But, even if Huss abjured, he was not to be trusted, for, if allowed to go back to Bohemia, he and his sympathizers would disseminate the same errors and also new errors, and the new errors would be worse than the old. He should be forbidden altogether to preach or to go to his sympathizers. In Poland, the errors had a large following as well as in Bohemia, and the council should direct his brother, the king of Bohemia, and the princes and prelates to destroy them branch and root, wherever they might be found. In the mouth of two or three witnesses, as it is written, is a thing established. The council should make a clean sweep of all his disciples and especially of the one detained at Constance. “Who do you call him?” The king’s defective memory being supplied by members of the council, the king went on to say: “Yes, Jerome—he is the pupil and Huss is the master.” If you have done with that one—Huss—in a single day, you will have little trouble in dealing with the other. “I was a young man,” he concluded, “when this sect arose and started in Bohemia, and see how it has grown and multiplied.” As Palacky says, these words of Sigismund spoken in a corner of the Franciscan refectory soon resounded throughout all Bohemia and cost the speaker little less than the crown of a kingdom.[1] Sigismund was soon to take leave of the council and what was done he wanted done quickly. He referred to his approaching journey to Spain, whose purpose was to induce Benedict XIII to resign. According to Mladenowicz, the members left the refectory in high spirits over the king’s words.
During the remaining four weeks of his life spent in the Grayfriars prison, Huss wrote a number of letters to his friends in Constance and Bohemia, now in Czech, now in Latin. All the while he was suffering from physical weakness and pain. The wonder is that the prisoner had any spirit left. On June 8, the last day of public hearing, he looked
- ↑ Gesch., III: 357.
