sanctuary with the monks of his cathedral.  Every effort was made to drag him from his refuge.  Some Louvain merchants, to whom he had bound himself for the king’s debts, demanded that he should be surrendered to their custody until the money was paid.  He was summoned to court and afterwards to parliament.  But he prudently remained safe within the walls of Christ Church, and preached a course of sermons to the monks, in which he compared himself to St. Thomas of Canterbury, and hinted at the danger of his incurring his prototype’s fate.  Edward replied to this challenge by a lengthy pamphlet, called the libellus famosus.  The violence and unmeasured terms of the tractate suggest the hand of Bishop Orleton, Stratford’s lifelong foe, who had by Burghersh’s recent death become the most prominent of the courtly prelates.  The archbishop was declared to be the sole cause of the king’s failures.  He had left Edward without funds, and in trusting to him the king had leant on a broken reed.  Stratford justified himself in another sermon in which he invited inquiry and demanded trial by his peers.

Edward so far relented as to issue letters of safe-conduct enabling the archbishop to attend the parliament summoned for April 23, 1341.  But when Stratford took his place, the king refused to meet him, and ordered him to answer in the exchequer the complaints brought against him.  The lords upheld the primate’s cause, and declared that in no circumstances could a peer of parliament be brought to trial elsewhere than in full parliament.  Edward’s fury abated when he saw that he would get no grant unless he gave way.  He restored Stratford to his favour, and acceded to his request that he should answer in parliament and not in the exchequer.  The childish controversy ended with the personal victory of the primate and the formal re-assertion of the important principle of trial by peers.  But not even then was Edward able to get a subsidy.  He was further forced to embody in the statute of the year the doctrines that auditors of the accounts of the royal officers should be elected in parliament, and that all ministers should be chosen by the king, after consultation with his estates, and should resign their offices at each meeting of parliament and be prepared to answer all complaints before it.

Thus the fallen minister brought the estates the greatest triumph over the prerogative won during Edward’s reign.  Before long Edward was magnanimous enough to resume friendly relations with him, but he was never suffered to take a prominent part in politics.  He died in 1348, after spending his later years in the business of his see.  It was a strange irony of fate that this worldly and politic ecclesiastic should have perforce become the champion of the rights of the Church and the liberties of the nation.  His victory established a remarkable solidarity between the high ecclesiastical party and the popular opposition, which was to last nearly as long as the century.  Disgust at this alliance moved Edward to take up the anti-clerical attitude which henceforth marks the policy of the crown until the accession of the house of Lancaster.