He probably saw the captive kings in London; and he must have heard of the rich spoils carried home by the soldiers, or sent by settlers to their friends in England, where, according to enthusiastic contemporaries, there was scarcely a house which did not contain some ornament or other valuable brought over from the conquered country. He may have seen and conversed with the famous son of a Gloucestershire outlaw, Richard Whittington, who, after his own death, presided three times over the merchant princes of the metropolis. He would not be ignorant of the vast accumulation of land and wealth in the hands of a comparatively small section of the nation. And side by side with this wealth he sawΓÇöwe know from his writings that he sawΓÇöthe misery of the serfs, the poverty and starvation of the laborers, the grinding taxation of the industrious classes, and the growing discontent of the common people with their conditions and prospects.
It is only in a particular and limited sense that Wyclif can be properly spoken of as a politician. Certainly he took a deep interest in the politics of his time, looking to them for results which, in his opinion, would be highly advantageous to the cause of true religion.
We do not know at what precise date John Wyclif was appointed one of the king's chaplains. He speaks of himself in 1366 as "peculiaris regis clericus talis qualis." The last two words might almost imply that he was an occasional preacher before the Court by invitation rather than by formal appointment, though they would equally well indicate a modest self-depreciation, quite in keeping with his ordinary style. If we did not know that Wyclif actually discharged some of the functions of a royal chaplain, in his character as a secular priest, we might be content to take the regis clericus in what would perhaps be its most natural significationΓÇöthat of a cleric learned in the canon and civil law, and consulted by the Crown as a lawyer rather than as a clergyman. Wyclif's reports to Parliament, however, carefully avoid any claim to speak with authority on legal points. It seems most natural to conclude that he had a regular appointment as chaplain, and that he spent some of his time every year in the train of the monarch, and in association with members of his Court. Perhaps it was in this way that he first made the acquaintance of John of Gaunt; but on the other hand his good connections in the North may have procured for him an introduction to the King's son, who had married Blanche of Lancaster in 1360. In any case Wyclif was soon in high favor; and he exercised an influence, amongst other, on the unhappy and doubtless scandalous Alice Perrers, who seems to have been an able manager of men, and who was certainly susceptible to the charms of his fiery and pungent eloquence.
However this may have been, it cannot be doubted that, when Wyclif came into touch with the political forces of the time, he would aim at the promotion of ecclesiastical reforms through the secular authorities, just as these authorities must have expected to gain through him the alliance of a revolutionary party within the Church.
The bolder spirits of the fourteenth century who entered more or less consciously and deliberately into this combination, directed as it was towards the attainment of civil and religious reform, were not altogether without warrant if they began by nursing sanguine hopes of success. It was not for them to foresee that the destiny of England required her still to pick her dreary way through a chaos of mental darkness and desperate civil war. They could only realize their own regeneration, and anticipate the harvest of their own toil. The bright visions excited in ardent and enthusiastic minds in the age of the Plantagenets, by the lives of such men as Wyclif and Chaucer, by the growing vigor of Parliament, by the championship of Lancaster at his best, by the rich endowment and achievement of the universities, were not on the face of them more chimerical, more foredoomed to disappointment, than those which flashed before the minds of Englishmen in the days of the Tudors, as they witnessed the work of Cranmer, of Thomas Cromwell, of the Council of Edward VI., of John Milton, of the schoolmasters in the sixteenth century. If the disappointment of the earlier hope was predestined and inevitable, as the shapeless blossom is enfolded in the cankered bud, neither Wyclif nor John of Gaunt, nor any of the optimists of their generation, could have foreseen the abortive failure. How often in the history of our country have the first hopes of eager and earnest reformers been doomed to extinctionΓÇöand how often in the long run has the original failure been the groundwork of eventual success!
