Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/479

Rh cient proof that such an excuse is untenable. Such an assertion would have been all-sufficient when, May 13, 1415, the Bohemians in Constance presented a memorial to the council in which they re- ferred to the treatment of Huss as a violation of the safe-conduct. Yet in its answer the council had no thought of making such an allegation, while at the same time Sigismund's services in the quar- rel with John XXIII. were too recent, and still too necessary, for the good fathers to inflict on him the disgrace of publicly declaring that they had righteously overruled his attempt to protect a here- tic. They therefore had recourse to a lie manufactured for the oc- casion, by asserting, in spite of the notorious existence of the safe- conduct in Constance at the time of Huss's arrest, that witnesses worthy of credit had proved that it had not been procured until fifteen days after that occurrence, and therefore that no public faith had been violated in the proceedings. This argument, which Sigismund himself asserted to be false in the public session of June 7, is an admission that the public faith was violated. A single fact such as this outweighs all the special pleadings of modern apologists.