Hus, in the meantime, had been hurried off to a Dominican convent, in a suburb of Constance, and was there thrown into a damp prison. Chlum was not, however, to be silenced; and he put up bills on the great church at Constance, denouncing the Pope and Cardinals for their breach of faith. Then he appealed to the Bohemian nobles who had come to the Council; and they and the leading Polish nobles also prepared a protest against the treatment of Hus, to be presented to Sigismund on his arrival. In the meantime, the treatment of Hus showed a mixture of cruelty and cunning on the part of his opponents. While, on the one hand, the prison in which he was confined was so damp as to produce fever, he was yet allowed to communicate freely with his friends; and two of the letters which he wrote from prison had some influence on his fate. In one of these he defended the practice, which Jakaubek was now introducing, of Communion in both kinds. In the other he declared that, even if he were condemned by false witnesses, his friends were not to believe that he had forsaken the truth. This latter letter seems to have fallen into the hands of Pálec̆, or some other enemy; and it was at once perverted into the statement that, if he revoked and recanted anything at Constance, he would still continue to hold and teach it notwithstanding.
While these intrigues of the enemies of Hus were being reduced into a literary form, Sigismund at last arrived at Constance. Most English readers will remember the scene, as Carlyle has given it, of his splendid appearance on his entrance into the Council, of his pompous address about the need of suppressing the schism in the Church, and of his rebuke to the man who ventured to correct his Latin--“Rex sum Romanus et super grammaticam.”
The question of Hus’s imprisonment was brought before him by the Bohemian and Polish nobles; and he at first protested, with much indignation, against the violation of his safe-conduct. But the necessity of dealing with the question of the Papacy compelled him, for a time, to abandon further inquiry into the Bohemian heresies; for the representatives of the Popes arrived soon after at the Council. At first the discussion was confined to the consideration of the disorders produced by the multiplication of claimants to the Papal throne; and a demand was made for the simultaneous resignation of all the rivals, in order that the ground might be cleared for a new election. But it soon became evident that the case against John XXIII. was based on very different grounds from the opposition to his rivals; and fearing the consequences which might ensue, he fled from Constance. The Duke of Austria, willing enough to hamper a Council presided over by a member of the House of Luxemburg, lent his aid to this scheme, and John escaped to Freyburg. He was, however, seized and brought back; and he was soon after degraded from the Papacy, on account of his horrible crimes.