Page:The letters of John Hus.djvu/205

 method they adopted showed either hesitation or duplicity. On November 28, the cardinals, led on by Palecz and Michael the Pleader, sent at breakfast-time the Bishops of Augsburg and Trent, and the burgomaster of Constance, to inform Hus ‘that they were now ready to hear him.’ Chlum at once detected the plot, for the house was surrounded with soldiers. ‘The devil himself,’ he said to the burgomaster, ‘if he came to plead, ought to have a fair hearing.’ ‘I have not come,’ added Hus, rising from the table, ‘to address the cardinals, but the whole Council.’ The envoys replied, ‘that they had come only for the sake of peace, to avoid a tumult.’ After further parley, Hus consented to go with them. ‘God bless you,’ he said, bidding farewell on the stairs to his weeping hostess. The two bishops for their part could not conceal their joy. ‘Now,’ they said, ‘you will not say mass here any more.’ ‘So Hus rode away on a small horse to the Pope’s palace.’ Interrogated by the cardinals, ‘Rather than hold any heresy,’ he replied, ‘I would prefer to die.’ ‘Your words are good,’ replied the cardinals, and retired to dine, leaving Hus to be badgered by a Franciscan friar, who posed ‘as a simple monk desirous of information,’ but was really, as Hus learned from the soldiers, one ‘Master Didaco, reputed the subtlest theologian in all Lombardy.’ After dinner, ‘at four in the afternoon, the cardinals returned to consider further what they should do with the said Hus. His adversaries Palecz and Michael the Pleader continued instant in their demand that he should not be released. Dancing round the fire, they called out in their joy, “Ha, ha, we have him now. He shall not leave us until he has paid the last farthing.” Chlum, meanwhile, sought out the Pope. John took refuge in characteristic evasions. As for the friar—Didaco—‘he is a clown, he is not one of my people.’ The imprisonment was the act of the cardinals. ‘You know, very well,’ he added, ‘the terms on which I stand with them.’ Had Hus, he continued, really a safe-conduct? ‘Holy Father,’ replied Chlum, ‘you know that he has’ (Mladenowic’s Relatio in Doc. 248–52).

The fate of Hus was really sealed. That night ‘about nine he was led away to the house of one of the precentors of the cathedral.’ Eight days later (December 6) he was removed ‘to a dark cell hard by the latrines,’ in the monastery of the Blackfriars, in those days on an island in the lake, though now joined to the town. In later prints we can still see it strongly surrounded with its own walls. (See map in Hardt, v. iv.)