your secretary Peter can arrange the petition for a hearing.
Item, if a hearing shall be granted to me, ask that after it is granted the King shall not allow me to be thrust back into prison; so that I can be free to avail myself of your counsels and those of my friends, and, if it should please God, to say something to my lord the King for his own good and that of Christianity.
XLV. To the Same
(Without date: February, 1415)
I spent nearly all last night in writing answers to the charges which Palecz had drawn up against me.[1] He is definitely working to bring about my condemnation. God have mercy on him and comfort my soul!
They are saying that the article “on the right to disendow”[2] is heretical. You may give my lord the King the hint that if that article be condemned as heresy, he too will come to be condemned as a heretic for having taken away from the bishops their temporal goods, ay, as his father did before him,[3] Emperor and King of Bohemia. Give no person letters to
- ↑ See Doc. 204 ff.
- ↑ Gerson, in his charges against Hus, forwarded from Paris on September 24, 1414 , had put his finger on this (Doc. 187), while it had already in 1412 formed one of the charges of Michael the Pleader (Doc. 170). Hus, in fact, had embraced Wyclif’s “plan of campaign” to this extent, that the goods of priests of evil life should be taken away for the benefit of the poor. Hus’s treatise on this subject, De Ablatione (see Mon. i. 117–25), is mainly taken from the De Ecclesia of Wyclif. It was written in 1412.
- ↑ Charles IV. In his De Ablatione Hus simply refers in general terms (from Wyclif) to the case of the Templars. Both Charles and Wenzel had few qualms in this matter.
