Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/181

 Cardinal Brancaccio was deprived of the direction of the Bohemian affairs that had recently been entrusted to him. His successor, Cardinal Peter of St. Angelo, acted entirely according to the wishes of the Bohemian enemies of church-reform. The representatives of Hus at the papal court were declared to be heretics; some were imprisoned, while others succeeded in escaping to Prague. The cause of Hus at the papal courts was definitively lost and a decisive condemnatory judgment against him was being prepared. Momentous events, however, occurred in Prague before the judgment became known there.

The attempt to establish at Prague the sale of indulgences in a manner that was particularly repulsive to the citizens had produced a state of feverish excitement. The Germans and Romanist partisans declared that they would burn the Bethlehem chapel and murder all heretics. Among the friends of church-reform the more frivolous and unreflecting men were led astray and organised demonstrations that must have been very painful to the truly pious mind of Hus. Jerome was still in Prague, and Hus, perhaps better acquainted with his eloquence and learning than with his many faults, did not attempt to exercise sufficient restraint over him. It was, therefore, undoubtedly with the connivance of Jerome that one of King Venceslas's favourite courtiers, Lord Vok of Waldstein, organised a grotesque procession of which all sober-minded citizens disapproved. It is probable that King Venceslas, who was not at Prague on the day the procession took place, was utterly unaware of the intended folly of his courtier, but when after the death of Hus and the movement of universal fury which the news of it caused in Bohemia, the Council of Constance wished to attack the King of Bohemia, he was accused of complicity. It is certain that on June 24