At the time when he was brought into contact with the English Parliament, that body had but recently become effective for other purposes than the granting of supplies, and the presenting of petitions which might or might not form the basis of ordinances. The inferior ranks of the Church dignitaries had ceased to attend, the clergy sitting apart in a Convocation of their own. The prelates still sat with the baronsΓÇötwenty-seven abbots and two priors in addition to the bishops; whilst the knights of the shires sat with the burgesses from the towns. The Lords and Commons thus constituted had begun to pass their statutes, and forward them to the monarch for his assent. Not only had Parliament deposed a king in 1327, but it had repeatedly checked the arbitrary levy of taxes by Edward III. The Commons had expressly claimed freedom of speech, the finality of elections by constituencies, the immunity of their Speaker, and the right to audit public accounts. It was already the established rule that the two Houses should meet every year; and the failure to issue writs for upwards of a year, towards the close of Edward's reign, was deeply resented.1 Parliament was thus a very powerful and serviceable body, even in presence of a monarch as willful and haughty as Edward III. Wyclif might well have expected that such an instrumentΓÇöa "two-handed engine" which already in those days involved the power and strength of the nationΓÇöwould be able to effect the great object which he had been courageous enough to desire. There are sundry passages in his writings which show that he took a strong interest in parliamentary debates affecting either the National Church or the Church of Rome. It may be that his chaplaincy imposes upon him certain clerical duties in connection with the meeting of the Houses, which rendered his presence necessary. At all events he refers more than once to discussions which he had heard amongst the Lords at Westminster. He had opportunities for preaching, and we know that he made a strong impression by his sermons in London. Perhaps the first of these opportunities was when he had to preach to King and Parliament at the opening of the session of 1366.
So far as the attitude of the State towards the papal authority was concerned, there was at this time very little difference of opinion amongst Englishmen. Apart from the Italians whom Rome had thrust into English benefices, and from Italianised members of the regular and secular clergy, all were against the papal assumptions. Wyclif's firmest opponent in the ranks of the hierarchy, William Courtenay, who rose to be Archbishop of Canterbury, was in this sense anti-papal. The clergy of England had had long and grievous struggles with a succession of monarchs in defense of their possessions against what they doubtless considered unjust and exorbitant taxation: but they showed more than once that they preferred the exactions of the King to the exactions of Rome. And, as a matter of fact, the Church and the various Orders in England had grown so enormously rich that if they had not paid heavy ransoms throughout the century, and borne a very considerable share of the cost of the wars, they could not have escaped with their title-deeds. Their possessions were so largely increased after sundry visitations of the Black Death, which shook the tree of superstition until their garners were full of its fruit, that the taxable area outside the Church was sensibly and even seriously diminished. Henceforth, if not before, it was one of the political axioms of intelligent English laymen that the State could never thrive again until the Church had been made to restore the immense superfluity of wealth which pious Christians had bestowed upon her. And the truth is that it never did thrive until the earlier Tudors had redressed the balance, at any rate so far as the Orders had disturbed it.
John of Gaunt seems to have entered political life with the special object of enforcing this restoration of property by the Church, and for a time it looked as though nothing could save the clergy from the zeal of the Duke and the barons. "Never," says Mr. Green, "had the spiritual or moral hold of the Church on the nation been less; never had her wealth been greater. Out of a population of little more than two millions the ecclesiastics numbered between twenty and thirty thousand, owning in landed property alone more than a third of the soil; their 'spiritualities' in dues and offerings amounting to twice the royal revenue." Such a condition of things must indeed be a peril to any nation; and no one could call himself a statesman in those days without recognizing the evil and seeking a remedy for it. That is a justification for much of the Duke's subsequent conduct, as well as for Wyclif's participation in politics.
It was in 1366, as already stated, that the Rector of Rillingham was invited by Parliament to show cause against the further payment of tribute to Rome. The matter called for argument rather than authority; the tribute was already largely in arrears, for Englishmen could no longer brook the humiliation bequeathed to them by one of the most worthless of their kings. Nothing had been paid since 1333, and the conquerors of Crecy and Poitiers were not minded to renew the payment of an annual subsidy which stamped them as vassals to the vassal of France. The Pope had pressed for his dues, which Parliament declined to pay. The former had found his champion in the person of a monk who had apparently addressed a remonstrance to Parliament; and Wyclif was called upon to reply to this document.
He did no in a Latin tract or "determination" on Lordship,2 which maintainedΓÇöwith the same distinction between temporal and spiritual things which had often been urged in the discussions on ecclesiastical povertyΓÇöthat the State was always entitled to refuse tribute to the Roman Pontiff, to try ecclesiastics in its own courts, and to take away, for fit and proper cause, the possessions of ecclesiastics.
