d the deep suspicion
fostered by hostile whisperings against him in his royal nephew's
breast, still contrived to hold the first place by the throne. Though
serious danger had already existed of a conflict between the King and
his uncle, yet John of Gaunt and his Duchess Constance had been
graciously dismissed with a royal gift of golden crowns, when in July,
1386, he took his departure for the continent, to busy himself till his
return home in November, 1389, with the affairs of Castile, and with
claims arising out of his disbursements there. The reasons for
Chaucer's attachment to this particular patron are probably not far to
seek; on the precise nature of the relation between them it is useless
to speculate. Before Wyclif's death in 1384, John of Gaunt had openly
dissociated himself from the reformer; and whatever may have been the
case in his later years, it was certainly not as a follower of his old
patron that at this date Chaucer could have been considered a
Wycliffite.

Again, this period of Chaucer's life may be called fortunate, because
during it he seems to have enjoyed the only congenial friendships of
which any notice remains to us, The poem of "Troilus and Cressid" is,
as was just noted, dedicated to "the moral Gower and the philosophical
Strode." Ralph Strode was a Dominican of Jedburgh Abbey, a travelled
scholar, whose journeys had carried him as far as the Holy Land, and
who was celebrated as a poet in both the Latin and the English tongue,
and as a theologian and philosopher. In connexion with speculations
concerning Chaucer's relations to Wycliffism it is worth noting that
Strode, who after his return to England was appointed to superintend
several new monasteries, was the author of a series of controversial
arguments against Wyclif. The tradition, according to which he taught
one of Chaucer's sons, is untrustworthy. Of John Gower's life little
more is known than of Chaucer's; he appears to have been a Suffolk man,
holding manors in that county as well as in Essex, but occasionally to
have resided in Kent. At the period of which we are speaking, he may
be supposed, besides his French productions, to have already published
his Latin "Vox Clamantis"--a poem which, beginning with an allegorical
narrative of Wat Tyler's rebellion, passes on to a series of reflexions
on the causes of the movement, conceived in a spirit of indignation
against the corruptions of the Church, but not of sympathy with
W