Tyler, and many of Wiclif's enemies have with small success endeavoured
to connect his name with that affair. It arose from causes sufficiently
known to all acquainted with our history, and Wiclif is as little
responsible for it, as Luther for the famous rise of the peasants after
the publication of his doctrines. In May, 1382, Courtney, now Archbishop
of Canterbury, summoned a council to consider the doctrines attributed
to Wiclif. Eight bishops and fourteen doctors, with other learned
persons, met on the 17th of May, at Grey Friars in London. The
proceedings had scarcely commenced when the place in which they were
assembled was shaken by an earthquake, to the great alarm of the
doctors, who were disposed to attribute it to the Divine displeasure--an
opinion in which Wiclif coincided. The archbishop, however, explained it
differently, and the doctors, reassured, proceeded with their
deliberations.[24] After three days' careful consideration they
pronounced ten of the "conclusions" to be heretical, and the remaining
fourteen to be erroneous. The heretical notions being those on the
eucharist, his denial of the need of priestly absolution, his
declaration that clerical endowments were unlawful, and his condemnation
of the papal infallibility. Everything was done that appeared likely to
impart force and solemnity to this decision. After an imposing
procession through London, a friar was appointed to explain to the
people from St. Paul's the enormity of the heresy. Copies of the
sentence were forwarded to the leading bishops; and even to the clergy
about Lutterworth. Messengers were dispatched to the king, and to the
University of Oxford. Wiclif again appealed to the secular power. This
appeal has been complained of as opposed to his principles: after all,
it has been said, "the new apostle was in no haste to grasp the crown of
martyrdom."[25] But Wiclif did not depart from his own principles. He
held and taught that the secular power ought to preserve the lives and
liberties of the subjects, and it does not seem that he asked the
parliament to affirm the truth of his doctrines. The archbishop called
on the king to put down by force the growing heresy; and the monarch
readily answered the call, by issuing a writ to the Chancellor of
Oxford, directing him to search out such as were suspected of holding
these opinions, and to seize and imprison any who harboured Wiclif or
his followers. In his appeal to the parliament Wiclif had somewhat more
success. The king, at the instigation of the bishop, had promulgated an
ordinance in the form of an act of parliament, directing all sheriffs,
&c. to arrest any persons found preaching any of the doctrines condemned
at the convocation; but on the meeting of parliament this ordinance was
declared to be illegal, the parliament itself having had no share in
framing it--and they would not, they said, subject themselves to the
jurisdiction of the prelates in a manner unknown to their fathers. It
was, in fact, a bold attempt of the bishop to introduce something very
like the Holy Office into England.
But Wiclif's success ended here. He was now left to sustain the unequal
conflict alone. His principal supporters at Oxford had been summoned
before a synod to answer for their own delinquencies, and had been
compelled to retract or explain away their obnoxious sentiments. John of
Gaunt no longer stood by him. Perhaps sincerely shocked at his venturing
to question so sacred a doctrine as transubstantiation was then
generally believed to be, he earnestly recommended Wiclif to submit to
his diocesan--and left him to his fate. Wiclif was soon summoned to
appear before a convocation at Oxford, at which the archbishop presided,
and several bishops were present. He delivered in two statements of his
sentiments on the eucharist; one in Latin, the other in English. The
former is declared to be unintelligible--it is fenced about with all the
forms of scholastic dialectics, and may be passed by; the other, as it
is in English, was probably meant for the unlearned, and is plain and
perfectly comprehensible. It is evident that his matured and deliberate
views were the same as we have already stated them to be. His bearing
before the assembly was firm and manly--his enemies say haughty and
obstinate. He did not retract. The result was that his opinions were
again condemned, and himself deprived of his professorship of divinity,
and banished from the University.