"My Doctor," says Wyclif,--"my Doctor with his brethren demands, with a certain excess of vehement insistence, with effervescence and swelling of the spirit, that I should reply to him categorically in the terms of his argument, and more particularly as regards the case which he makes for the Pope against the authority of the King. Every lordship, says he, given under a condition, exists only so long as that condition has not been destroyed. Now the Pope gave the realm of England to our King on condition that England would pay seven hundred marks each year [and Ireland three hundred]. But this condition has been abolished by lapse of time and circumstances: wherefore the King of England has lost the true lordship of England."
It is curious, Wyclif goes on to say, that the case should be put to me in this pointed way; and my friends tell me that it has been done for three reasonsΓÇöfirst, that, as soon as I have answered, I may be denounced to the Roman Curia, censured, and deprived of my position; secondly, that the favor of Rome may be secured for himself and his friends; thirdly, that secular lordships may be heaped upon the abbeys, by the extension of the papal authority in England, without the wholesome restraint of brotherly expostulation. "But I, as a humble and obedient son of the Roman Church, protest that I do not mean to make any contention which would so much as sound like an insult, or give reasonable cause of offense to pious ears. Wherefore in the first instance I would invite my reverend friend the Doctor to deal with the following argument, which was held, as I have been told, by a number of secular lords in a certain Council." Then he proceeds to unfold his case against the tribute, manifestly devising this pious fraud in order to deprive his opponent of the opportunity of triumphing over him as a rebellious priest. The seven lords are seven arguments; and they are substantially of this kind.
1. England was won with the sword and defended with the sword. No tribute can go on for ever without an appeal to the sword.
2. Tribute should only be paid to those who are fit to receive it. The Pope ought to be poor, like Christ, and to leave tribute to Caesars.
3. As the Pope is "servant of the servants of God," he can only take his dues in return for service rendered. But he renders no service to England; and, services being denied, the tribute also may be properly refused.
4. An overlord cannot be expected to pay tribute, and the King of England is overlord in England. If the Pope were overlord of the ecclesiastical property, he would be paramount over one-third of England, which cannot be allowed. But if he holds of the King, it is he who ought to be paying tribute.
5. Pope Innocent made King John pay for his absolution and for other spiritual ministrationΓÇöwhich was flat simony; and every one is entitled to repudiate an immoral contract.
6. If the Pope really gave England to John, as a lord gives to his vassal, he gave it for a ridiculously small fee; and on the same principle he might squander the rest of Christendom in the same way. We ought to make a stand at once. And as the theologians say that a man who is in mortal sin forfeits his dominion, and the Pope is liable to sin, one mortal overlord is quite enough for us, and we had better give our goods to the poor instead of to the Pope, and hold of Christ alone.
7. My colleagues are forgetting the unwisdom of the King and the supreme right of the nation, without whose consent no lasting contract can be made to its damage.
"Now," says Wyclif, after reciting arguments of this kind, and so neatly turning the tables on the monk who had desired to entrap him, "unless the Doctor can support the rational character of his argument against these contentions of the English lords, it has no force against the position of our lord the King."
For those days the rejoinder was quite sufficient, and was held to have served its turn. The claim for tribute was dropped again, and Wyclif, by the cogency of his reasoning, earned both credit amongst his friends and odium at Rome. Unwelcome as such reasoning would naturally be to the Papacy, and to its warmest friends in England, there was so far no attempt to fix any charge of heresy on Wyclif. Nevertheless it was about this time that John Kynyngham, a Carmelite Friar, began to wage a pertinacious fight with him, challenging him on the score of certain opinions in his academic treatise, De Esse Intelligibili Creaturae. Kynyngham was somewhat impar congressus; he seems to have been mild of mood and speech, gentle and self-deprecatory; but that he should have attacked the strongest of his contemporaries, and stuck to the attack for nearly twenty years, showed at any rate that he found controversy a congenial pursuit.
