nation was ready for sweeping remedies.  The people felt little loyalty to the pope, as the language of the Statutes of Provisors[83] conclusively proves, and they were prepared to risk the sacrilege of confiscating the estates of the religious houses—­a complete measure of secularisation being then, as I have already said,[84] the expressed desire of the House of Commons.[85] With an Edward III. on the throne such a measure would very likely have been executed, and the course of English history would have been changed.  It was ordered otherwise, and doubtless wisely.  The church was allowed a hundred and fifty more years to fill full the measure of her offences, that she might fall only when time had laid bare the root of her degeneracy, and that faith and manners might be changed together.

The history of the time is too imperfect to justify a positive conclusion.  It is possible, however, that the success of the revolution effected by Henry IV. was due in part to a reaction in the church’s favour; and it is certain that this prince, if he did not owe his crown to the support of the church, determined to conciliate it.  He confirmed the Statutes of Provisors,[86] but he allowed them to sink into disuse.  He forbade the further mooting of the confiscation project; and to him is due the first permission of the bishops to send heretics to the stake.[87] If English tradition is to be trusted, the clergy still felt insecure; and the French wars of Henry V. are said to have been undertaken, as we all know from Shakspeare, at the persuasion of Archbishop Chichele, who desired to distract his attention from reverting to dangerous subjects.  Whether this be true or not, no prince of the house of Lancaster betrayed a wish to renew the quarrel with the church.  The battle of Agincourt, the conquest and re-conquest of France, called off the attention of the people; while the rise of the Lollards, and the intrusion of speculative questions, the agitation of which has ever been the chief aversion of English statesmen, contributed to change the current; and the reforming spirit must have lulled before the outbreak of the wars of the Roses, or one of the two parties in so desperate a struggle would have scarcely failed to have availed themselves of it.  Edward IV. is said to have been lenient towards heresy; but his toleration, if it was more than imaginary, was tacit only; he never ventured to avow it.  It is more likely that in the inveterate frenzy of those years men had no leisure to remember that heresy existed.

The clergy were thus left undisturbed to go their own course to its natural end.  The storm had passed over them without breaking; and they did not dream that it would again gather.  The immunity which they enjoyed from the general sufferings of the civil war contributed to deceive them; and without anxiety for the consequences, and forgetting the significant warning which they had received, they sank steadily into that condition which is inevitable from the constitution