He was not further molested,--at least for the next two years. This
interval was busily employed. A host of opponents sprung up against him
after the adjudication at Oxford, and he was not of a temper to let them
pass unanswered. His intense energy was little impaired by age or
anxiety, and his opponents still found him a ready antagonist. Bowed
down by persecution, his life by illness made a living death, he wavered
not, nor ceased from his labours. During his last years Wiclif suffered
much from paralysis--the effect, no doubt, of his anxious and stormy
life. His first attack was in 1379. Perhaps the knowledge of his weak
state prevented his enemies from pressing for the infliction of physical
punishment. But a few months before his death he was cited by Urban II.
to appear before him at Rome, to answer for his heresies. Wiclif was
unable from illness to go, but he addressed a letter to his holiness in
which he "tells his belief." The main points of it are his declaration
of his entire dependence on Christ as the Son of God, and of his
assurance of the supreme authority of Scripture. He acknowledges the
pope to be Christ's chief vicar on earth--but adds, that he ought to
follow the example of his master, who was the poorest of men when in
this world. "This I take as wholesome counsel that the pope leave his
worldly lordship to worldly lords, as Christ gave (charged) him, and
move speedily all his clerks (clergy) to do so: for thus did Christ, and
taught thus his disciples, till the fiend had blinded this world." He
declares that if he were able he would go to the pope; but as he cannot,
he supposes the pope will not show himself open anti-Christ by
commanding him again to do that which God had rendered him unable to do.
If his opinions can be prayed to be wrong, he is ready to recant; if it
be necessary to die for them, he is willing, "for that I hope were good
for me."
As he was assisting at the celebration of mass by his curate in his
parish church of Lutterworth, on the 29th of December, 1384, another and
more fatal stroke of paralysis deprived him of the use of speech and of
motion. He lingered two days, when his spirit ascended to that world
where misapprehension and strife are alike unknown. His corpse was
buried in the church; and there it rested, till forty years afterwards
the Council of Constance, at the same time that it crowned itself with
eternal infamy by its treacherous murder of John Huss and of Jerome,
condemned Wiclif's doctrines, and directed that his corpse should be
exhumed and burnt, "if it could be discerned from those of the
faithful." The order was obeyed. Richard Fleming, bishop of Lincoln, in
whose diocese Lutterworth was situated, directed the process. The
reformer's remains were taken up, burnt, and the ashes cast into the
Swift, a little stream that runs at the foot of the hill on which the
town is built. "Thus this brook," says Fuller, "hath conveyed his ashes
into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the
main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wiclif are the emblem of his doctrine,
which now is dispersed all the world over."
We have endeavoured, as far as our limits would allow us, to exhibit
Wiclif according to his own principles. It remains for us to add a few
words on his sentiments, and express our own impression of his
character. His opinions have been the subject of much disputation, and
it is often said that they are so enwrapped in explanations and
mystifications, that it is difficult to make out what they really were.
But to one desirous to understand them, the difficulty soon disappears.
The contemporary notices of him do not imply that there was any
obscurity: the charges brought against him; his own defences; the
references his followers make to him, do not suggest it. That his
opinions will appear contradictory to one who extracts from his
different writings, without regard to the circumstances and the time in
which each was written, there can be no doubt; but if it be borne in
mind that his creed, like that of every reformer, and especially of
every religious reformer, was progressive--that his opinions were slowly
formed, often forced upon his conviction after a long struggle against
them--so that he would more than any other lament the necessity imposed
upon him to admit, and especially to diffuse them,--if this gradual
formation of his creed be remembered, the difficulty of reconciling the
articles of it with the statements and reasonings to be found in others
of his writings, will not surprise any candid inquirer, whether he admit
the truth of the opinions or not. To us it appears he might truly be
called the first Protestant--the first who boldly and firmly protested
against the papal domination, both in relation to society and to
individual man. His doctrinal views were in the main those afterwards
adopted by Luther and the reformed churches--in others, he went far
beyond them, verging closely upon Puritanism; while to the last he held
many things now only retained by the Romish church.
