Gloucester carried his trouble to his confessor. The appointed heir to the throne a Lollard!—nor only that, but married to a grand-daughter of the Lollard Princess, a niece of the semi-Lollard King! What was to be done to save England to Catholicism?
Sir Thomas de Arundel laughed a low, quiet laugh in answer.
“What matters all that, my Lord? Is not Alianora my sister’s daughter? The lad is young, yielding, lazy, and lusty (self-indulgent, pleasure-loving.) Leave all to me.”
Arundel saw further than the Princess had done.
And Gloucester was Arundel’s slave. Item by item he worked the will of his master, and no one suspected for a moment whither those acts were tending. The obnoxious, politically-Lollard Duke of Lancaster was shunted out of the way, by being induced to undertake a voyage to Castilla for the recovery of the inheritance of his wife Constanca and her sister Isabel; a statute was passed conferring plenipotentiary powers on “our dearest uncle of Gloucester;” all vacant offices under the Crown were filled with orthodox nominees of the Regent; the Lollard Earl of Suffolk was impeached; a secret meeting was held at Huntingdon, when Gloucester and four other nobles solemnly renounced their allegiance to the King, and declared themselves at liberty to do what was right in their own eyes. The other four (of whom we shall hear again) were Henry Earl of Derby, son of the Duke of Lancaster; Richard Earl of Arundel, brother of Gloucester’s confessor; Thomas Earl of Nottingham his brother-in-law; and Thomas Earl of Warwick, a weak waverer, the least guilty of the evil five. The conspirators conferred upon themselves the grand title of “the Lords Appellants;” and to divert from themselves and their doings the public mind, they amused that innocent, unsuspecting creature by a splendid tournament in Smithfield.
Of one fact, as we follow their track, we must never lose sight:—that behind these visible five, securely hidden, stood the invisible one, Sir Thomas de Arundel, setting all these puppets in motion according to his pleasure, and for “the good of the Church;” working on the insufferable pride of Gloucester, the baffled ambition of Derby, the arrogant rashness of Arundel, the vain, time-serving nature of Nottingham, and the weak fears of Warwick. Did he think he was doing God service? Did he ever care to think of God at all?
The further career of the Lords Appellants must be told as shortly as possible, but without some account of it much of the remainder of my story will be unintelligible. They drew a cordon of forty thousand men round London, capturing the King like a bird taken in a net; granted to themselves, for their own purposes, twenty thousand pounds out of the royal revenues; met and utterly routed a little band raised by the Duke of Ireland with the object of rescuing the sovereign from their power; impeached those members of the Council who were loyalists and Lollards; plotted to murder the King and the whole Council, which included near blood relations of their own; prohibited the possession of any of Wycliffe’s books under severe penalties; murdered three, and banished two, of the five faithful friends of the King left in the Council. The Church stood to them above all human ties; and Sir Thomas de Arundel was ready to say “Absolvo te” to every one of them.
This reign of terror is known as the session of the Merciless Parliament, and it closed with the cruel mockery of a renewal of the oath of allegiance to the hapless and helpless King. Then Gloucester proceeded to distribute his rewards. The archbishopric of York was conferred on Sir Thomas de Arundel, and Gloucester appropriated as his own share of the rich spoil, the vast estates of the banished Duke of Ireland.
And then the traitor, robber, and murderer, knelt down at the feet of Archbishop Arundel, and heard—from man’s lips—“Thy sins are forgiven thee”—but not “Go, and sin no more.”
“Master Calverley, you? God have mercy! what aileth you?”