[Sidenote:  John of Gaunt]

At the moment of their triumph the assailants of the Church found a leader in John of Gaunt.  The Duke of Lancaster now wielded the actual power of the Crown.  Edward himself was sinking into dotage.  Of his sons the Black Prince, who had never rallied from the hardships of his Spanish campaign, was fast drawing to the grave; he had lost a second son by death in childhood; the third, Lionel of Clarence, had died in 1368.  It was his fourth son therefore, John of Gaunt, to whom the royal power mainly fell.  By his marriage with the heiress of the house of Lancaster the Duke had acquired lands and wealth, but he had no taste for the policy of the Lancastrian house or for acting as leader of the barons in any constitutional resistance to the Crown.  His pride, already quickened by the second match with Constance to which he owed his shadowy kingship of Castille, drew him to the throne; and the fortune which placed the royal power practically in his hands bound him only the more firmly to its cause.  Men held that his ambition looked to the Crown itself, for the approaching death of Edward and the Prince of Wales left but a boy, Richard, the son of the Black Prince, a child of but a few years old, and a girl, the daughter of the Duke of Clarence, between John and the throne.  But the Duke’s success fell short of his pride.  In the campaign of 1373 he traversed France without finding a foe and brought back nothing save a ruined army to English shores.  The peremptory tone in which money was demanded for the cost of this fruitless march while the petitions of the Parliament were set aside till it was granted roused the temper of the Commons.  They requested—­it is the first instance of such a practice—­a conference with the lords, and while granting fresh subsidies prayed that the grant should be spent only on the war.  The resentment of the government at this advance towards a control over the actual management of public affairs was seen in the calling of no Parliament through the next two years.  But the years were disastrous both at home and abroad.  The war went steadily against the English arms.  The long negotiations with the Pope which went on at Bruges through 1375, and in which Wyclif took part as one of the royal commissioners, ended in a compromise by which Rome yielded nothing.  The strife over the Statute of Labourers grew fiercer and fiercer, and a return of the plague heightened the public distress.  Edward was now wholly swayed by Alice Perrers, and the Duke shared his power with the royal mistress.  But if we gather its tenor from the complaints of the succeeding Parliament his administration was as weak as it was corrupt.  The new lay ministers lent themselves to gigantic frauds.  The chamberlain, Lord Latimer, bought up the royal debts and embezzled the public revenue.  With Richard Lyons, a merchant through whom the king negotiated with the gild of the Staple, he reaped enormous profits by raising the price of imports and by lending to the Crown at usurious rates of interest.  When the empty treasury forced them to call a Parliament the ministers tampered with the elections through the sheriffs.