His moral character was unimpeached. His sincerity has been questioned,
but to us it seems to stand firm and unshaken. His faults, however, are
manifest. Living up to the lofty character he set before him, he stooped
not to one who was unable to attain to the same elevation. A fierce
polemic, he is unmeasured in the expression of his wrath against all
whom he opposed. But we must not let our dislike of such violence lead
us too far. A wise man has told us "not to condemn bitter and earnest
writing." In truth, a man cannot beat down idols with a feather broom:
and Wiclif's task was not merely to sweep the dust off those about the
holy place. After all, Wiclif was abundantly repaid in his own coin. For
every handful of mud he flung, a cart-load was thrown back upon him. Let
him not be condemned for a fault common to every one who has undertaken
so apparently hopeless a task as the destruction of a mighty system of
evil. It is a fault that seems to spring out of the vehemence of temper
natural and almost necessary to the character of a reformer. The
vehemence of his language in some instances, and its cautiousness at
other times, appear to have arisen from the fact that, _seeing_ palpably
the evil practices of the religious orders about him, and the
consequences that resulted from them, he attacked them with an
overflowing asperity--while in matters of _doctrine_ he formed his
opinions deliberately, was conscious of all the difficulties of the
question, and spoke cautiously, moderately, and with an honest desire
not to obtrude extreme opinions. This, at least, appears to us the true
explanation.
We regard Wiclif as one of the noblest of our Worthies; and as long as
true manly earnestness and Christian worth are honoured by his
countrymen, his name will live in their remembrance, and be cherished
with devout gratitude, A true, honest, noble-hearted man, he recognised
the divinity within him, and followed its bidding--through evil and
through good report. With him worldly honours were nought; the fear of
man he knew not; he had a work to accomplish, and he turned not aside
from it. As long as he had a hand or a tongue to labour with, he ceased
not to labour. Wiclif was the pioneer in the great struggle to release
man from spiritual thraldom. He stood forth and proclaimed the forgotten
truth, that the soul of man is responsible alone to its Creator; that no
man can stand between his fellowman and his Divine Master. The welcome
with which his doctrine was met showed that the hollowness of the ground
upon which men stood was felt. He died, but his work survived him. In
this country a goodly band remained, and carried on what he had begun;
and when they were silenced, his opinions were cherished in private,
till on the introduction of the reformed doctrines they were lost in the
broader stream. It is probable, indeed, that these secret dissentients
within the English church largely contributed to the easy introduction
of the reformed opinions here. On the Continent, too, his views found a
home and a welcome. Carried into Bohemia immediately after his death,
they there spread widely; nor did the martyrdom of John Huss stop their
progress. The result was their accomplishment in the great Reformation.
The number of writings attributed to Wiclif, from tracts of a page up to
large and elaborate works, which remain in MS. scattered through public
libraries, is very great. Few of them have been printed, and it is not
creditable to our literature that while the various societies
established for the republication of the works of our earlier writers
are loading their shelves with much worthless rubbish, only one work
attributed to Wiclif (and that not known to be his) should have been
printed. The Religious Tract Society, a few years back, published a
volume of selections from his writings; but the language is modernized
with very little judgment, and the work is of course of no value.
The authorities we have consulted for this sketch are Wiclif's own
writings, so far as accessible to us; Walsingham, Knighton, and Wilkins;
the Lives by Lewis and Vaughan; the Introduction to the 'Hexapla;' the
various ecclesiastical histories; and the papers and prefaces by Dr.
Todd.
CHAUCER
Two undertakings of more than ordinary importance mark the second half
of the fourteenth century, and suggest on various grounds an interesting
and useful parallel. Pursuing one of these undertakings, the chief actor
in it collected vast sums of treasure by the taxation of the people of
England, drew from the peaceful and profitable avocations of industry
the materials for army after army of English citizens, and poured them
upon the soil of a neighbouring country, which he was determined at all
costs to conquer. To found for England a new empire on the Continent,
was the undertaking on which the brave, able, accomplished, but grasping
and unscrupulous Edward III. concentrated the energies of a life. About
the very same time that Edward began in earnest to prosecute this
undertaking, there was a youth, buried in the seclusion of study, not
less actively engaged in the promotion of another undertaking; that--too
gigantic in its character probably to be determined upon, or even
rightly estimated then--was doubtless dawning little by little upon his
mind. For this undertaking, he too drew supplies from all quarters, but
his levies were of books, his treasure the accumulated stores of thought
that time had bequeathed to the world. And when he had mastered all that
could thus be obtained, he went forth into the world to study men, as
well as man, before he attempted the conquest of the empire _he_
meditated, over the hearts and minds of his fellows. And how fared these
respective undertakings? Failures of course affected the ambitious
student as well as the ambitious warrior, but we have not in the one
case, as in the other, a record of them; let us therefore look simply at
the successes of both, and the results. The battle of Creci, the first
great encounter between the two nations, was won in 1346, and in the
same year the first important poem of the first great English poet is
understood to have been produced. Ten years later, Creci had been
followed by Poitiers; the 'Court of Love,' by the noble 'Troilus and
Cressida;' and by an announcement contained in the concluding lines of
that work, which showed the poet had essayed and was satisfied as to his
powers, and was preparing to give to England a work that should rival
the divine comedy of the illustrious Italian (Dante) lately deceased.
