Johann Frederick was accused by Philip of Hesse of the grossest immorality. This happened when the former refused to defend Philip’s bigamy and when his Superintendent, Justus Menius, who was given to lauding the Elector’s virtues, showed an inclination to protest publicly against the Landgrave’s bigamy. This led Philip to write this warning to his theologian Bucer: “If those saintly folk, Justus Menius and his crew, amuse themselves by writing against us, they shall have their answer. And we shall not leave hidden under a bushel how this most august and quite sinless Elector, once, under our roof at Cassel, and again, at the time of the first Diet of Spires, committed the crime of sodomy.”[663] A. Hausrath remarks concerning this in his “Luthers Leben”: That Philip was lying “can hardly be taken for granted”;[664] G. Mentz, likewise, in his recent work, “Joh. Friedrich der Grossmütige,”[665] says: “It is difficult simply to ignore the Landgrave’s statement, but we do not know whether the allusion may not be to some sin committed in youth.” Here belongs also the passage in Philip of Hesse’s letter to Luther of July 27, 1540 (above, p. 60), where he calls the Elector to bear witness that he (the Landgrave) had done “the worst.” The Biblical expression “_peccatum pessimum_” stood for sodomy. Further charges of a similar nature were even more explicitly laid at the door of Johann Frederick. A Catholic, relating the proceedings in Brunswick at the close of the conquest of that country by the Protestant troops in 1542, speaks of “vices and outrages against nature then indulged in by the Elector at the Castle as is commonly reported and concerning which there is much talk among the Court people.”[666] Duke Henry of Brunswick in a tract of 1544 referred not only to the Elector’s sanction of the Landgrave’s bigamy, in return for which he was spared by the latter, but also to the “many other pranks which might be circumstantially proved against them and which deserved more severe punishment” than that of the sword.[667] The “more severe punishment” means burning at the stake, which was the penalty decreed by the laws of the Empire for sodomy, whereas polygamy and adultery were simply punished by decapitation. Both sovereigns in their reply flatly denied the charge, but, evidently, they clearly understood its nature; they had never been guilty, they said, of “shameful, dishonourable pranks deserving of death by fire.”[668]