The end of his adventures is well known. The burghers of Freiburg refused to protect him and he fled to Breisar, where the envoys of the Council came to press for his resignation. He put on his rough disguise once more, and made off with a troop of Austrian cavalry, but Friedrich, to obtain a mitigation of his own sentence, betrayed him. For several days he miserably resisted the pressure of the envoys, weeping and wailing piteously, and on May 2d the Council summoned him to appear before it within nine days to answer charges of heresy, schism, simony, and immorality. On the seventh day a troop of horse came for him, but he was ill and irresolute. On May 14th the patience of the Council was exhausted; it suspended him from office and ordered the public trial of the charges which had already been examined and on which a mass of evidence had been taken. Two days later the great assembly of prelates and doctors drew up the appalling indictment, in seventy-two articles, of Baldassare Cossa. In the main the charges referred to those acts of simony, bribery, corruption, and tyranny which I have recounted, but it should be added that he was described as "addicted to the flesh, the dregs of vice, a mirror of infamy" (art. 6), and "guilty of poisoning, murder, and persistent addiction to vices of the flesh" (art 29). The worst charges of Dietrich were solemnly endorsed by the gravest lawyers and priests of Europe.
John lay, prostrate and in tears, in an inn at Rudolphzell. He wished to submit a defence, but a few friendly cardinals advised him to submit, and when, on May 26th, he heard that the Council had endorsed the indictment, he made no further resistance. He was deposed on the 29th and accepted the sentence with words of humility and repentance. A few days later the wretched man was consigned to the castle of Gottlieben, and then to a castle at Mannheim. There was, in the following year, a futile attempt to rescue him, and he was confined in the castle of Heidelberg, where he remained three years, with a cook and two chaplains of his once magnificent establishment, composing verses on the vanity of earthly things. The hollow words of his consecration-ceremony, _Sic transit gloria mundi_, had for him assumed a terrible reality.