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Updated: May 8, 2025
He was a strenuous controversialist, chiefly against the Lollards; but his free style of argument, and especially his denial of the infallibility of the Church, led him into trouble, and on being offered the choice of abjuration or death at the stake, he chose the former, but nevertheless was deprived of his bishopric, had his books burned, and spent his latter days in the Abbey of Thorney, Cambridgeshire.
And, beshrew me, much as I love thy cause, much as thou hast with thy sorrows and thy princely beauty glamoured and spelled my heart and my hand, ay, so that I, the son of a Lollard, forget the wrongs the Lollards sustained from the House of Lancaster; so that I, who have seen the glorious fruitage of a Republic, yet labour for thee, to overshadow the land with the throne of ONE yet yet, lady yet, if I thought thou wert to be the same Margaret as of old, looking back to thy dead kings, and contemptuous of thy living people, I would not bid one mother's son lift lance or bill on thy behalf."
In the Netherlands, where the attachment to Rome had never been intense, where in the old times, the Bishops of Utrecht had been rather Ghibelline than Guelph, where all the earlier sects of dissenters Waldenses, Lollards, Hussites had found numerous converts and thousands of martyrs, it was inevitable that there should be a response from the popular heart to the deeper agitation which now reached to the very core of Christendom.
Such were the adherents of Luther in Germany, the Lollards in England, and the adherents of Knox in Scotland.
They always demanded at least a form of home government. That made England a congenial home for the Protestant spirit, which claimed the right to independent study of the sources of religion and independent judgment regarding them. It was only a continuance of the spirit of Wiclif and the Lollards. The spirit in a nation lives long, especially when it is passed down by tradition.
From that period until the appearance of Luther, a succession of sects Waldenses, Albigenses, Perfectists, Lollards, Poplicans, Arnaldists, Bohemian Brothers waged perpetual but unequal warfare with the power and depravity of the Church, fertilizing with their blood the future field of the Reformation. Nowhere was the persecution of heretics more relentless than in the Netherlands.
The feature which characterized the Lollards in common was a bold spirit of inquiry which led them, in spite of persecution, to read Wyclif's English Bible and call in question such dogmas and rites of the church as did not seem to find warrant in the sacred text.
The Lollards, as Wycliffe's English followers were called, were speedily extirpated by fire and sword, through the stern orthodoxy of an English king, but the Hussites long defied the pope and survivals of their heresy were to be found in 1500. These were people who outwardly conformed to Catholicism but inwardly doubted and even scoffed at the very foundations of Christianity.
Is it not rather matter for thee thee by thyself, beyond all priests that be? "Nay, in very deed, Custance, thou art a Lollard, else hadst thou never spoken no such a thing!" "What, be Lollards the only men that have a care for their own souls? But be it as thou wilt what will it matter then? Isabel, in good sooth I have sins enough to answer for, neither will I by my good-will add thereto.
We must ask our readers therefore to follow us beneath the groining of the Gate-House into the quiet little court that lies on the river-side of the hall. Passing over its trim grass-plot to a doorway at the angle of Lollards' Tower, and mounting a few steps, they will find themselves in a square antechamber, paved roughly with tiles, and with a single small window looking out towards the Thames.
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