Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/385

 defenders, King Venceslas’s former bodyguard, composed of friends of the national party, offered little resistance. An attack on the Hradcany castle, however, was unsuccessful. In the course of this prolonged street-fighting, of which the contemporary chroniclers give a vivid account, a large part of the city was destroyed. The citizens began to desire peace, and through the mediation of Cenek of Wartemberg a truce was concluded. The citizens of Prague again surrendered to the royal troops the Vysehrad castle; the utraquist nobles, as whose spokesman Wartemberg acted, promised to support their countrymen in their demand of independence for the Bohemian church. The Taborites, who disapproved of this compromise, left Prague and proceeded to Plzen and then to the Tabor hill, where their first meetings had been held. They here built the city of Tabor, which became their stronghold up to the time of their final downfall.

The not very favourable terms of this armistice, the retreat of the Taborites, and the expectation of Sigismund’s arrival caused a short-lived Romanist reaction in Bohemia. The miners of Kutna Hora, strong adherents of the Roman Church, seized many utraquist priests and other Hussites and threw them into the shaft of one of their mines, to which they had in derision given the name of Tabor. Many Romanists and Germans returned to Prague and several utraquist priests were expelled from their churches. The Germans greatly rejoiced, and as a contemporary chronicler tells us, “smiled and clapped their hands, saying now these heretical Hussites and Wycliffites will perish and there will be an end of them.”

Sigismund had meanwhile arrived in the lands of the Bohemian crown, and at Brno received the envoys of the cities of Prague. They protested of their thorough loyalty to their new sovereign, and begged only to be allowed to continue to follow the rites of the utraquist church. The king returned an evasive answer. He merely stated that he intended to rule