"... We beseech you in all good affection, O powerful Prince," he said, "and we entreat your noble vassals that by them and by you Jeanne be sent unto us surely and shortly, and we hope that thus ye will do as being the true protector of the faith and the defender of God's honour...."[431]
The Vicar-General of the Grand Inquisitor of France, Brother Martin Billoray,[432] Master of theology, belonged to the order of friars preachers, the members of which exercised the principal functions of the Holy office. In the days of Innocent III, when the Inquisition was exterminating Cathari and Albigenses, the sons of Dominic figured in paintings in monasteries and chapels as great white hounds spotted with black, biting at the throats of the wolves of heresy.[433] In France in the fifteenth century the Dominicans were always the dogs of the Lord; they, jointly with the bishops, drove out the heretic. The Grand Inquisitor or his Vicar was unable of his own initiative to set on foot and prosecute any judicial action; the bishops maintained their right to judge crimes committed against the Church. In matters of faith trials were conducted by two judges, the Ordinary, who might be the bishop himself or the Official, and the Inquisitor or his Vicar. Inquisitorial forms were observed.[434]
In the Maid's case it was not the Bishop only who was prompting the Holy Inquisition, but the Daughter of Kings, the Mother of Learning, the Bright and Shining Sun of France and of Christendom, the University of Paris. She arrogated to herself a peculiar jurisdiction in cases of heresy or other matters of doctrine occurring in the city or its neighbourhood; her advice was asked on every hand and regarded as authoritative over the face of the whole world, wheresoever the Cross had been set up. For a year her masters and doctors, many in number and filled with sound learning, had been clamouring for the Maid to be delivered up to the Inquisition, as being good for the welfare of the Church and conducive to the interests of the faith; for they had a deep-rooted suspicion that the damsel came not from God, but was deceived and seduced by the machinations of the Devil; that she acted not by divine power but by the aid of demons; that she was addicted to witchcraft and practised idolatry.[435]
Such knowledge as they possessed of things divine and methods of reasoning corroborated this grave suspicion. They were Burgundians and English by necessity and by inclination; they observed faithfully the Treaty of Troyes to which they had sworn; they were devoted to the Regent who showed them great consideration; they abhorred the Armagnacs, who desolated and laid waste their city, the most beautiful in the world;[436] they held that the Dauphin Charles had forfeited his rights to the Kingdom of the Lilies. Wherefore they inclined to believe that the Maid of the Armagnacs, the woman knight of the Dauphin Charles, was inspired by a company of loathsome demons. These scholars of the University were human; they believed what it was to their interest to believe; they were priests and they beheld the Devil everywhere, but especially in a woman. Without having devoted themselves to any profound examination of the deeds and sayings of this damsel, they knew enough to cause them to demand an immediate inquiry. She called herself the emissary of God, the daughter of God; and she appeared loquacious, vain, crafty, gorgeous in her attire. She had threatened the English that if they did not quit France she would have them all slain. She commanded armies, wherefore she was a slayer of her fellow-creatures and foolhardy. She was seditious, for are not all those seditious who support the opposite party? But recently having appeared before Paris in company with Friar Richard, a heretic, and a rebel,[437] she had threatened to put the Parisians to death without mercy and committed the mortal sin of storming the city on the Anniversary of the Nativity of Our Lady. It was important to examine whether in all this she had been inspired by a good spirit or a bad.[438]
Despite his strong attachment to the interests of the Church, the Duke of Burgundy did not respond to the urgent demand of the University; and Messire Jean de Luxembourg, after having kept the Maid three or four days in his quarters before Compiègne, had her taken to the Castle of Beaulieu in Vermandois, a few leagues from the camp.[439] Like his master, he ever appeared the obedient son of Mother Church; but prudence counselled him to await the approach of English and French and to see what each of them would offer.
At Beaulieu, Jeanne was treated courteously and ceremoniously. Her steward, Messire Jean d'Aulon, waited on her in her prison; one day he said to her pitifully:
"That poor town of Compiègne, which you so dearly loved, will now be delivered into the hands of the enemies of France, whom it must needs obey."
She made answer: "No, that shall not come to pass. For not one of those places, which the King of Heaven hath conquered through me and restored to their allegiance to the fair King Charles, shall be recaptured by the enemy, so diligently will he guard them."[440]
One day she tried to escape by slipping between two planks. She had intended to shut up her guards in the tower and take to the fields, but the porter saw and stopped her. She concluded that it was not God's will that she should escape this time.[441] Notwithstanding she had far too much self-reliance to despair. Her Voices, like her enamoured of marvellous encounters and knightly adventures, told her that she must see the King of England.[442] Thus did her dreams encourage and console her in her misfortune.
Great was the mourning on the Loire when the inhabitants of the towns loyal to King Charles learnt the disaster which had befallen the Maid. The people, who venerated her as a saint, who went so far as to say that she was the greatest of all God's saints after the Blessed Virgin Mary, who erected images of her in the chapels of saints, who ordered masses to be said for her, and collects in the churches, who wore leaden medals on which she was represented as if the Church had already canonized her,[443] did not withdraw their trust, but continued to believe in her.[444] Such faithfulness scandalized the doctors and masters of the University, who reproached the hapless Maid herself with it. "Jeanne," they said, "hath so seduced the Catholic people, that many have adored her as a saint in her presence, and now in her absence they adore her still."[445]