It was great crisis in the life of Wyclif. A high compliment had been paid him, not merely in making him a king's chaplain, but also in looking to him to plead the cause of the nation against the Pope. Already it was clear he had attracted the notice of all who were tired of the dominion of Rome, and was recognized as peculiarly well equipped for this act of championship. His friend, the King's son, was at the head of a strong party of complaisant earls and barons. The King was weak and pliable in the hands of the young Duke, and, though the Prince of Wales was by no means of one mind with his intriguing brother, he would scarcely be a fatal obstacle in the way of an equitable reform of the Church. The popular hostility to Rome, coupled as it was with an intense dislike of the foreign workmen in London and the manufacturing centers, was sufficiently strong to encourage the hope that the fourteenth century might see the last of the Rome-Scot, and of papal intervention in England. But it may be questioned whether the Reformers did not unwittingly exaggerate the strength or the extent of the feeling against the excessive endowments of the Church.
Lancaster and his friends came to open issue with the Church party almost as soon as the Duke began to take an interest in public affairs. William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, and a prince of pluralists, was President of the King's Council in 1370, and he was regarded with not a little jealousy in various quarters. He was very naturally obnoxious to the anti-clericals in the two Houses, who did not see why the clergy, having their own Convocation, and a potent voice amongst the Lords, should also hold the presidency of the Council and the principal posts under the Crown. The discontent on this ground came to a head in the year just named, when Parliament sent a petition to the King requesting "that it will please our said lord the King that the laymen of the said kingdom who are sufficient and able of estate may be chosen for this (the task of government), and that no other person be hereafter made Chancellor, Treasurer, Clerk of the Privy Seal, Baron of the Exchequer, Chamberlain of the Exchequer, Controller, and all other great officers and governors of the said kingdom."
This demand was followed at once by the removal of the Bishops of Winchester and Exeter from the Council, and by the appointment in their place of Robert Thorpe as Chancellor and Richard le Scrope as Treasurer. The Duke for a few years to come had the reins of power in this hands, and it seemed as it the opportunity had arrived for striking his decisive blow.
At the outset, Parliament was strongly and unmistakably on his side. Until misfortunes abroad and corruption at home brought discredit upon Lancaster and his colleagues, we hear little of opposition in the Commons. It was not likely that the knights and burgesses would protest against the heavy burdens laid upon the Church, through though they were very stiff when it came to a question of taxing wool and movables. Doubtless there would be vigorous remonstrances in the representative chamber when the King claimed increasing dues on the raw material of Norwich fustians, Sudbury baize, Kentish broadcloths, Colchester sayes and serges, Kendal cloth, Devonshire kerseys, Welsh friezes, Taunton serges, and the various cloths produces in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, in Sussex, Berkshire, and Hampshire, But, when the demand was addressed to the rulers of the Church, every other interest in the kingdom endorsed it without hesitation.
These taxes would produce a large revenue; and through the wars sucked up money like a quicksand, and the corrupt Court was a sponge that never ceased to absorb public fundsΓÇöover and above the loans which Edward continued to contract with the Florentine money-lendersΓÇöyet the Commons were doubtless relieved by such solid contributions from the Church. It was vain for the clergy to resist, so long as they had the nation united against them.
A Benedictine monk preached a sermon before the University of Oxford, protesting against the harshness of these demands, and repeating arguments for exemption which few would have gainsaid if the acquisitiveness of the Church had never passed the bounds of moderation. Wyclif took occasion to reply to this sermon; and in doing so he gives us what is probably (as Dr. Shirley says) the first published report of a speech delivered in the House of Lords.
"I heard," he says, "certain religious possessioners in a Parliament in London make the same demand (of exemption), and one of the lords answered by means of a fable. 'Once upon a time,' said he, 'the birds were gathered together, and amongst them was the owl, bare of plumage. Making himself out to be half dead and frozen, he shiveringly begged feathers from the other birds. And they, moved to pity, gave him feathers all round, until he had been decked in some ugly guise with the plumes of his fellow bipeds.'" Then a hawk suddenly appeared in the distance, and threw this assembly of fowls into a panic, and they all demanded their feathers again. "'And when he refused them, every bird took back his own feather by force; and so they escaped the danger, whilst the owl was more wretchedly callow than before. So,' said he, 'if war breaks out against us, we ought to take the temporalities from the possessioners, as being the common property of the realm, and prudently to defend our country with what is our own wealth, though in a measure superfluous.'"