"Go, little book," wrote the poet--
"go, little tragedy,
Where God my maker, yet ere that I die.
So send me might to make some comedy."
Sixteen or seventeen years more elapse, and the iron-willed sovereign
bends beneath a fiat even more potent than his own, and in deep
humiliation feels that he is utterly defeated; about the same time the
poet is receiving from the lips of an illustrious contemporary an
addition to the materials for the work that is to form the culminating
point of his life and fame, the last of a long series of productions
destined to be as permanent as the language itself which they have done
so much to create, the 'Comedy,' in short, of which he has so long
dreamed;--he is hearing from Petrarch the exquisitely pathetic story of
Griselda. Edward dies in 1377, a broken-hearted man; deserted, even on
his palace-hearth, at the last hour, by those he had fed and clothed and
honoured; he who would have conquered France cannot even now command the
presence of a single lackey: when Chaucer dies, it is amidst the
profound regrets of all who knew him personally or through his works;
and as he goes "home" and takes his "wages," it is with the conviction
that he has indeed done his "worldly task," in the foundation of what,
all things considered, it is no national vanity to call the mightiest of
Literatures. The parallel we have thus ventured to draw does not even
end here. Whilst we still drink refreshing draughts from Chaucer's "well
of English undefiled," and wonder to see how little of essentially
differing qualities his greatest successors have infused into the
national literature, the only effect, if there be any one now
perceptible, of Edward's unjust attempt, or of his brilliant victories,
is in the unhappy jealousy which these and similar events have left in
the minds of the people who most suffered from them. Truly if the sword
in its day is honoured at the expense of the pen, the pen in the long
run repays itself with sweeping interest. We have said nothing in these
remarks of the connexion between the two personages whose respective
undertakings we have placed in juxtaposition with each other, but that
connexion is not the least interesting or least important portion of the
biography of either: we do not know whether Edward intentionally
forwarded Chaucer's poetical undertakings, but it is clear that by his
patronage they _were_ forwarded--and greatly; whilst Chaucer, on the
other hand, was one of the most trusted and valued of the king's
servants; promoting Edward's views by his personal services in the field
as a soldier, and still more influentially by his experience and wisdom
in the cabinet as a diplomatist.
It is a curious though a very common characteristic of certain
biographers, in dealing with cases where information is as desirable as
it is meagre, to make the little less, by throwing all sorts of doubts
upon the facts that we thought had been settled and realized. They have,
in short, a horror of all speculations but those which may tend to
disturb existing beliefs. Unable to build themselves, they would deny to
others the use of the necessary foundations. Why, for instance, must
there be a doubt excited as to the date of Chaucer's birth? Most of the
old writers say it took place in the second year of the reign of Edward
III., 1328, and their statement is supported by a host of indirect
evidences, which show that it must have been about the time they
mention. But it is urged, that when Chaucer, in 1386, gave his
deposition in the controversy between Lord Scrope and Sir Robert
Grosvenor relative to the right of using a certain coat-of-arms (an
important part of Chaucer's biography, to which we shall subsequently
refer), he described himself "of the age of forty and upwards," and as
having borne arms for twenty-seven years. Do the doubters therefore
abide by their own necessary inference that he was born in 1345, and
became a soldier at the ripe age of thirteen? Not a whit; they
acknowledge that such a date cannot be correct; it has even been pointed
out that other persons who were examined at the same time are known to
have been from ten to twenty years older than the depositions make them.
