on the legitimacy of his birth and claim.  An early marriage of his mother Joan of Kent, a granddaughter of Edward the First, with the Earl of Salisbury had been annulled; but the Lancastrian party used this first match to throw doubts on the validity of her subsequent union with the Black Prince and on the right of Richard to the throne.  The dread of Lancaster’s ambition is the first indication of the approach of what was from this time to grow into the great difficulty of the realm, the question of the succession to the Crown.  From the death of Edward the Third to the death of Charles the First no English sovereign felt himself secure from rival claimants of his throne.  As yet however the dread was a baseless one; the people were heartily with the Prince and his child.  The Duke’s proposal that the succession should be settled in case of Richard’s death was rejected; and the boy himself was brought into Parliament and acknowledged as heir of the Crown.

[Sidenote:  Wyclif and John of Gaunt]

To secure their work the Commons ended by obtaining the addition of nine lords with William of Wykeham and two other prelates among them to the royal Council.  But the Parliament was no sooner dismissed than the Duke at once resumed his power.  His anger at the blow which had been dealt at his projects was no doubt quickened by resentment at the sudden advance of the Lower House.  From the Commons who shrank even from giving counsel on matters of state to the Commons who dealt with such matters as their special business, who investigated royal accounts, who impeached royal ministers, who dictated changes in the royal advisers, was an immense step.  But it was a step which the Duke believed could be retraced.  His haughty will flung aside all restraints of law.  He dismissed the new lords and prelates from the Council.  He called back Alice Perrers and the disgraced ministers.  He declared the Good Parliament no parliament, and did not suffer its petitions to be enrolled as statutes.  He imprisoned Peter de la Mare, and confiscated the possessions of William of Wykeham.  His attack on this prelate was an attack on the clergy at large, and the attack became significant when the Duke gave his open patronage to the denunciations of Church property which formed the favourite theme of John Wyclif.  To Wyclif such a prelate as Wykeham symbolized the evil which held down the Church.  His administrative ability, his political energy, his wealth and the colleges at Winchester and at Oxford which it enabled him to raise before his death, were all equally hateful.  It was this wealth, this intermeddling with worldly business, which the ascetic reformer looked upon as the curse that robbed prelates and churchmen of that spiritual authority which could alone meet the vice and suffering of the time.  Whatever baser motives might spur Lancaster and his party, their projects of spoliation must have seemed to Wyclif projects of enfranchisement for the Church.  Poor and powerless