The town of Compiègne was closely besieged by the English and the Burgundians, and was likely to yield. So the Maid rode thither with her brothers and two or three hundred men to raise the siege. She charged the Burgundians, but was surrounded and taken prisoner and held to ransom. The French would not pay a franc for her, and so her captors sold her to the English, who “feared not any captain, not any chief in war, as they had feared the Maid.” She was brought before the Bishop of Beauvais and tried for witchcraft. After a long and tedious trial, and after suffering every kind of insult and hardship, she was found guilty, and was tricked into signing a paper confessing her guilt. And all the time the miserable French king made no sign, and lifted not his little finger to save her.
On May 30, 1431, they led her into the market-place of Rouen and burnt her alive. With her dying words she testified to the truth of her Visions, and underwent her awful doom with the courage of a martyr. So she died, pressing to her lips a rude cross which a pitiful soldier held out to her. The old legends tell that as the flames leaped round her, and her spirit departed, a pure white dove, the harbinger of peace, rose from out the smouldering pile and winged its way towards heaven. In very truth peace did spring from her ashes. Her heroic example gave new life to the crushed spirit of her countrymen, who rose and drove the invader from their shores. Four years later, nothing was left of all the English conquests in France but the town of Calais.
THE CORONATION OF CHARLES VII. AT RHEIMS.
(From the painting by J. E. Lenepveu in the Pantheon, Paris.)
JOAN OF ARC STORMING THE “BULWARK” (ORLEANS).
(From the painting by J. E. Lenepveu.)
