857 



WYKEHAM, WILLIAM DE. 



WYNDHAM, SIR WILLIAM. 



858 



of October 1366, he was immediately, upon the king's earnest recom- 

 mendation, elected by the prior and convent of Winchester to succeed 

 him as bishop of that see. He was not consecrated till the 10th of 

 October in the year following ; but this delay, till an adjustment was 

 effected of the conflicting pretensions of the royal authority and the 

 court of Rome, was evidently occasioned, as Lowth has shown, only 

 by a contention between the king and the pope as to which of them 

 should have tho largest share in Wykeham's promotion. Meanwhile 

 he had been appointed by the king lord high chancellor of England; 

 he was confirmed in that office on the 17th of September 1367. 



He continued chancellor till the 14th of March 1371, when he 

 delivered back to the king both the great and the privy seals, on the 

 change of ministry made in compliance with a petition presented 

 shortly before by the Lords and Commons, complaining of the mis- 

 chiefs which had resulted from the government of the kingdom 

 having for a long time been in the hands of men of the church, and 

 praying that secular men only might be appointed to the principal 

 offices both in the king's courts and household. There is no appear- 

 ance however of this complaint being specially directed against any part 

 of the conduct of the Bishop of Winchester, who assisted at the cere- 

 mony of constituting his successor in the chancellorship, and seems to 

 have for years after this continued to retain both the favour of the 

 king and the good will of the parliament, and even to have remained 

 in habits of intimate and confidential connection with the Duke of 

 Lancaster, to whose influence the removal of the clergy from the 

 offices of state is said to have been owing. 



At this time the bishops of Winchester had no fewer than twelve 

 different castles or palace?, all furnished and maintained as places of 

 residence. Wykeham's first undertaking after he found himself in 

 possession of the see was to set about a thorough repair of these 

 episcopal houses. This cost him above 20,000 marks. He also 

 applied himself with great zeal and diligence to the reformation of 

 abuses in the monasteries and religious houses of all sorts throughout 

 his diocese : the ancient hospital of St. Cross, at Sparkeford, near 

 Winchester, founded in 1132 by the famous Bishop Henry de Blois, 

 brother to King Stephen, in particular engaged much of his attention, 

 and the objects of the charity were indebted to his persevering exer- 

 tions for the restoration of many rights and benefits which they had 

 originally enjoyed, but of which they had been for a loug time 

 defrauded. But the object which from the first chiefly occupied him 

 was his own great foundation of two colleges in which students might 

 be educated ''for the honour of God and increase of his worship, for 

 the support and exaltation of the Christian faith, and for the improve- 

 ment of the liberal arts and sciences." His preparatory college or 

 school at Winchester was opened in 1373; and he had before this 

 purchased most of the ground in the city of Oxford upon which his 

 college there, still called New College, to which that at Winchester 

 was designed as a nursery, was afterwards built. 



These pious and patriotic exertions however were interrupted for a 

 time by a political storm which rose against the bishop in 1376, the 

 last year of the reign of Edward III. He had been appointed one of 

 the council established to superintend the conduct of affairs on the 

 petition of the parliament which met in April of that year; and in 

 consequence became a principal object of the resentment of the Duke 

 of Lancaster and his party, who, after the death of the Black Prince 

 in June, and the rise of the parliament in July, took possession of the 

 superannuated and dying king and proceeded to overthrow all the 

 reforms that had been lately made in the government, and to effect, 

 as far as they could, the ruin of all concerned in them. By the duke's 

 contrivance eight articles were exhibited against the bishop at the 

 beginning of the next Michaelmas term, charging him with various 

 acts of pecuniary defalcation, oppression, and other sorts of misgovern- 

 ment while he had been in office many years before as keeper of the 

 privy seal and lord chancellor. He was heard in his defence, before a 

 commission of bishops, peers, and privy councillors, about the middle 

 of November, when judgment was given against him upon one of the 

 articles, involving at the utmost a more irregularity ; and upon this, 

 under the influence that then prevailed at court, an order was imme- 

 diately issued for the sequestration of the revenues of his bishopric, 

 and he was at the same time forbidden, in the king's name, to come 

 within 20 miles of the court. The next parliament, which met on the 

 27th of January 1377, was wholly devoted to Lancaster; and when, 

 soon after, on the petition of the Commons, an act of general pardon 

 was issued by the king, in consideration of its being the year of his 

 jubilee, the Bishop of Winchester alone was specially excepted out of 

 its provisions. All this, in the circumstances of the time, may be 

 taken as the best attestation to Wykeham's patriotism and integrity. 

 His brethren of the clergy however assembled in convocation now 

 took up his cause with great zeal; and, whether in consequence of 

 their bold representations on the subject to the king, or for some 

 other reason, it was soon deemed expedient to drop the proceedings 

 againt him, and on the 18th of June his temporalities were restored to 

 him, on condition of his fitting out three ships of war for the defence 

 of the kingdom and maintaining them at sea for a quarter of a year. 

 And even from this mulct he was released on the accession of 

 Richard II., a few days after. But the loss nevertheless to which he 

 had been subjected by his prosecution ia said to have amounted to 

 10,000 marks. 



