After the condemnation and burning of Hus, the Council proceeded to the trial of Jerome of Prague, who after a recantation repented of it and elected to die like his greater comrade. The proceedings against him were marked by great heat and acrimony, for he had made many personal enemies. Moreover, controversialist passions, which had indeed been apparent in the trial of Hus--for Hus was condemned as much because he was a realist as anything--flared up with still greater violence. Among the interested spectators of the death at the stake of Jerome of Prague was the great Italian humanist, Poggio. Much struck by the martyr's eloquence and genius, he thought it was a great pity that he should have turned his attention to heretical ideas, and half pityingly, half uncomprehendingly, wondered that a man should be willing to die merely for the sake of an opinion.
This chance connection between Jerome, the ardent scholastic reformer, and Poggio, the cynical forerunner of the New Learning--between the old order and the new, is remarkable and prophetic. The movement towards change, which Jerome of Prague represented, whether it was a conservative movement as interpreted by Gerson and D'Ailly, or radical as it became in the hands of Wycliffe and Hus, definitely failed. The mediæval system had indeed been challenged by that movement, which had resulted from the glaring scandals of Avignon and the papal Schism; but the system, though severely shaken, yet remained; and pontiffs such as Martin V, Eugenius IV and Pius II were able by politic means to bolster it up through a restoration of influence, mainly of a temporal nature, to the Papacy. The Conciliar method of ecclesiastical reform failed for a variety of reasons--partly because of defects in organization and policy, still more because of a natural failure to recognize the great significance of national differences and the need, or at least the demand, for variety of treatment as between states, which produced the Pragmatic Sanctions of Bourges and Mainz, of the years 1438 and 1439 respectively; yet more, precisely because the attempted reforms were not sufficiently far-reaching and thorough in character, a tinkering, not a renewal.