.1 



WYCLIFFE, JOHN DE. 



WYCLIFPE, JOHN DE. 



853 



after privately married. The lady was (probably not without good 

 reason) distractedly jealous. Dennis relates that their lodgings were 

 in Bow-street, Covent Garden, opposite the Cock Tavern, and if at any 

 time he entered that place of refreshment with his friends, he was 

 obliged to leave the windows open that she might see there was no 

 woman in the company. Of course a person of this disposition would 

 feel considerable reluctance to trust her husband at the court. The 

 unfrequency of Wycherly's appearance there gave umbrage, and lost 

 him the favour of Charles. 



The countess did not long survive her marriage. She settled her 

 whole estate upon Wycherley, but the settlement was disputed after 

 her death, and, ruined in his circumstances by legal and other 

 expenses, he was thrown into prison. There he lay several years. It 

 is said that he was at last relieved by James II., who, having gone to 

 see ' The Plain Dealer' acted, was so delighted, that he was induced to 

 give orders for the payment of the author's debts and settling a pen- 

 sion of 200/. a year on him. The story has an apocryphal air. It is 

 certain that Wycherly in after-life returned to the Romish Church, 

 and this, with some remains of court influence, is more likely to have 

 attracted to him the munificence of James. 



Wycherly did not profit by the king's liberality to the full extent, 

 for, ashamed to confess the amount of his debts, he understated them. 

 His pension dropped at the Revolution. His father's estate, to which 

 he succeeded some years later, was strictly entailed, and the income 

 was attached by his creditors. A more decorous, if not a more 

 virtuous generation had risen up, and Wycherly's strain of wit was no 

 longer the fashion. He continued to struggle with his difficulties till 

 1715, the year of his death. Eleven days before that event, in the 

 eightieth year of his age, he was married to a j T oung woman with a 

 fortune of 1500Z. What attractions such a match could possess for 

 the lady it is difficult to imagine. He contrived to spend a good deal 

 of her money ; but repaid her on his death-bed by the j udicious 

 advice, " not to take an old man for her second husband." 



In 1704 Wycherly published a volume of poems, to which he pre- 

 fixed an engraving from his picture painted by Sir Peter Lely in the 

 prime of life. Below this portrait he inserted the motto ' Heu quan- 

 tum mutatus ab illo ! ' A volume of poems, and ' moral reflections,' 

 which he had in part prepared for the press, was published post- 

 humously in 1728, by Major Pack, who prefixed a very slovenly and 

 meagre memoir of the author. Wycherly's poems are defective in 

 rhythm, and have not much of what is properly called feeling in 

 them ; but they are not unfrequently characterised by his vigorous 

 common-sense. Some of his ' moral reflections' are terse and pointed. 

 (Major Pack's Memoirs of William Wycherly, Esq. ; Dennis's Letters ; 

 Biogrnphia Britannica. Leigh Hunt's biographical notice of Wycherly 

 in Moxon's edition, and the review of the notice in the Athenaeum; 

 and before drawing any conclusions from the Wycherly Letters as 

 published by Pope, the literary student would do well to see what is 

 said on the subject in the Athenceum for October 3, 1857.) 



WYCLIFFE or WICLIF (two of the most common among about 

 twenty variations of the spelling), JOHN DE, appears to have been 

 born about the year 1324, and, according to the most probable account, 

 was a native of the parish of the same name, situated about six 

 miles from the town of Richmond iu Yorkshire. The tradition of 

 the place makes him to have been a relation of a family of the name 

 of Wycliffe, or De Wycliffe, who were lords of the manor and patrons 

 of the rectory from the Conquest down to the year 1606, when the 

 property passed by the marriage of the heiress into a family of another 

 name. The earliest fact that is known respecting Wycliffe is, that he 

 was one of the students first admitted at Queen's College, Oxford, 

 which was founded in 1340. He soon however removed to Merton 

 College. He is said to have applied himself with diligence and success 

 to the study of the civil, the canon, and even the common law ; but 

 the departments of learning in which he acquired the greatest dis- 

 tinction were scholastic philosophy and divinity. The chronicler 

 Knighton, who on every occasion evinces and openly expresses the 

 keenest aversion to Wycliffe's doctrines and proceedings, admits that 

 he was esteemed the most eminent theological and philosophical 

 doctor of his time, and that in the employment of the scholastic dia- 

 lectic he had no equal. 



Wycliffe's first publication, as commonly stated, is a tract entitled 

 'The Last Age of the Church,' which is inferred from internal 

 evidence to have appeared in 1356. It was printed for the first time 

 with a preface and notes by the Rev. James Henthorn Todd, D.D., 

 Dublin, 16mo., 1840, from the only known manuscript in the Univer- 

 sity library, Dublin, in which shape it fills thirteen or fourteen short 

 pages, making altogether not much above two hundred lines. For 

 anything that this performance can add to the reputation of Wycliffe, 

 it might have been left in oblivion ; it is an attempt to prove that the 

 world would come to an end with the then current century, grounded 

 principally on the prophecies attributed to the Calabrian monk 

 Joachim (who lived in the 12th century, and whose own calculation 

 was that the end of the present system would happen in 1260), 

 and on a cabalistic computation from the letters of the Roman 

 alphabet, which appears to be the writer's own. These dreams of 

 Wycliffe seem to have arisen out of the impression left by the great 

 pestilence which desolated Europe in 1348. Dr. Todd however has 

 ventured in his preface (pp. xii.-xv., and notes, p. Ixxxi) to suggest a 



doubt whether the tract can with perfect certainty be assigned to 

 Wycliffe, and also whether the passage from which the date of its 

 publication or composition has been inferred is conclusive as to that 

 matter. 



