Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/256

 evidence on oath in the presence of the accused. Once, when Hus’s illness was at its worst, fifteen witnesses were brought into his prison on the same day. It was natural that he should be quite bewildered, and God only, as he afterwards wrote, knew what he suffered. Mladenovic, who enumerates many of those who were made to give evidence against Hus, writes that some of them were very reluctant to do so. A layman, before he was called in, said: “I swear to God that I have nothing to depose.” Then Michael de causis said to him: “My good man, you don’t know what they will ask you, and you swear that you have nothing to depose. As for me, I would bear witness against my own father if it was (if he was accused of) something against the faith.” The result of these investigations was that the commissioners, on the advice of Michael and Stephen Palec, drew up a new act of accusation against Hus consisting of forty-four articles, all derived from the treatise De Ecclesia. “These had,” Mladenovic writes, “been falsely and unfairly extracted from the book by Palec, who had mutilated some sentences at the beginning, others in the middle, others at the end, and who had also invented things that were not contained in the book at all.”

The Bohemian informers uninterruptedly continued their task of persecuting Hus, but the council was now for a time occupied with other matters. On Christmas Day, 1414, Sigismund arrived at Constance. Richenthal, who describes the arrival of such illustrious visitors in his native town with evident pleasure, writes: “On the holy day early, two hours after midnight, came from Ueberlingen to Constance that most noble prince Sigismund, King of the Romans, of Hungary, Dalmatia, Croatia, etc., and with him the most noble princess, Lady Barbara, Queen of the Romans, his spouse, by birth Countess of Cilli, and the most noble princess, Lady Elizabeth, Queen of Bosnia, and also the most noble princess,