hich was, that
henceforth it would not be a child, such as the late sovereign had
been, self-willed and void of understanding, but a Man that would rule
over them, in the full maturity of his understanding, and resolved to
do not so much his own will as the will of God.[62]

Thus did the spiritual and lay nobility, in and with the Parliament,
make good their claim to dispose of the crown. They went to work
against Richard II with less reserve than against Edward II. In the
latter case the Queen had taken part in the movement; they had set the
son in his father's stead. But this time they did not wait for the
actual consummation of the King's marriage; they raised a prince to
the throne who had openly opposed him in the field, and was not even
the next in succession. For there were still the descendants of an
elder brother left, who according to English usage had a prior right.
The Parliament held itself competent to settle on its own authority
even the succession to the crown. It enacted that it should belong to
the King's eldest son, and after him to his male issue, and on their
failure to his brothers and their issue. The proposal formally to
exclude succession in the female line did not pass; but for a long
while to come the actual practice had that effect.

Besides the motives involved in the extension of the Power of the
Estates in and for itself there was yet another reason for such a
proceeding. And this arose out of the growth, and increasing urgency,
of the religious divisions. The Lollards preached, and taught in
schools, according to their views: in the year 1396 in a petition to
Parliament they traced all the moral evils and defects of the world to
the fact that the clergy were endowed with worldly goods, and showed
the advantage which would arise from the application of these to the
service of the state and the prosecution of war.[63] They seem to have
flattered themselves that by this they would win over the lay lords,
but they were completely mistaken. For these remarked on the contrary
that their own property had no better legal foundation than that of
the clergy,[64] and only attached themselves to the rights of the
Church all the more zealously.

That which would have been impossible under Richard II's vacillating
government, the first Lancaster now undertook: in full agreement with
the Estates he a few days after his accession announced to Convocation
that he purposed to destroy heretics and heresi