§ 45. HUSS AT CONSTANCE. 375
correspondence four things are prominent :_Huss' reliance upon the king_and his word of honor, his consuming desire to be heard in o])en couiicil,J^ie expectation of possible death and Jiis trust in God. He feared sentence would be passed before opportunity was given him to speak with the king. " If this is his honor, it is his own lookout," he wrote. ^
In the meantime the council had committed the matter of heresy to a commission, with D'Ailly at its head. It plied Huss with questions, and presented heretical articles taken from his writings. Stephen Paletz, his apostate friend, badgered him more than all the rest. His request for a " proctor and advocate " was denied. The thought of death was continually before him. But, as the Lord had delivered Jonah from the whale's belly, and Daniel from the lions, so, he believed, God would deliver him, if it were expedient.
Upon John XXIII. 's flight, fears were felt that Huss might be delivered by his friends, and the keys of the prison were put into the hands of Sigismund. On March 2-lth the bishop of Constance had the prisoner chained and transferred by boat to his castle, Gottlieben. There he had freedom to walk about in his chains by day, but he was handcuffed and bound to the wall at night. The imprisonment at Gottlieben lasted seventythree days, from March 24th-June 5th. If Huss wrote any letters during that time none have survived. It was a strange freak of history that the runaway pontiff, on being seized and brought back to Constance, was sent to Gottlieben to be fellow-prisoner with Huss, the one, the former head of Christendom, condemned for almost every known misdemeanor ; the other, the preacher whose life was, by the testimony of all contemporaries, almost without a blemish. The criminal pope was to be released after a brief confinement and elevated to an exalted dignity; the other was to be contemned as a religious felon and burnt as an expiation to orthodox theology.
At Gottlieben, Huss suffered from hemorrhage, headache and other infirmities, and at times was on the brink of starvation . A_ne w comniisaiDiva^ppoiiit&d.^pril .6,^witli D'Ailly at its head, now took up seriou^TytheJieresy of Huss and Wyclif,
1 Workman : Letters, p. 174, 182, 184, 190.
376 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
whom the council coupled together.^ IIuss' friends had not forgotten him, and 250 Moravian and Bohemian nobles signed a remonstrance at Prag, May 13, wliijch they sent to Sigismund, protesting against the treatment " the beloved master and Christian preacher" was receiving, and asked that he might be granted a public hearing and allowed to return home. Upon a public hearing Huss staked everything, and with such a hearing in view he had gone to Constance.
In order to bring the prisoner within more convenient reach of the commission, he was transferred in the beginning of June to a third prison, — the Franciscan friary. From June 5-8 public hearings were had in the refectory, the room being crowded with cardinals, archbishops, bishops, tlieologians and persons of lesser degree. Cardinal D'Ailly was present, and took the leading part as head of the commission. The action taken May 4th condemning 260 errors and heresies extracted from Wyclif's works was adapted to rob Huss of whatever hope of release he still indulged. Charges were made against him of holding that Christ is in the consecrated bread only as the soul is in the body, that Wy clif was a good Christian, that salvation was not dependent upon the pope and that no one could be excommunicated except by God Himself. He also had expressed the hope his soul might be where Wyclif's was.^ When a copy of his book on the Church was shown, they shouted, "Burn it." Whenever Huss attempted to explain his positions, he was met with shouts, " Away with your sophistries. Say, Yes or No. " The Englishman, John Stokes, who was present, declared that it seemed to him as if he saw Wyclif himself in bodily form sitting before him.
On the morning of June 7th, Huss exclaimed that God and his conscience were on liis side. But, said D'Ailly, " we cannot goby your conscience when we have other evidence, and the evidence of Gerson himself against you, the most renowned doctor in Christendom." ^ D'Ailly and an Englislnnan attempted
1 See Card. Fillastre's Dinrij in Fiiike's Farschungen, pp. 104, 17ft.
2 Utinam anima essetibi, ubi est, anima Juh. Wicleff, Mansi, XXV'II. 75G. * iVo.s noil possumus secundum tunm consrientiam judicare, etc., Palacky,
Due. 278. Tschackert, pp. 225, 235, says D'Ailly would have been obliged to