cient proof that such an excuse is untenable. Such an assertion would have been all-sufficient when, May 13, 1415, the Bohemians in Constance presented a memorial to the council in which they re- ferred to the treatment of Huss as a violation of the safe-conduct. Yet in its answer the council had no thought of making such an allegation, while at the same time Sigismund's services in the quar- rel with John XXIII. were too recent, and still too necessary, for the good fathers to inflict on him the disgrace of publicly declaring that they had righteously overruled his attempt to protect a here- tic. They therefore had recourse to a lie manufactured for the oc- casion, by asserting, in spite of the notorious existence of the safe- conduct in Constance at the time of Huss's arrest, that witnesses worthy of credit had proved that it had not been procured until fifteen days after that occurrence, and therefore that no public faith had been violated in the proceedings. This argument, which Sigismund himself asserted to be false in the public session of June 7, is an admission that the public faith was violated. A single fact such as this outweighs all the special pleadings of modern apologists.[1]
- ↑ Von der Hardt IV. 189, 209. Berger's labored collection of safe-conducts and their comparison with the one given to Huss (Johann Hus u. König Sigmund pp. 180-208) prove nothing but his own industry. Huss went to Constance as an excommunicate to defend himself and his faith. Sigismund, knowing this, gave him a safe-conduct with- out limitation or condition. The only contemporaneous documents with which this can fairly be compared are those offered by the council and by Sigismund to John XXIII. when they summoned him back to Constance, May 2, 1415, and the one offered by the council to Jerome of Prague, April 17. first was limited by the clause "justitia tamen semper salva," the second by "in Of these the quantum idem dominus rex tenetur sibi dare de jure et servare alios salvos conduc- tus sibi datos," the third by "quantum in nobis est et fides exegit orthodoxa" (V. d. Hardt IV. 119, 143, 145). No ingenious reasoning can explain this away. The allusion in Sigismund's safe-conduct to other letters already given by him to the pope refers to those which John had required of him and of the city of Con- stance before he would trust himself there (Raynald. ann. 1413, No. 22-3). These the council set aside as coolly as it did that of Huss. Sigismund, as we shall see, had no power to give a safe-conduct that would protect a heretic, but Berger's argument that he therefore could not have de- signedly issued an unlimited one to Huss (Berger, op. cit. 92-3, 109) is worthless in view of his readiness, which Berger freely concedes (p. 85), to enter into en-
