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the 16th of the following month this promise was broken. The Archbishop surrounded his palace with an armed guard; and in its court-yard two hundred volumes of Wyclif’s writings, as well as works of Milicz and others, were solemnly committed to the flames. A great assembly of dignitaries and clergy shouted Te Deums round the bonfire; and the bells of the churches tolled “as if for the dead.” This ridiculous proceeding excited the greatest indignation. Once more the popular feeling against the clergy sought expression in satire, ribald songs, threats, insults, and actual violence. The Archbishop found it expedient to retire to Rudnicz; whence, two days after the burning of the books, he fulminated his excommunication against Huss and his adherents.[1] The news of the excommunication increased both the popular excitement and the royal displeasure. The King ordered the magistrates of the city to sequestrate the temporalities of the Archbishop and of those of his priests who published the excommunication in their churches. Some of the clergy were imprisoned. The Primate retaliated with a wholesale excommunication[2] of all the magistrates and officers who had been directly or indirectly concerned in executing the royal commands.
The Archbishop’s exile lasted about a year. He was fond of affecting to pose as a S. Thomas of Canterbury; but he was not equal to the part, and could never sustain it for long together. He agreed that the questions in dispute between himself and the University should be referred to the arbitration of the King and his Council. The arbitrators determined[3] that there should be, to use diplomatic language, a return to the status quo ante bellum. The Archbishop was to take off all ecclesiastical censures pronounced by himself, and to procure the cancelling of those imposed by the Pope: he was to report to the Pope that no heresy existed in Bohemia, and to request that all proceedings pending in the Papal Courts might be stopped. On these conditions the Archbishop and those who had obeyed him were to be restored to their benefices, and the imprisoned clerks released. Neither side fulfilled its part of the agreement. The letter which the Archbishop was to have written to the Pope, was never despatched; while on his part, he complained that the clerical revenues were still intercepted, and the popular violence still unchecked. Again he left Prague; and proceeded to the Court of the King’s brother Sigismund,
- ↑ Doc. 397.
- ↑ Doc. 429, where there is nothing whatever to warrant the “atque interdicti contra civitatem Pragensem amtitumque duorum milliariorum” inserted by Palacky in the heading. The document contains nothing about an Interdict. Surely the Interdict spoken of in Doc. 432, and in the decision of the arbitration, p. 439 (“eos D. Archiepiscopus excommunicatione liberare atque interdictum tollere debet”), is that of Doc. 378, where the Archbishop “interdicit ne verbum Dei in locis privatis civitatis Pragensis prædicetur.”
- ↑ Doc. 437. The Archbishop afterwards pretended that he did not know that the King had authorised the sequestration.
