Lancaster’s strategy, in the early years of the renewed war, consisted mainly of attempts to wear down the force of France by devastating raids; he hoped to provoke the enemy to battle by striking at the heart of his realm, but Character of the war. never achieved his purpose. Warned by the disasters of Creçy and Poitiers, Charles V. and his great captain Bertrand du Guesclin would never commit themselves to an engagement in the open field. They let the English invaders pass by, garrisoning the towns but abandoning the countryside. Since Lancaster, in his great circular raids, had never the leisure to sit down to a siege—generally a matter of long months in the 14th century—he repeatedly crossed France leaving a train of ruined villages behind him, but having accomplished nothing else save the exhaustion of his own army. For the French always followed him at a cautious distance, cutting off his stragglers, and restricting the area of his ravages by keeping flying columns all around his path. But while the duke was executing useless marches across France, the outlying lands of Aquitaine were falling away, one after the other, to the enemy. The limit of the territory which still remained loyal was ever shrinking, and what was once lost was hardly ever regained. Almost the only reconquest made was that of the city of Limoges, which was stormed in September 1370 by the troops of the Black Prince, who rose from his sick-bed to strike his last blow at the rebels. His success did almost as much harm as good to his cause, for the deliberate sack of the city was carried out with such ruthless severity that it roused wild wrath rather than terror in the neighbouring regions. Next spring the prince returned to England, feeling himself physically unable to administer or defend his duchy any longer.
The greater part of Poitou, Quercy and Rouergue had been lost, and the English cause was everywhere losing ground, when a new danger was developed. Since Sluys the enemy had never disputed the command of the seas; but in English reverses. 1372 a Spanish fleet joined the French, and destroyed off La Rochelle a squadron which was bringing reinforcements for Guienne. The disaster was the direct result of the campaign of Najera—for Henry of Trastamara, who had long since dethroned and slain his brother Peter the Cruel, remained a consistent foe of England. From this date onward Franco-Spanish fleets were perpetually to be met not only in the Bay of Biscay but in the Channel; they made the voyage to Bordeaux unsafe, and often executed descents on the shores of Kent, Sussex, Devon and Cornwall. It was to no effect that, in the year after the battle of La Rochelle, Lancaster carried out the last, the most expensive, and the most fruitless of his great raids across France. He marched from Calais to Bordeaux, inflicted great misery on Picardy, Champagne and Berry, and left half his army dead by the way.
This did not prevent Bertrand du Guesclin from expelling from his dominions John of Brittany, the one ally whom King Edward possessed in France, or from pursuing a consistent career of petty conquest in the heart of Aquitaine. By 1374 little was left of the great possessions which the English had held beyond the Channel save Calais, and the coast slip from Bordeaux to Bayonne, which formed the only loyal part of the duchy of Guienne. Next year King Edward sued for peace—he failed to obtain it, finding the French terms too hard for acceptance—but a truce at least was signed at Bruges (Jan. 1375) which endured till a few weeks before his death.
