Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/251

 had assembled there, who waited in the ante-room to hear the decision of the cardinals. Among them were several friends of Hus, and also Stephen Palec and Michael de causis, the ringleaders of the agents of the Bishop of Litomysl. When they found that Hus would be detained, they displayed ignoble and indecent joy. They danced round the room exclaiming: “Ha! ha! now we have him, he will not escape us till he has paid the last farthing;” by this they meant that he would suffer the supreme penalty, the sentence of death. The cardinals at last sent a message saying that Lord John might depart, but that Hus was to remain in custody. Lord John made a direct appeal to the pope, who declined all responsibility and said that the arrest was the work of the cardinals, with whom he was himself on bad terms. It is very difficult to conjecture the part of the cunning Italian Baldassare Cossa in this matter. Little acquainted with the affairs of Northern Europe, he probably considered Hus a person of very slight importance. Perhaps hoping to win Bohemia to his side, he had at first promised Hus’s companions that he would protect him. He now also assured the Bohemian noblemen that he had no part in his arrest. He repeated this assertion afterwards to King Sigismund, when the latter, on arriving at Constance, feigned to be indignant at the imprisonment of Hus. Later, however, when John XXIII. had fled from Constance to Schafhausen and was on terms of enmity with Sigismund, he wrote to the King of France stating that by his order Hus had been imprisoned as a heretic, though Sigismund had endeavoured to protect him. After protesting energetically, Lord John of Duba left the palace, where Hus remained surrounded by armed guards. Peter Mladenovic, as he tells us, brought him his fur coat and a supply of money. In the evening Hus was conveyed to the house of a precentor of the cathedral. After a week—on