This action of the daring churchman threw the emperor into such a paroxysm of rage that the archbishop, knowing well the man he had to deal with, took to flight, saving his neck at the expense of his dignity.  The furious Wenceslas, finding that the chief offender had escaped, vented his wrath on the subordinates, several of whom were seized.  One of them, the dean, moved by indignation, dealt the emperor so heavy a blow on the head with his sword-knot as to bring the blood.  It does not appear that he was made to suffer for his boldness, but two of the lower ecclesiastics, John of Nepomuk and Puchnik, were put to the rack to make them confess facts learned by them in the confessional.  They persistently refused to answer.  Wenceslas, infuriated by their obstinacy, himself seized a torch and applied it to their limbs to make them speak.  They were still silent.  The affair ended in his ordering John of Nepomuk to be flung headlong, during the night, from the great bridge over the Moldau into the stream.  A statue now marks the spot where this act of tyranny was performed.

The final result of the emperor’s cruelty was one which he could not have foreseen.  He had made a saint of Nepomuk.  The church, appreciating the courageous devotion of the murdered ecclesiastic to his duty in keeping inviolate the secrets of the confessional, canonized him as a martyr, and made him the patron saint of Bohemia.

Puchnik escaped with his life, and eventually with more than his life.  The tyrant’s wrath was followed by remorse,—­a feeling, apparently, which rarely troubled his soul,—­and he sought to atone for his cruelty to one churchman by loading the other with benefits.  But his mad fury changed to as mad a benevolence, and he managed to make a jest of his gratuity.  Puchnik was led into the royal treasury, and the emperor himself, thrusting his royal hands into his hoards of gold, filled the pockets, and even the boots, of the late sufferer with the precious coin.  This done, Puchnik attempted to depart, but in vain.  He found himself nailed to the floor, so weighed down with gold that he was unable to stir.  Before he could move he had to disgorge much of his new-gained wealth, a proceeding to which churchmen in that age do not seem to have been greatly given.  Doubtless the remorseful Wenceslas beheld this process with a grim smile of royal humor on his lips.

The emperor had a brother, Sigismund by name, a man not of any high degree of wisdom, but devoid of his wild and immoderate temper.  Brandenburg was his inheritance, though he had married the daughter of the King of Hungary and Poland, and hoped to succeed to those countries.  There was a third brother, John, surnamed “Von Goerlitz.”  Sigismund was by no means blind to his brother’s folly, or to the ruin in which it threatened to involve his family and his own future prospects.  This last exploit stirred him to action.  Concerting with some other princes of the empire, he suddenly seized Wenceslas, carried him to Austria, and imprisoned him in the castle of Wiltberg, in that country.