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Such were the unhappy affairs which clouded the last days of the celebrated Black Prince, and even tended to sow dissension between him and his father. He died on Trinity Sunday, the 8th of June, 1376, in the forty-sixth year of his age, to the immense regret of the people, who regarded his military achievements, though of no solid advantage to the nation, with a deep national pride, and, from his opposition to corruptions at home, esteemed him as a most patriotic prince. It is clear that he must have been of a naturally noble nature, and possessed of personal qualities as engaging as his courage and military genius were unrivalled; but his warlike education had blunted many of the finest feelings of the heart, and led him to become the scourge of France, and in a great measure useless to his own country. His body was drawn by twelve horses from London to Canterbury, the whole court and Parliament following through the city; and he was buried in the cathedral, near the shrine of Thomas Becket.

After his death the Duke of Lancaster recovered his ascendency in the state and over the king, who, grown indolent, and devoted only to the society of his artful mistress, paid little attention to State affairs. John of Gaunt hastened to undo all that the Black Prince had effected. He caused his own Steward, Sir Thomas Hungerford, to be made Speaker of the House of Commons. He restored his faction there, and soon had Sir Peter de la Mare, the late Speaker, arrested, and the celebrated William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, deprived of his temporalities, on charges of embezzlement which could not be proved, and dismissed from court. The duke went so far as not only to implore that the Lord Latimer, but Alice Perrers, should be freed from the censures passed upon them by the late Parliament in the name of the king, and restored to their former condition and privileges. The present Parliament, however, was not so completely packed by John of Gaunt but that it possessed a spirit of opposition, which insisted that the accused should be put upon their trial; and the bishops demanded the same justice towards William of Wykeham, one of the greatest men of the age, the architect of Windsor Castle, the founder of St. Mary's College at Winchester and of New College at Oxford.

It is said that we owe it to the resentment of John of Gaunt against the bishops that he took up so earnestly the cause of Wycliffe, the great English reformer, and thus became a most effectual champion and guardian of the Reformation. Wycliffe, who was a parish priest at this time, living at Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, and the prebendary of Aust, in the collegiate church of Westbury, in the diocese of Worcester, had been a member of a commission sent by Edward to Pope Gregory XI., which met at Bruges; and it is remarkable that this glimpse of the papal court is said to have had the same effect on him as the visit of Luther afterwards to Rome. He became a decided Church reformer, and being a teacher at Oxford, had ample opportunity of making public his ideas. His denunciation of Church abuses, and opposition to many of its doctrines, had caused him to be cited by a convocation of the clergy to appear at St. Paul's on the 3rd of February, 1377, to answer to the charges against him. Here he was attended by John of Gaunt and the Earl Marshal, Lord Percy. These noblemen and the bishops became mutually very hot on the question, and the Duke of Lancaster is reported to have threatened to drag Courtenay, the Bishop of London, who presided, by the hair of the head out of the church. A riot was the consequence, the Duke of Lancaster protecting Wycliffe; and the people, who were very jealous of Lancaster's overgrown power, resenting his insult to the bishop, broke into his house and that of Lord Percy, killing Lord Percy's chaplain, and doing immense damage to the duke's palace. The two noblemen escaped across the water to Kennington, where the widow of the Black Prince, the "Fair maid of Kent," and her son Richard, the heir apparent, resided. The riot ran so high that the debates of Parliament were interrupted, and the mob reversed the duke's arms as a traitor.

The king, completing the fiftieth year of his reign and the sixty-fourth of his life, published a general amnesty for all minor offences; still however, through the influence of Lancaster, excluding Wykeham of Winchester. He was now fast failing, and passed his time between Eltham Palace and his manor of Shene (or Sheen), near Richmond. The last days of this great monarch were like those of many others who during their lives ruled men with a high hand. They were desolate and deserted. Nobles and courtiers were now looking out for the rising sun, and paying it their assiduous adoration. By some this was held to be the Duke of Lancaster, against whose designs on the throne the people had called on the king, before the death of the Black Prince, to guard; and he had named his grandson Richard, then not six years old, his successor. By others Richard was deemed the true fountain of future favour, and all deserted the dying king, except his deeply interested mistress, who, after securing everything else of value that she could, drew the diamond ring from the finger of the dying monarch, and departed. The servants had gone before to plunder the house, and only a solitary, faithful priest, preferring his duty to the things of this world, hastened to the bedside of the departing monarch, held aloft his crucifix, and remained in that position till the once mighty king had breathed his last.

