against Wenzel, but he had interfered to protect his best beloved brother, in the hope that he would put aside his indifference and put a stop to the enormities which were being perpetrated. In case the council found its ecclesiastical censures unavailing and felt itself obliged to insist on secular aid, he hoped the barons would exonerate him from all guilt in the case.
While these communications were being interchanged between Constance and Prague, Huss’s friend, Jerome, was being tried: and he was burned, May 30, 1416. Jerome differed from Huss in the circumstances of his birth, being of a noble family, and in his personal presence, being a large and strong man. He was restless, as his career shows. Educated in Prague, where he was promoted to the B. A, degree, 1398, he travelled abroad and after various experiences went to Oxford, where he copied with his own hand Wyclif’s Dialogus and Trialogus, which he took back with him to Bohemia. In 1403, he visited Palestine and two years later was at Paris, and afterward at Cologne and Heidelberg, taking the M. A, degree from each university.
From the first, Jerome was on intimate terms with Huss and, in 1410, defended Wyclif’s writings at the Prague university, though he denied accepting everything that Wyclif stood for. At Vienna he was cast into prison on the charge of being a Wyclifite. He escaped, but was followed with the ban of excommunication by the archbishop of Vienna. He stood by Hușs in the strife over the rights of the Bohemian nation at the university and in attacking the crusading letters of John XXIII. When Huss started out for his journey to Constance, Jerome warned him that he would not get back alive. Against Huss’s advice he appeared in Constance in the spring of 1415, and posted up a notice asking for safeconduct from the council and Sigismund.
While returning to Prague, he was seized at Hirschau and taken back to Constance, May 23, with chains on his
