CHAPTER VIII
THE TRIAL AND DEATH OF HUS
Though the council had been obliged to grant Hus a public hearing, it did so most reluctantly and with the firm intention that he should be declared guilty and under all circumstances prevented from returning to Bohemia—on this Sigismund laid great stress. During a deliberation of the council, which immediately preceded the trial, it was resolved that, should Hus not retract, he should be handed over to the secular authorities to receive condign punishment. By a legal fiction the church avoided ordering the execution of the sentence. Death at the stake was the penalty for heresy according to a law of the Emperor Frederick II., who, as Dr. Lenz writes in his clever defence of the conduct of the council,[1] “cannot be considered a friend of the popes, and still less an ultramontane.” Though the matter will have to be mentioned again later, it should here already be stated that Sigismund had pledged his honour to allow Hus to return to Bohemia from Constance, whatever sentence might have been passed on him there. The secular authority to whom Hus should have been handed over was his own sovereign, King Venceslas, not the burgomaster of Constance. The possibility of Hus’s retracting had also been taken into consideration. It was decided that in that case Hus should, in punishment of the scandal which he had caused, be imprisoned for life in a Swedish monastery, in a cell that was to be walled up, leaving only a small opening through which food and drink were to be handed to the prisoner.[2]
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