When Henry V. became king a more determined effort was made to crush Lollardy. Hitherto its strength had lain among the country gentlemen who were the representatives of the shires. The court and clergy had been afraid to attack this powerful class. The new king determined to overawe them, and to this end selected one who had been a personal friend and whose life had been blameless. This was Sir John Oldcastle, in right of his wife, Lord Cobham, "the good Lord Cobham" as the common people called him. Henry first tried personal persuasion, and when that failed directed trial for heresy. Oldcastle was convicted, but was imprisoned for forty days in the Tower in hope that he might recant. He escaped, and summoned his co-religionists to his aid. A Lollard plot was formed to seize the king's person. In the end Oldcastle was burnt for an obstinate heretic (Dec. 1417). These persecutions were not greatly protested against; the wars of Henry V. with France had awakened the martial spirit of the nation, and little sympathy was felt for men who had declared that all war was but the murder and plundering of poor people for the sake of kings. Mocking ballads were composed upon the martyr Oldcastle, and this dislike to warfare was one of the chief accusations made against him (comp. Wright's _Political Poems_, ii. 244). But Arundel could not prevent the writing and distribution of Lollard books and pamphlets. Two appeared about the time of the martyrdom of Oldcastle--_The Ploughman's Prayer_ and the _Lanthorne of Light_. _The Ploughman's Prayer_ declared that true worship consists in three things--in loving God, and dreading God and trusting in God above all other things; and it showed how Lollards, pressed by persecution, became further separated from the religious life of the church. "Men maketh now great stonen houses full of glasen windows, and clepeth thilke thine houses and churches. And they setten in these houses mawmets of stocks and stones, to fore them they knelen privilich and apert and maken their prayers, and all this they say is they worship.... For Lorde our belief is that thine house is man's soul." Notwithstanding the repression, Lollardy fastened in new parts of England, and Lollards abounded in Somerset, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Lincoln and Buckinghamshire.