thus the political situation obliged John XXIII. to work cautiously at the undoing of Hus, the latter also considered it his duty to continue the negotiations with the Holy See. He had begun these negotiations on the advice of the King and Queen of Bohemia, and considering himself, as he did to the end of his life, a true member of the Catholic Church, he believed that he had the right of placing his views before the papal court.
King Venceslas was greatly irritated because Archbishop Zbynek had by order of the pope caused the decree pronouncing the ban against Hus to be read publicly in the churches of Prague. The king’s principle during the protracted disputes had been to maintain that the Bohemian Church should settle its own differences within the country, and that the intervention of foreigners should be eliminated as far as possible. To this principle Venceslas adhered with a tenacity that was rare with him. He had shortly after the burning of Wycliffe’s works requested the archbishop to refund the value of these books to those who had been deprived of them. Archbishop Zbynek had tacitly ignored the royal command, and this incurred the wrath of the ever-irritable king. Venceslas now decreed that certain estates and houses in Prague belonging to the archbishop and other prelates who had taken part in the burning of Wycliffe’s books should be confiscated, and their revenue employed to indemnify those who had been deprived of their books. The carrying out of this order was entrusted to the magistrates of the towns of Prague. Recent changes in the constitution of these municipalities had given the national party a majority in them, and the king’s orders were immediately obeyed. The archbishop, who had again retired to his castle of Roudnice on May 2, 1411, sent a letter
dissolute, fierce and pusillanimous, a bye-word and object of horror to the Bohemians, hated and despised by the Germans, a warning to all rulers. His companion John XXIII., lewd and murderous, a simonist and an infidel, was a true comrade for Sigismund in all evil deeds, a warning lesson to all future popes.”
