I know nothing either of my Polish servant or of Cardinalis, except that I have news that your lordship is here and in the King’s company. I beg you therefore to entreat his Majesty, both on my own account and for the sake of God Almighty, Who hath so richly endowed him with His gifts; and, further, for the sake of manifesting justice and truth to the glory of God and the welfare of His Church. Entreat him, I say, to release me from imprisonment, so that I may be able to prepare myself for a public hearing. You should know that I have been very ill, and have had clysters applied to me; but I am now well again. Please give my greetings to the Bohemian lords who are at the court of the king. Written with my own hand, which your secretary, Peter, knows.[1] Sent off from prison. May all of you who are my friends remember the Goose!
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LETTERS WRITTEN DURING THE
The Commission to which Hus alludes in the following letter was a Commission of three inquisitors—the Patriarch of Constantinople, Hus’s courier the Bishop of Lebus, and Bishop Bernard of Citta di Castello, who had met Jerome at Cracow in the spring of 1413, and procured, as we have seen (p. 134), his expulsion from that city. These the Council had appointed, immediately on Hus’s arrest, to examine him. By these three, ‘together with their notaries and witnesses,’ Hus was repeatedly visited in prison and questioned. The prosecutors, especially, Palecz and Michael, were unsparing in their labours. ‘I should be glad,’ said Michael, spurring on a reluctant witness, ‘to bear evidence against my own father if he were a heretic.’ Michael’s spies, as Hus complains, were everywhere ‘finding out letters and other evidence.’ To what Hus alludes in his statement about the ‘dozen masters’ it is difficult to say. Wylie[2] and others have taken Hus to mean that the inquisitors offered him a dozen
