But you, that are polluted with your lusts,
Stained with the guiltless blood of innocents,
Corrupt and tainted with a thousand vices,
Because you want the grace that others have,
You judge it straight a thing impossible
To compass wonders but by help of devils.”
The English had devils on their own side, the cruel priests and Bishop Cauchon, whom they had promised to make Archbishop of Rouen. But he never got it.
For three months these people examined Joan every day, sometimes all shouting at her at once, so that she said, “Gentlemen, if you please, one at a time.” She had no advocate, who knew the law, to help her to defend herself. But once, when she appealed to the Council of Basle, a Council cf the Church which was then sitting, they bade her be silent, and told the clerk who took down everything in writing, in French, not to write down her appeal. There is nothing about this in the Latin book of the Trial, translated from the French, but in the French copy, mode in court, you see the place where the clerk’s pen has stepped at the words, “and she appeals” (Et requiert, in French). He was going to write the rest. Now she had a right to appeal, and as the clergy at the Council of Basle were of many countries, they would not have taken the English side, but pronounced Joan innocent. The Bishops and clergy of the loyal French party at Poitiers, before she went to the war, had declared her innocent and a thing of God, after a long examination of her life up till April 1429. Joan often asked her judges to send for “the Poitiers book,” where they would find answers to their questions about her early days; but they vexed her about everything, even about the fairy tree, on which the children used to hang their garlands. Their notion seems to have been that the fairies were her helpers, not the Saints, and that the fairies were evil spirits.
Joan had shown that, in war and politics, she was wiser than the soldiers and statesmen. She went straight at the work to be done—to beat the English, and to keep attacking them before they got back their confidence. At her Trial she showed that she was far wiser than the learned priests. They tried to prove that she was helped by fairies. She said that she did not believe there were any fairies: and though I would not say that there are none, there certainly are not so many, or so busy and powerful, as the priests supposed. They kept asking her about the prophecies of Merlin the Wizard: she thought nothing of Merlin the Wizard.
She vowed to speak truth in answer to questions, but she would not answer questions about her Saints and Voices, except when they gave her permission. The judges troubled her most about the secret of the King, and what she told him about that, before she went to the wars. You remember that the King had secretly prayed to know whether he really was the son of the late King or not, and that Joan told him of his prayer, and told him that he was the son of the late King, and had the right to be King himself. But she would tell the Judges nothing about all this matter. If she had, the English would have cried everywhere, “You see he is not certain himself that he is what he pretends to be. Our King of England is the only King of France.”