ng act is uncertain; it is more likely, from their conduct,
that they had made their existence incompatible with the security of any
tolerable government.

[Sidenote: Insurrection of Sir John Oldcastle.]

[Sidenote: Oldcastle tried and executed.]

[Sidenote: Fresh act against heresy.]

A rumour having gone abroad that the king intended to enforce the laws
against heresy, notices were found fixed against the doors of the London
churches, that if any such measure was attempted, a hundred thousand men
would be in arms to oppose it. These papers were traced to Sir John
Oldcastle, otherwise called Lord Cobham, a man whose true character is
more difficult to distinguish, in the conflict of the evidence which has
come down to us about him, than that of almost any noticeable person in
history. He was perhaps no worse than a fanatic. He was certainly
prepared, if we may trust the words of a royal proclamation (and Henry
was personally intimate with Oldcastle, and otherwise was not likely to
have exaggerated the charges against him), he was prepared to venture a
rebellion, with the prospect of himself becoming the president of some
possible Lollard commonwealth.[26] The king, with swift decisiveness,
annihilated the incipient treason. Oldcastle was himself arrested. He
escaped out of the Tower into Scotland; and while Henry was absent in
France he seems to have attempted to organize some kind of Scotch
invasion; but he was soon after again taken on the Welsh Border, tried
and executed. An act which was passed in 1414 described his proceedings
as an "attempt to destroy the king, and all other manner of estates of
the realm as well spiritual as temporal, and also all manner of policy,
and finally the laws of the land." The sedition was held to have
originated in heresy, and for the better repression of such mischiefs in
time to come, the lord chancellor, the judges, the justices of the
peace, the sheriffs, mayors, bailiffs, and every other officer having
government of people, were sworn on entering their office to use their
best power and diligence to detect and prosecute all persons suspected
of so heinous a crime.[27]

[Sidenote: Final termination of the Lollard movement.]

Thus perished Wycliffe's labour,--not wholly, because his translation of
the Bible still remained a rare treasure; a seed of future life, which
would spring again under happier circumstances. But the sect which he
organized, the special doctrines which h