• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1450 0

the jaws of Hell, withdrew. In 1381 a council of twelve doctors of the University of Oxford was to pronounce eight of his theses unorthodox and fourteen heretical, and to prohibit him from further lecturing or preaching. Though his voice was silenced, his work spread through dissemination of the Bible in English. The entire Scripture of some three quarters of a million words was translated from the Latin by Wyclif and his Lollard disciples in the dangerous business of opening a direct pathway to God, bypassing the priest. In the future fierce reaction after the Peasants’ Revolt, when Lollardy was harried as the brother of subversion, and mere possession of a Bible in English could convict a man of heresy, the making of multiple copies of the manuscript Bible was a labor of risk and courage. In view of 175 copies that still survive and the number that must have been destroyed during the persecution and lost over the centuries, many hundreds must have been laboriously and secretively copied out by hand. Wyclif died in 1384, and the current of protest, as persecution intensified, ran on underground. When Jan Hus was burned at the stake for heresy by the Council of Constance in 1415, Wyclif’s bones were ordered dug up and burned at the same time. Even riddled by the schism, the Church was still in control. The cracking of old and famous structures is slow and internal, while the façade holds.

With Europe polarized between two papacies, and the Church politicized by the rivals’ struggle for secular support, it became harder to heal the schism each year that it lasted. All thoughtful men recognized how it was damaging society and tried to find the means of reunification, but in the schism, as in the war, vested hostilities kept the breach open. Ecumenical Council, advocated by the University of Paris and many individuals, was the obvious solution. As a challenge to their supremacy, however, both Popes adamantly rejected it. The hateful rift in Christendom was to last for forty years. According to a popular saying toward the end of the century, no one since the beginning of the schism had entered Paradise.

* The fourth, the aged Cardinal Tebaldeschi, had died.

Part Two

Chapter 17

Coucy’s Rise

Now “wholly French” once more, Coucy served as the King’s right arm through the closing efforts of the reign. Though only 41, Charles V felt time pressing. In February 1378 his Queen, Jeanne de Bourbon, who was the same age as he, died of childbed fever after the birth of a daughter, Catherine. Three weeks later, the last to survive of her previous five daughters died, leaving of her eight children only two sons and the newborn to outlive her. The King “sorrowed long and marvelously” from his wife’s death “and so did many other good people, for the Queen and he loved each other as much as loyal married people can.” A month later came the death—precipitating the schism—of Pope Gregory XI, with whom Charles had been closely associated, followed in November by the death of his uncle the Emperor and shortly afterward by the passing of his longtime ally King Enrique of Castile. In all these losses Charles cannot but have felt the advancing shadow of his own limited time, and with it an urgency to leave his kingdom whole and at peace before he too departed.

To that end he must close the three portals of danger represented by the persistent betrayals of Charles of Navarre, by the alliance of the Duke of Brittany with England, and by the continuing war with England itself. Coucy’s strategic territory, his military and diplomatic talents, and that evident dependability which Gregory XI had found notable made him a fulcrum of the King’s effort. His first task was to conduct a campaign to eliminate Charles of Navarre from Normandy once and for all.

On learning that Navarre had again secretly negotiated to re-open Normandy to the English, Charles V swore to drive his faithless vassal out of every town and castle he held there. Legality was at hand in the person of Navarre’s two sons, in whose name the Navarrese fiefs in Normandy