It is affirmed by all Wycliffe's biographers that he began to dis- 

 tinguish himself by his writings against the Mendicant Orders about 

 the year 1360. The fact may be so, but the earliest testimony to it, 

 we believe, is that of Anthony Wood, who may have derived his 

 knowledge from the records of the University of Oxford. There is 

 nothing upon this subject among the extant writings attributed to 

 Wycliffe which can be assigned to nearly so early a date. The state- 

 ment however is in itself very probable : the contest between the 

 Mendicants and the University was at its height about 1360; and 

 about the same time Wycliffe appears to have been in high favour at 

 the university ; for in 1360 or 1361 he was made warden or master of 

 Balliol Hall (as Balliol College was then called), and in the beginning 

 of 1361 he was presented by that society to the rectory of Fy ling- 

 ham or Fillingham, a living of considerable value, in the diocese of 

 Lincoln. 



In 1365 Wycliffe appears to have resigned the mastership of Balliol 

 for that of Canterbury Hall, then recently founded by Archbishop 

 Islep. He was put into this place by the archbishop in December 

 of that year, in the room of a monk named Henry de Wodehall, who 

 had been originally appointed, but wbose turbulent conduct had com- 

 pelled the founder to remove him. In 1366 however Islep was suc- 

 ceeded in the primacy by Simon Langham, who had been himself a 

 monk ; and then a process was commenced with the object of ejecting 

 the secular warden from Canterbury Hall, on the pretence that his 

 nomination had taken place when Islep was incapacitated by weak- 

 ness both of body and mind for the transaction of business.. It 

 appears that Wycliffe's appointment was pronounced void by the arch- 

 bishop ; that a person named John de Radyngate was in the first 

 instance substituted in his place ; but that, within a month after, 

 Wodehall was restored. WycliS'e appealed against the sentence to the 

 pope, but it was confirmed by his holiness in 1370; and in 1372 it 

 was further ratified by the king, Edward III. 



It is singular that Mr. Webb Le Bas (in his ' Life of Wiclif,' Lon., 

 8vo, 1832) should in an elaborate argument entirely constructed upon 

 a comparison of dates (pp. 121-123) have assumed that Wycliffe's 

 appeal to Rome in this cause was made in 1365. It is correctly stated, 

 only a few pages before (p. 117), that Archbishop I*lep died in 136G, 

 and that the proceedings in the case were commenced under his suc- 

 cessor Archbishop Langham. Wycliffe's appeal was certainly not 

 made till 1367, in the month of May of which year Wodehall was 

 restored. Instead therefore of his suit having been then two years 

 pending, as Mr. Le Bas argues, it had probably not commenced when 

 Wycliffe was, in 1367, publicly challenged by a monk to defend the 

 decision of parliament that the king should not do homage to the 

 pope ; a challenge which, as is stated by Mr. Le Bas, he promptly 

 answered. His reply to the monk is printed, from a manuscript iu 

 the Lambeth library, by Lewis, ' Life of Dr. John Wiclif,' Papers and 

 Records, No. 30. It is in Latin, being entitled* Determinatio qiuedam 

 Magistri Johannis Wyclyff de Dominio contra unurn Monachum;' and 

 in it the author calls himself the king's own chaplain (' peculiaris 

 regis clericus '). He protests that, as an humble and obedient son of 

 the Roman church, he desires to assert nothing injurious to the said 

 church, or that could reasonably offend pious ears. 



In 1368, while his suit at Rome was certainly depending, he ex- 

 changed his living of Fillingham for that of Ludgershall, in the same 

 diocese, but in the archdeaconry of Bucks, which was of less value, 

 but was recommended to him by being nearer Oxford. In 1372, 

 having taken his degree of D.D., he publicly professed divinity and 

 read lectures in it in Oxford University. This " he did," Lewis con- 

 tinues, " with very great applause, having such an authority in the 

 schools that whatever he said was received as an oracle. In these 

 lectures he frequently took notice of the Corporation of the begging 

 friars, which at first he did in a soft and gentle manner, until, Sliding 

 that his detecting their abuses was what was acceptable to his hearers, 

 he proceeded to deal more plainly and openly with them." Some of 

 his treatises that survive were probably written about this time, but 

 there is no positive evidence to that effect. 



The next fact in his history that is ascertained is his appointment, 

 in July 1374, as one of the members of a legation sent by Edward III. 

 to Pope Gregory XI., then residing at Avignon, to treat with his 

 holiness about the practice of papal provision and other abuses against 

 which the English parliament had recently passed several laws and 

 resolutions, more especially the Statutes of Provisors and Prrcmunire 

 in 1350. The circumstance that Wycliffe's name stands second in tho 

 royal commission (the first name being that of John, bishop of Bangor) 

 may be taken as attesting the high public reputation to which he had 

 by this time risen. The seat of the conferences was fixed at Bruges ; 

 the negociation resulted in a very partial mitigation of the evils com- 

 plained of ; but Wycliffe is supposed to have had his aversion to the 

 then prevalent ecclesiastical system considerably sharpened by his ex- 

 perience of the papal court. In the meantime however he did not 

 deem it necessary to decline what of its advantages might fall to his 

 share. Either while he was still abroad, or immediately after his 

 return home, he was presented by the king to the prebend of Aust in 