Englishmen look with pride to the reign of Edward III., as one of those which stamped the martial ascendency of their race; and unquestionably it was an era of high military glory. But, beyond the glory, what was the genuine advantage won by Edward III. and his heroic son? Neither in France nor in Scotland, the scenes of his feats of arms, did he retain a foot of the land which he conquered, except Calais and its little circle of environs. In fact, in France, he lost much territory which he inherited. Of all the time—a great and invaluable lifetime—spent, of all the human lives destroyed, of all the taxes wrung from his people, there remained no fruits but the small district of Calais, destined to furnish fresh cause of feud, and a heritage of eternal hate on the part of France towards England. But, so far as Edward III.'s foreign expeditions led his great and factious nobles abroad, they ensured a long and settled quiet at home. That quiet, it is true, was not free from oppressions and from plunderings of the people by the practice of purveyance. Edward ruled with a high hand, and kept both his nobles and people in subjection; but the exactions of the Crown were, at their worst, far more tolerable than those of a crowd of barons and their vassals, and the horrors which civil dissensions inflicted on the people. With all the drain of men and barones minores, or lesser nobility, to the wars, there were constant complaints of robberies, murders, and other outrages committed under protection of the great; but in no degree so extensive as at the times when the restless and quarrelsome nobles were all at home. The king, too, driven to straits by the constant want of money for his wars, always made very free in levying taxes without consent of Parliament, and in procuring provisions by what was styled purveyance. When the king had no money his family must subsist, and therefore he was obliged to send out his servants as purveyors, who seized provisions wherever they could find them, and gave tallies, or wooden memoranda, of what they took, at what rate they pleased; the price to be obtained as best it might, or stopped out of the next taxes.

But for all these things the king was called to account on each fresh application to Parliament for supplies. By this means the Parliament during his reign acquired a great amount of influence, as it had done under Edward I. from the same cause, and began to feel its power; so that, as we have seen, the king was obliged to renew the Great Charter fifteen times during his reign. So also we see, in the last years of his reign, the Parliament impeached his ministers, and drove Lord Neville and Lord Latimer from his service. The power of the barons was thus considerably depressed; and, at the same time, that of the Crown was restrained, and by nothing more than by a statute passed in the twenty-fifth year of Edward's reign, limiting the charge of high treason—before very loose and expandable, at the royal pleasure—to four principal heads: namely, conspiring the death of the king, queen, or his eldest son; levying war against him in his kingdom, or adhering to his enemies; counterfeiting the Great Seal, or bringing false money into the land; slaying the royal officers while in discharge of their duty; and even on these grounds no penalty was to be inflicted without the sanction of Parliament.

Trade in this reign was at a low ebb, the natural result of war: yet Edward made efforts to introduce woollen manufactures, having observed their value amongst the Flemings, at the same time that he injured commerce by seizing so many of its ships to convey his troops and stores. Altogether, it was a reign, during which, owing to the necessities of the king and the nobles, the people were slowly advancing, and in which they were considerably relieved from the encroachments and exactions of the Church by the firm conduct of the king. He passed a statute of provisors, making it penal for bishops or clergy to receive bulls from Rome, and menacing with outlawry any who appealed to Rome against judgments passed in England. Parliament, encouraged by this, went further, declaring that the Pope levied five times more taxes in England than the king; adding that they would no longer endure it, and even plainly talking of throwing off all papal authority. In fact, in this reign really began the Reformation. Altogether, therefore, the reign of Edward III. is as remarkable for the growth of popular power as for that of military fame.