Note 183 — Chapter X · FREETHOUGHT IN THE RENAISSANCE

The main causes of the hostility he met from the English hierarchy and Government appear to have been, on the one hand, his change of political party, which put him in opposition to Archbishop Bourchier, and on the other his zealous championship of the authority of the papacy as against that of the Councils of the Church. It was expressly on the score of his denunciation of the Councils that he was tried and condemned.183 Thus the reward of his effort to reason down the menacing Lollards and rebut Wiclif184 was his formal disgrace and virtual imprisonment. Had he not recanted, he would have been burned: as it was, his books were; and it is on record that they consisted of eleven quartos and three folios of manuscript. Either because of his papalism or as a result of official intrigue, Church and lords and commons were of one mind against him; and the mob would fain have burned him with his books.185 In that age of brutal strife, when “neither the Church nor the opponents of the Church had any longer a sway over men’s hearts,”186 he figures beside the mindless prelates and their lay peers somewhat as does More later beside Henry VIII, as Reason versus the Beast; and it was illustrative of his entire lack of fanaticism that he made the demanded retractations—avowing his sin in “trusting to natural reason” rather than to Scripture and the authority of the Church—and went his way in silence to solitude and death. The ruling powers disposed of Lollardism in their own way; and in the Wars of the Roses every species of heretical thought seems to disappear. The bribe held out to the nation by the invasion of France had been fatally effectual to corrupt the spirit of moral criticism which inspired the Lollard movement at its best; and the subsequent period of rapine and strife reduced thought and culture to the levels of the Middle Ages.