The History of the Bohemian Persecution/Chapter 36
Cmap. XXXVI,
John Augusta, James Bileck, and George Israel taken.
I. THe third Edict that Ferdinand set forth against the brethren, was concerning the taking of the Ministers of the brethren prisoners: wherefore they are disperſed, part into Morauia, which at that time was free from troubles, part, that they might not forsake their auditors, in private places, from whence comming forth (but for the most part, in the night) they visited the faithfull, and where need required administred in houses, which continued for fome years.
2. Three of them fel into their enemies clutches, Iohn Augusta, the elder, with Iames Bilke his colleague, & George Israel, pastor of the Church of Turnovia, but he by the admirable help of God was freed from the deep dungeon of the Castle of prague, and followed his friends into borussia, being from above made an Apostle of the polonians. For when he had once or twice travelled from Borussia into Moravia (where the Ministers forced from Bohemia did lurk & had gone through polonia the greater, in some places (as occasion offered it selfe) hee preached the Gospell with such success, that he gained many of the nobility and in these the pallatines and Castellanes, and within fewe years erected about twenty Churches in polonia the greater: and this was the first originall of Churches in Polonia, which as yet retaine the Cerimonies of the bohemian Confession.
3. The enemies so rejoyced for the imprisonment of John Augusta, as the philistims did when they had taken Sampson; for he was a man renowned through the whole Country, not so much for that he was the chief bishop among the brethren, but for his disputations both by words and writings with his adversaries the Calixtines, who as Luther, the pope in Germany, so he confounded his adversaries in bohemia. For he was sometimes Luther’s auditor, and did often afterwards receive Letters from him. by which meanes the enemies laid all the blame of the disobedience of the Orders towards Ferdinand, upon Augusta alone, as if he with his had caused (the rest of the Order cunningly being drawn into the faction) that Ferdinand being driven out, they might advance lohn Frederick the Elector of Saxony unto the Kingdome; which had assuredly been brought about, if Cæsar had been overthrown in war.
4. That this cruell conspiracy might be disclosed, Augusta being called forth by a feigned friend to discourse as if to advise with them concerning the allaying of that mischief, he is taken & carried back to Prague, & was by order three times miserably tortured by the hand of the hangman, his colleague John Billek, fared no better. But no unlawfull act being known, or any signe thereof appearing, they are left in prison for the space of 17 years, at the length after the death of Ferdinand they are dismissed in the year 1564.