These two last years of Edward’s reign were filled with an episode of domestic strife, which had considerable constitutional importance. The nation ascribed the series of disasters which had filled the space from 1369 to 1375 entirely Domestic strife. to the maladministration of Lancaster and the king’s favourites, failing to see that it was largely due to the mere fact that England was not strong enough to hold down Aquitaine, when France was administered by a capable king and served by a great general. Hence there arose, both in and out of parliament, a violent agitation for the removal of Lancaster from power, and the punishment of the favourites, who were believed, with complete justification, to be misusing the royal name for their own private profit. Among the leaders of this agitation were the clerical ministers whom John of Gaunt had expelled from office in 1371, and chiefly William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, the late chancellor; they were helped by Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, a personal enemy of Lancaster, and could count on the assistance of the prince of Wales when he was well enough to take a part in politics. The greater part of the House of Commons was on their side, and on the whole they may be regarded as the party of constitutional protest against maladministration. But there was another movement on foot at the same time, which cut across this political agitation in the most bewildering fashion. Protests against the corruption of the Agitation against the Church. Church and the interference of the papacy in national affairs had always been rife in England. At this moment they were more prevalent than ever, largely in consequence of the way in which the popes at Avignon had made themselves the allies and tools of the kings of France. The Statutes of Praemunire and Provisors had been passed a few years before (1351-1365) to check papal pretensions. There was a strong anti-clerical party, whose practical aim was to fill the coffers of the state by large measures of disendowment and confiscations of Church property. The intellectual head of this party at the time was John Wycliffe, a famous Oxford Wycliffe. teacher, and for some time master of Balliol College. In his lectures and sermons he was always laying stress on the unsatisfactory state of the national church and the infamous corruption of the papacy. The doctrine which first made him famous, and commended him to all members of the anti-clerical faction, was that unworthy holders of spiritual endowments ought to be dispossessed of them, because “dominion” should depend on “grace.” Churchmen, small and great, as he held, had been corrupted, because they had fallen away from the early Christian idea of apostolic poverty. Instead of discharging their proper functions, bishops and abbots had become statesmen or wealthy barons, and took no interest in anything save politics. The monasteries, with their vast possessions, had become corporations of landlords, instead of associations for prayer and good works. The papacy, with its secular ambitions, and its insatiable greed for money, was the worst abuse of all. A bad pope, and most popes were bad, was the true Antichrist, since he was always overruling the divine law of the scriptures by his human ordinances. Every man, as Wycliffe taught—using the feudal analogies of contemporary society—is God’s tenant-in-chief, directly responsible for his acts to his overlord; the pope is always thrusting himself in between, like a mesne-tenant, and destroying the touch between God and man by his interference. Sometimes his commands are merely presumptuous; sometimes—as when, for example, he preaches crusades against Christians for purely secular reasons—they are the most horrible form of blasphemy. Wycliffe at a later period of his life developed views on doctrinal matters, not connected with his original thesis about the relations between Church and State, and foreshadowed most of the leading tenets of the reformers of the 16th century. But in 1376-1377 he was known merely as the outspoken critic of the “Caesarean clergy” and the papacy. He had a following of enthusiastic disciples at Oxford, and scattered adherents both among the burghers and the knighthood, the nucleus of the party that afterwards became famous as the Lollards. But they had not yet differentiated themselves from the body of those who were merely anti-clerical, without being committed to any theories of religious reform.
Since Wycliffe was, above all things, the enemy of the political clergy of high estate, and since those clergy were precisely the leaders of the attack upon John of Gaunt, it came to pass that hatred of a common foe drew the duke and John of Gaunt and Wycliffe. the doctor together for a space. There was a strange alliance between the advocate of clerical reform, and the practical exponent of secular misgovernment. The only point on which they were agreed was that it would be highly desirable to strip the Church of most of her endowments, in order to fill the exchequer of the state. Lancaster hoped to use Wycliffe as his mouthpiece against his enemies; Wycliffe hoped to see Lancaster disendowing bishops and monasteries and defying the pope. Hence the attempt of the political bishops to get Wycliffe condemned as a heretic became inextricably mixed with the attempt of the constitutional party, to which the bishops belonged, to evict the duke from his position of first councillor to the king and director of the policy of the realm.
The struggle began in the parliament of 1376, called by the anti-Lancastrian party the “Good Parliament.” Headed by the earl of March, William Courtenay, bishop of London, The “Good Parliament.” and Sir Peter de la Mare, the daring speaker of the House of Commons, the duke’s enemies began their campaign by accusing the king’s ministers and favourites of corruption. Here they were on safe ground, for the misdeeds of Lord Latimer—the king’s chamberlain, Lord Neville—his steward, Richard Lyons—his financial agent, and Alice Perrers—his greedy and shameless mistress, Overthrow of the king’s favourites. had been so flagrant that it was hard for Lancaster to defend them. In face of the evidence brought forward the old king and his son had to abandon their friends to the angry parliament. Latimer and Lyons were condemned to imprisonment and forfeiture of their goods, Alice Perrers was banished from court. Encouraged by this victory, the parliament passed on to constitutional reforms, forced on the king a council of twelve peers nominated by themselves, who were to exercise over him much the same control Constitutional reforms. that the lords ordainers had held over his father, and compelled him to assent to a long list of petitions which, if properly carried out, would have removed most of the practical grievances of the nation. Having so done they dispersed, not guessing that Lancaster had yielded so easily because he was set on undoing their work the moment that they were gone.