He continued to stand high in the favour and confidence of parlia- 

 ment during the minority of the new king. In 1380 he was one of 

 a commission appointed on the petition of the Commons to examine 

 into the state of the revenue and the kingdom, with full powers to 

 call before them all persons who had been in office either during the 

 current or the late reign. Again after the suppression of the insur- 

 rection of Wat Tyler and his followers, in the next year, the Bishop 

 of Winchester was one of the seventeen persona proposed by the 

 Commons to be appointed to confer with them on the condition of the 

 kingdom : and on various occasions afterwards a similar tribute was 

 paid to his popularity and weight of character. As soon as he was 

 released from his troubles he hastened to apply himself anew to the 

 carrying forward and completion of his new colleges. The business 

 of teaching appears to have commenced both at Winchester and at 

 Oxford in 1373 ; Pope Urban VI.'s bull of licence for founding Win- 

 chester College was granted 1st June 1378; the building of the College 

 at Oxford, which he called ' St. Mary College of Winchester in Oxford,' 

 was begun in 1380, and was finished in 1386 ; that of the college at 

 Winchester was begun in 1387 and was finished in 1393. The papal 

 bull confirming the statutes of the college at Oxford is dated 19th July 

 1398. And as soon as his two colleges were erected, he entered upon 

 another work, which still remains a monument of his taste and muni- 

 ficence : he resolved to rebuild his cathedral in the greater part of its 

 extent. This undertaking he commenced in 1395, and he just lived to 

 see it brought to a close in about ten years after. 



The Bishop of Winchester was one of the fourteen persons appointed 

 in 1386, on the petition of the parliament instigated by the king's 

 uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, to be a council to the king for one 

 year, and in fact for that term to exercise all the powers of govern- 

 ment. As soon as the parliament was dismissed, Richard made an 

 attempt to break from the yoke thus imposed upon him ; the com- 

 mission and statute appointing the council were declared by the judges, 

 on the royal command, to be illegal and null, and to have involved all 

 who had been concerned in procuring them in the guilt of treason. 

 Upon this the Duke of Gloucester and his friends raised an army of 

 40,000 men. Having encamped before London, they sent a deputation, 

 of which the Bishop of Winchester was a member, to the king ; the 

 deputies were graciously received, and returned with proposals for an 

 accommodation ; but in the mean time a body of forces which had been 

 raised for the king in Wales and Cheshire, under the command of his 

 minion, the Duke of Ireland, was encountered by the Earl of Derby 

 and a part of the army of the confederated lords at Radcott Bridge in 

 Oxfordshire, and entirely defeated. This blow compelled Richard to 

 yield for the present. But in May 1389, another revolution in the 

 government was effected by the king suddenly declaring himself to be 

 of age, and removing the Duke of Gloucester and his friends from the 

 council-board. He did not however dispense with the services of the 

 Bishop of Winchester, but, on the contrary, forced him again to 

 accept the great seal. Wykeham remained chancellor till the 27th of 

 September 1391, when he retired from office, Gloucester having by 

 this time been restored to his place in the council, and all parties 

 having been for the present again reconciled, in a great measure, it is 

 probable, through the bishop's mediation. From this date Wykeham 

 appears to have taken little or no share in public affairs. In 1397, 

 when the Duke of Gloucester was put to death, and several of those 

 who had joined him in taking arms in 1386 were attainted for that 

 treason, the Bishop of Winchester and others were, at the intercession 

 of the Commons, declared by the king from the throne in parliament 

 not to have been implicated in what their fellow-commissioners had 

 done. Wykeham was present in the parliament held on the 30th of 

 September 1399, when Richard was deposed, and also in the first par- 

 liament of Henry IV. , summoned a few days after ; but this was the 

 last which he attended. He continued however in the active discharge 

 of his episcopal duties for two or three jears longer, and was able to 

 transact business till within four days of his death, which took place 

 at South Waltham, about eight o'clock on the morning of Saturday 

 the 27th of September 1404. 



(Life, by Robert Lowth, D.D., 2nd edition, 8vo, London, 1754.) 



WYNANTS, JOHAN, one of the best of the Dutch landscape- 

 painters, was born at Haarlem about the year 1600. Little is known 

 about him ; he is not mentioned by Houbraken ; and Van Gool, who 

 notices this omission of Houbraken, lived at too late a period to be 

 enabled to learn any facts of his life. Wynants is supposed to have 

 been the master of Wouvvermau, to whom some of his pictures have 

 been attributed. He was fond of amusement, and idled much of his 

 time in parties of pleasure, and his pictures are accordingly few in 

 number. He generally painted small pictures, coloured with great 

 transparency : the figures aud cattle in them are not painted by him- 

 self ; a fact, says D' Argenville, which Wynants endeavoured to keep 

 a secret. These parts of his pictures were painted by several masters 

 by Van Thulden, Ostade, Wouvverman, Lingelbach, and A. Vande- 

 velde, which gives an additional value to his works. In Pilkington's 

 ' Dictionary ' and some other books, 1670 is given as the date of 

 Wynants' death, but there is a picture in the gallery of Sehleissheim 

 by him, dated 1673; his name is also written in the painters'-com- 

 pany's book of Haarlem for the year 1677. (D'Argenville, Vies des 

 Peintres ; Dillis, Gemalde zu Sehleissheim.) 



WYNDHAM, SIR WILLIAM, the third baronet of that namo, 



