An infamous law had been enacted against the followers of Wyckliffe in 1401, and during the hero of Agincourt’s reign the Tower was full of these persecuted people; indeed, the one great blot upon Henry’s memory is the barbarous treatment of the Lollards by the Church. Of these reformers Sir John Oldcastle (afterwards he bore the title of Lord Cobham in right of his wife) was the most distinguished. He had been one of the foremost warriors in the French campaigns, and appears in every way to have been an honour to his class. By the provisions of the iniquitous clerical decree of 1401, the Bishops were allowed a free hand in persecuting, to the death, all those who were suspected of following Wyckliffe’s teaching; all preachers of his doctrine were liable to be arrested, as well as owners of heretical books. If the doctrines were not abjured, the Church had the power of handing the culprits over to the officers of the Crown, and these, according to the legal enactment of this religious persecution, the “first legal enactment,” as J. R. Green calls it in his history, “of religious bloodshed which defiled our Statute Book,” could burn the offender alive, “on a high place before the people.” The first martyr to suffer for the purer faith in England was a priest of Lynn, William Sautre. Oldcastle was the head of these reformers, and although a personal friend of the young King, the Bishops allowed no ties of friendship, no valiant services for his country, to weigh in his favour, or to stand between them and their prey. They demanded the body of Oldcastle, alive or dead, and Henry reluctantly, but weakly, gave up his old friend into the power of the bloodthirsty prelates, Oldcastle being taken by force in his castle of Cowling. He was brought to the Tower but succeeded in making his escape, whereupon the Lollards, encouraged by once more having their chief at their head, rose in arms. They, however, were speedily defeated and a wholesale butchery ensued, thirty-nine of the more prominent amongst them being burnt or hanged. Oldcastle was brought a second time to the Tower and did not again escape from the clutches of the priests; they had their way, and burnt the gallant old knight, hung in chains over a slow fire, on Christmas Day 1417, at Smithfield, in front of his own house. “Oldcastle died a martyr,” as Shakespeare pithily says. His life and death inspired Tennyson to write a noble poem on this heroic warrior-martyr.