Six months later, while Charles was sunk in sloth at the château of Sully, Jeanne was captured by the Burgundians at the siege of Compiègne, and her enemies closed on her like bloodhounds. The university and the Inquisition wrangled for her body, but English gold bought her from her Burgundian captors and sent her to a martyr’s death at Rouen. Those who would read the sad record of her trial may do so in the pages of Mr Douglas Murray’s translation of the minutes of the evidence, and may assist in imagination at the eighteen days’ forensic baiting of the hapless child (she was but nineteen years of age), whose lucid simplicity broke through the subtle web of theological chicanery which was spun to entrap her by the most cunning of the Sorbonne doctors.
A summary of Jeanne’s answers was sent to “Our Mother, the University of Paris.” The condemnation was a foregone conclusion[92] and after a forced retractation, the virgin saviour of France was led to her doom in the market-place of Rouen. As she passed the lines of English soldiers, their eyes flashing fierce hatred upon her, a cry escaped her, “O Rouen, Rouen, must I then die here?” With her last breath she protested that her voices had not deceived her and were of God; and calling on “Jesus!” her head sank in the flames. “We are lost,” said an English spectator; “we have burnt a saint!”
Some contemporary letters from Venetian merchants in the cities of France have recently been published, which give valuable testimony to the sympathy evoked among foreign residents by the career of Jeanne the Maid. To them she was a zentil anzolo, “a gentle angel sent of God to save the good land of France, the most noble country in the world, which having purged its sins and pride God snatched from the brink of utter destruction. For even as by a woman, our Lady St. Mary, He saved the human race, so by this young maiden pure and spotless He hath saved the fairest pearl of Christendom.”
“The English burnt her,” says one of the merchants, writing from Bruges, “thinking that fortune would turn in their favour, but may it please Christ the Lord that the contrary befall them!” And so in truth it happened. Disaster after disaster wrecked the English cause; the Duke of Bedford died, Philip of Burgundy and Charles were reconciled and Queen Isabella went to a dishonoured grave. The English were driven out of Paris, and in 1453, of all the “large and ample empery” of France, won at the cost of a hundred years of bloodshed and cruel devastation, a little strip of land at Calais and Guines alone remained to the English crown. Charles, who with despicable cowardice had suffered the heroic Maid to be done to death by the English without a thought of intervention, was moved to call for a tardy reparation of the atrocious injustice at Rouen; and a quarter of a century after the Te Deum sung in Notre Dame for her capture, another, a very different scene, was witnessed in the cathedral. “The case for her rehabilitation,” says Mr Murray, “was solemnly opened there, and the mother and brothers of the Maid came before the court to present their humble petition for a revision of her sentence, demanding only ‘the triumph of truth and justice.’ The court heard the request with some emotion. When Isabel d’Arc threw herself at the feet of the Commissioners, showing the papal rescript and weeping aloud, so many joined in the petition that at last, we are told, it seemed that one great cry for justice broke from the multitude.”
The story of Paris under the English is a melancholy one. Despite the rigid justice and enlightened policy of Bedford’s regency they failed to win the affection of the Parisians. Rewards to political friends, punishments and confiscations inflicted on the disaffected, the riotous and homicidal conduct of some of the English garrison, the depression in commerce and depreciation of property brought their inevitable consequences—a growing hatred of the English name.[93] The chapter of Notre Dame was compelled to sell the gold vessels from the treasury. Hundreds of houses were abandoned by their owners, who were unable to meet the charges upon them. In 1427 by a royal instrument the rent of the Maison des Singes was reduced from twenty-six livres to fourteen, “seeing the extreme diminution of rents.”