But if the clergy had to listen occasionally to pungent apologues of this kind, they managed to return rubber for rubber. With part of the spoils of the Church a great fleet was fitted out and placed under the command of the Earl of Pembroke. "Plenty of money" was sent with it, to engage an army of mercenaries in Poitou; but the Spaniards fell upon this expedition off Rochelle, and annihilated it. Evidently, said the clergy, there was a curse on the plundered money; and when the King with four of his sons attempted to take our another fleet, to restore their broken fortunes, and could not get a favorable wind until it was too late, the superstitious friends of the Church agreed that "god was on the side of the French."
The fact is that the country entered on a series of disasters at the moment when Wyclif and his friends must have been nursing their highest hopes. The illness of the Prince of Wales had forced him to return to England after the cruel massacre at Limoges. The tide of war was already turning, and under the Duke of Lancaster the English arms suffered various humiliating defeats. Portsmouth had been burned by the French in 1369, and three years later came the terrible disgrace at Rochelle. The conquests made a Crecy and Poitiers were lost piecemeal, and a splendid English army led by Lancaster, whilst attempting to cross France from Calais to Bordeaux, was half destroyed by cold and famine. The Commons presented a petition to the monarch complaining that though, twenty years before, he had been called "the king of the sea," the English navy was now ruined by incapacity and mismanagement. Grievous taxation, direct and indirect, had been levied for the persecution of the war, and it was shrewdly suspected that considerable sums had remained in the hands of officials. Corn was at famine prices. The whole country was discontented and enraged; the King's advisers became thoroughly unpopular, and the government was brought into contempt.
John of Gaunt, it must be admitted, had been tried and found wanting; for though some of the mischances which fell upon him were independent of his control, he was certainly not without responsibility for the worst of them. Beginning with a strong policy, full of ambition and fire and intrigue, he was apparently one of those men who are born to make a noise in the world disproportionate to their effective power. Whether through fault or through misfortune, he failed as a general, as an administrator, and as a manager of men. Never at any time very acceptable with the people or their representatives, he had now earned a full measure of odium from all classes; and he made the crowning mistake of letting himself drift into a position of rivalry with the popular Prince of Wales.
To understand and appreciate the facts connected with the Conferences at Bruges, and especially with that in which Wyclif was engaged, one must bear in mind the clear distinction between the attack on the property of the English Church and the broader and more significant assault on the papal assumptions. The first movement was a question of domestic discipline, calculated in the eyes of Wyclif and his friends to purify and re-invigorate the national Church, whilst even laymen like the Duke of Lancaster could persuade themselves that they were doing God service by reducing the plethora from which religion so manifestly suffered in England. The other movement was one of national defense against a foreign invader, a contest having for its object the extrusion of an audacious tyranny which had been set up by aliens in the civil as well as in the spiritual domain, and one in which the strongest champions of the national Church might and did take an active part. There could be no doubt that the fight with Rome was more widely popular, or at any rate stirred up less of domestic discord, than that which converted nearly every regular and secular clergyman in the country into a center of loquacious disaffection.
Things would probably have gone better with John of Gaunt and his friends if they had pressed the cause against Rome some years earlier. It was natural that the disasters and discredit which fell upon the country during the last few years of the reign of Edward III. should practically destroy our chance of prevailing in conference over the papal representatives. Our virtual defeat at Bruges was in a measure the outcome of our defeat in Aquitaine, at Rochelle, and at Portsmouth. Beaten on land and at sea, by Frenchmen and Spaniards, dishonored at home by the King's inglorious old age, and so divided in counsels that no man, prince or duke or councilor, could act with sufficient authority and promptitude in the true interests of the country, we were evidently not in a position to speak at Avignon as we could have spoken five or ten years before.
1. Too much of Parliament may be at least as objectionable as too little of it. In January, 1379, after the Commons had with difficulty been prevailed upon to grant large supplies, the petitioned the Crown that they might not be called together again within the year. This is quite consistent with their resentment, four years earlier, when the twelve months were exceeded.
2. Determinatio quaedam de Dominio.
3. On the Conceptional Existence of God's Creation.