Whatever, therefore, the explanation of the phrase "forty and upwards,"
it is clear that it is not to be received in contradiction of the date
that makes the poet to have been in his fifty-fifth year. Yet the doubt
is raised just the same! So again as to the place of Chaucer's birth. In
his prose work, the 'Testament of Love,' where the poet is as evidently
and avowedly referring to himself as poet well can, he speaks of the
City of London that is "to me so dear and sweet, in which I was forth
grown; and more kindly love have I to that place, than to any other in
earth; as every kindly creature hath full appetite to that place of his
kindly engendure, and to wiln [wish] rest and peace in that stead
[place] to abide." But then as some biographers have mistaken various
other passages in that work, this passage also is to be doubted, nay,
the whole production laid aside as one that cannot be relied on. It is
true, that for a comprehensive and trustworthy Life of Chaucer greater
care must be shown in the use of the somewhat perplexing materials that
wait the biographer's disposal than ever yet has been shown, but it is
not by a system of wholesale negation that the work will be
accomplished. Nothing can come of nothing, and, trite as the observation
may be, there are some few for whom it still seems requisite to be
asserted. Not simply useless, but mischievous, is that kind of biography
which delights to reduce what at all events looks like flesh and blood
to a pure skeleton, and has no objection to take away even a bone or two
from that.
Chaucer then was born in 1328, in London; and there doubtless he spent
his earliest years, until, as he says, he was "forth-grown." Of his
parents we know nothing direct. A long list of persons has been
collected, who during the period in question bore the name of Chaucer,
which was derived from the old Norman word Chaucier or Chaussier,
signifying a shoemaker; and used in that sense during the poet's life by
Richard of Hampole, a hermit, who translated the Gospel of St. Mark, and
died in 1394. The passage, "There cometh one mightier than I after me,
the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose,"
is thus rendered by Richard: "A stalworthier man than I shall come after
me, of whom I am not worthy, downfalling or kneeling, to loose the thong
of his chawcers." But that the poet's parents were certainly persons of
wealth, probably also of consideration, may be assumed from the
excellence of the education given to their son, and from the ready
access which he found, on entering into public life, to the very person
and favour of the sovereign. Chaucer, in a word, was born a gentleman;
and the fact is of importance, not only for the incalculable benefit
that it involved through the instrumentality of that education, but as
showing us still more plainly than otherwise could have been shown the
true nobility of the poet's mind. It is Chaucer who tells us, in the
'Wife of Bath's' tale, that he who ever intendeth to perform all kinds
of gentle deeds is the greatest gentleman, and that he who will perform
none of them--
"He is not gentle, be he duke or earl;"
and that the poet here speaks his own sentiments, while relating the
sentiments of the knight's apparently aged and hideous bride, is clear
from his ballad on the same subject, where it is inculcated that unless
a man love virtue and fly vice,
"He is not gentle, though he riche seem,
All wear he mitre, crown, or diademe."
Where Chaucer was educated is uncertain; but the assertions of the older
biographers that he was both at Cambridge and Oxford, and that he
subsequently went to Paris, then the most famous and flourishing of all
the European universities, is supported by the known facts in the lives
of other eminent men, who became, like him, distinguished by their
scholastic attainments. Grostete, Roger Bacon, and Michael Scott, all
pursued the exact route ascribed to Chaucer. The poet is supposed to
refer to himself under the designation of "Philogenet of Cambridge,
clerk," in the 'Court of Love,' and the indications of a correct
knowledge of the locality exhibited in the Reve's Tale are referred to
as an additional corroboration of his residence in the neighbourhood.
Even the very college is named--Clare Hall--at which he studied, and
where he may have written his earlier poems, including the 'Court of
Love.' Clare Hall, Speght says, is the same with that mentioned in the
Reve's Tale, under the denomination of the Soleres or Scholars'. It is
to be hoped the licentious freaks of the scholars, as described in that
tale, are not to be received as characteristic of the order at the
period that Chaucer was a member.