§ 116.1. =Two National Saints.=--=John of Nepomuk=, of Pomuk in Bohemia, was from A.D. 1380 pastor, then canon, archiepiscopal secretary, and vicar-general of Prague. King Wenzel had him seized, cruelly tortured, and flung over the bridge into the Moldau, because, so runs the legend, he as confessor of the queen sturdily refused to betray the secrets of the confessional, but really because he had roused the king’s anger to the uttermost in a violent controversy between the king’s archbishop, John of Jenzenstein, and the chapter over their election and consecration of an abbot. The confession legend appears first in an Austrian writer of A.D. 1451, who gives it distinctly as a tradition. It is evidently connected with the Taborite rejection of the Catholic doctrine of auricular confession (§ 119, 7). If it be accepted as true, then, seeing that all the older chroniclers ascribe the cruel treatment of this prelate to the share he took in the abbot’s election, it will be necessary to assume two victims of the king’s wrath instead of one. The John Nepomuk of the legend, and the confessor of the queen, was tortured by the king’s command in A.D. 1383; the other, who figures in the old chronicles as archiepiscopal vicar-general, and is simply called John, was tortured in A.D. 1393, and then thrown over the bridge into the Moldau. This latter story appears first in a Bohemian chronicle of A.D. 1541. In the 17th century the Jesuits, in order to deprive the heretical national saint and martyr John Huss of his supremacy by bringing forward another genuine Bohemian, but also a thoroughly Catholic saint, gave currency to the legend, adorned with many additional stories of miracles. Benedict XIII. (§ 164, 1) was just the pope to aid such a device by sanctioning, as he did in A.D. 1729, the canonization of a purely fictitious saint-confessor John Nepomuk. He is patron saint of bridges, whose image in Bohemia, and other strictly Catholic lands, is met with at almost every bridge, and is reverenced as the protector from unjust accusations, as well as the dispenser of rain in seasons of great drought. Although no mention is made of the story about the confessional in the letter of complaint to Rome by Archbishop Jenzenstein, Catholic historians still insist that the confessor’s steadfastness was the real cause, the election of the abbot the ostensible cause, of the martyrdom of A.D. 1393.[345] The need of strengthening the position of the Romish church, in face of the progress of the Swiss Reformation of the 16th century, led also to the elevation of the recluse, =Nicolaus [Nicolas] of Flüe= upon the pedestal of a Swiss national saint. Esteemed even before his birth a saint by reason of signs and wonders, “Brother Claus,” after a long, active life in the world, in his 50th year, the father of ten children, forsook house and home, with the approval