secular; and we cannot be surprised, therefore, that these institutions
should have sympathised with each other, and have united to repress a
danger which was formidable to both.

The bishops, by this act, received arbitrary power to arrest and imprison
on suspicion, without check or restraint of law, at their will and
pleasure. Prisoners who refused to abjure their errors, who persisted in
heresy, or relapsed into it after abjuration, were sentenced to be burnt at
the stake--a dreadful punishment, on the wickedness of which the world has
long been happily agreed. Yet we must remember that those who condemned
teachers of heresy to the flames, considered that heresy itself involved
everlasting perdition; that they were but faintly imitating the severity
which orthodoxy still ascribes to Almighty God Himself.

The tide which was thus setting back in favour of the church did not yet,
however, flow freely, and without a check. The Commons consented to
sacrifice the heretics, but they still cast wistful looks on the lands of
the religious houses. On two several occasions, in 1406, and again 1410,
spoliation was debated in the Lower House, and representations were made
upon the subject to the king.[473] The country, too, continued to be
agitated with war and treason; and when Henry V. became king, in 1412, the
church was still uneasy, and the Lollards were as dangerous as ever.
Whether by prudent conduct they might have secured a repeal of the
persecuting act is uncertain; it is more likely, from their conduct, that
they had made their existence incompatible with the security of any
tolerable government.

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