onvocation followed the lead of parliament and gave an ample
subsidy. William of Wykeham purchased the restoration of his
temporalities by an unworthy deference to Alice Perrers. Wycliffe
remained powerful, flattered, and consulted, though his enemies had
already drawn up secret articles against him, which they had forwarded
to the papal _curia_. Perhaps in the rapidly declining health of the
king all parties saw that their real interest lay in the postponement
of a crisis.

In June Edward lay on his deathbed at Sheen. To the last his talk was
all of hawking and hunting, and his mistress carefully kept from him
all knowledge of his desperate condition. When he sank into his last
lethargy, his courtiers deserted him, and Alice Perrers took to flight
after robbing him of the very rings on his fingers. A simple priest,
brought to the bedside by pity, performed for the half-conscious king
the last offices of religion. Edward was just able to kiss the cross
and murmur "Jesus have mercy". On June 21, 1377, he breathed his last.

With Edward's death we break off a narrative whose course is but half
run. John of Gaunt's rule was not over; Wycliffe was advancing from
discontent to revolt; Chaucer was yet to rise for a higher flight;
Langland had not yet put his complaint into its permanent form; the
French war was renewed almost on the day of Edward's death; popular
irritation against bad government, and social and economic repression
were still preparing for the revolt of 1381. With all its defects the
age of Edward is preeminently a strong age. Greedy, self-seeking,
rough, and violent it may be; its passions and rivalries combined to
make futile the exercise of its strength; it sounded the revolutionary
note of all abrupt ages of transition, and it ends in disaster and
demoralisation at home and abroad. But government is not everything,
and least of all in the Middle Ages when what was then thought vigorous
government appears miserably weak to modern notions. The strong rule
decayed with the failure of the king's personal vigour. The ministers
of Edward's dotage could not hold France nor even keep England quiet.
England had grown impatient of the rule of a despot, though she was not
yet able to govern herself after a constitutional fashion. It is in the
incompatibility of the political ideals of royal authority and
constitutional control, not less than in the want of purpose of her
ruler and in the factions of her nobles that