This, however, was the case; after the shortest of intervals the duke executed something like a coup d’état. In his father’s name he released Latimer and Lyons, dismissed the council of twelve, imprisoned Peter de la Mare, John of Gaunt re-establishes the royal power. sequestrated the temporalities of Bishop Wykeham, and sent the earl of March out of the realm. Alice Perrers took possession again of the king, and all his corrupt courtiers came back to him. A royal edict declared the statutes of the “Good Parliament” null and void. Lancaster would never have dared to defy public opinion and challenge the constitutional party to a life-and-death struggle in this fashion, had it not been that his brother the prince of Death of the Black Prince. Wales had died while the “Good Parliament” was sitting; thus the opposition had been deprived of their strongest support. The prince’s heir was a mere child, Richard of Bordeaux, aged only nine. It was feared by some that Duke John might carry his ambitions so far as to aim at the throne—he could do what he pleased with his doting father, and flaws might have been picked in the marriage of the Black Prince and his wife Joan of Kent, who were cousins, and therefore within the “prohibited degrees.” As a matter of fact Lancaster was a more honest man than his enemies suspected; he hastened to acknowledge his little nephew’s rights, acknowledged him as prince of Wales, and introduced him as his grandfather’s heir before the parliament of January 1377.
The character of this body was a proof of the great strength of the royal name and power even in days when parliamentary institutions had been long in existence, and were supposed to act as a check on the crown. To legalize his arbitrary acts Duke John dared to summon the estates together, after he had issued stringent orders to the sheriffs to exclude his enemies and return his friends when the members for the Commons were chosen. He obtained a house of the complexion that he desired, and having a strong following among the peers actually succeeded in undoing all the work of 1376. No sign of trouble or rebellion followed, the opposition being destitute of a fighting leader. March had left the realm; Bishop Wykeham showed an unworthy subservience by suing for pardon through the mediation of Alice Perrers. Only Bishop Courtenay refused to be terrorized; he chose this moment to open a campaign against the duke’s ally, John Wycliffe, who was arraigned for heresy before the ecclesiastical courts. His trial, however, ended in a scandalous fiasco. Lancaster and his friend Lord Percy came to St Paul’s, and so insulted and browbeat the bishop, that the proceedings degenerated into a riot, and reached no conclusion (Feb. 19). Courtenay dared not recommence them, and Lancaster ruled as he pleased till his father, five months later, died. Deserted Death of Edward III. by his worthless courtiers and plundered on his death-bed by his greedy mistress, the victor of Sluys and Creçy sank into an unhonoured grave. It was a relief to the nation that he was gone. Yet there was a general feeling that chaos might follow. If Lancaster should justify the malevolent rumours that were afloat by making a snatch at the crown, the last state of the realm might be worse than the first.
Duke John, however, was a better man than his enemies supposed. He was loyal to the crown according to his lights, and showed a chivalrous self-denial that had hardly been expected from him. He saluted his little nephew as Richard II. king without a moment’s hesitation, though he was aware that with the commencement of a new reign his own dictatorship had come to an end. The princess of Wales, in whose hands the young Richard II. was placed, had never been his friend, and was surrounded by adherents of her deceased husband, who belonged to the constitutional party. Disarmed, however, by the duke’s frank submission they wisely resolved not to push him to extremes, and the first council which was appointed to act for the new monarch was a sort of “coalition ministry” in which Lancaster’s followers as well as his foes were represented. For that very reason it was lacking in strength and unity of purpose, and proved lamentably incapable of dealing with the problems of the moment.
Of these the most pressing was the renewal of the French war; the truce had expired a few weeks before the death of Edward III., and the new reign began with a series The French war. of military disasters. The French fleet landed in great force in Sussex, burnt Rye and Hastings and routed the shire levies. Simultaneously the seneschal of Aquitaine was defeated in battle, and Bergerac, the last great town in the inland which remained in English hands, was captured by the duke of Anjou.