president of some possible Lollard
commonwealth.[474] The king, with swift decisiveness, annihilated the
incipient treason. Oldcastle was himself arrested. He escaped out of the
Tower into Scotland; and while Henry was absent in France he seems to have
attempted to organise some kind of Scotch invasion; but he was soon after
again taken on the Welsh Border, tried and executed. An act which was
passed in 1414 described his proceedings as an "attempt to destroy the
king, and all other manner of estates of the realm, as well spiritual as
temporal, and also all manner of policy, and finally the laws of the land."
The sedition was held to have originated in heresy, and for the better
repression of such mischiefs in time to come, the lord chancellor, the
judges, the justices of the peace, the sheriffs, mayors, bailiffs, and
every other officer having government of people, were sworn on entering
their office to use their best power and diligence to detect and prosecute
all persons suspected of so heinous a crime.[475]

Thus perished Wycliffe's labour,--not wholly, because his translation of
the Bible still remained a rare treasure; as seed of future life, which
would spring again under happier circumstances. But the sect which he
organised, the special doctrines which he set himself to teach, after a
brief blaze of success, sank into darkness; and no trace remained of
Lollardry except the black memory of contempt and hatred with which the
heretics of the fourteenth century were remembered by the English people,
long after the actual Reformation had become the law of the land.[476]

So poor a close to a movement of so fair promise was due partly to the
agitated temper of the times; partly, perhaps, to a want of judgment in
Wycliffe; but chiefly and essentially because it was an untimely birth.
Wycliffe saw the evil; he did not see the remedy; and neither in his mind
nor in the mind of the world about him, had the problem ripened itself for
solution. England would have gained little by the premature overthrow of
the church, when the house out of which the evil spirit was cast out could
have been but swept and garnished for the occupation of the seven devils of
anarchy.

The fire of heresy continued to smoulder, exploding occasionally in
insurrection,[477] occasionally blazing up in nobler form, when some poor
seeker for the truth, groping for a vision of God in the darkness of the
years which followed, found his way into that h