Paris was ripe for rebellion, and at the sight of ‘the Maid’ would have murdered her foreign garrison and opened her gates. Bedford was in the north suppressing a revolt, yet Charles, clutching at the excuse of the broken bridges, retreated southwards, disbanding his army and leaving his defender to her fate. Her Voices now warned Jeanne of impending capture and death, but her mission was to save France, and hearing that the Duke of Burgundy planned to take the important town of Compiègne she rode to its defence with a small force. Under the walls, in the course of a sortie, she was captured, refusing to surrender. ‘I have sworn and given my faith to another than you, and I will keep my oath,’ she declared; and through the months that followed, caged and fettered in a dark cell of the castle of Rouen, exposed to the insults of the rough English archers, she maintained her allegiance, saying to her foes of the prince who had failed her so pitiably, ‘My King is the most noble of all Christians.’ Frenchmen (some of them bishops, canons, and lawyers of the University of Paris), as well as Englishmen, were amongst those who, after the mockery of a trial, sent Jeanne to be burned as a heretic in the market-place of Rouen. Bravely as she had lived she died, calling on her saints, begging the forgiveness of her enemies, pardoning the evil they had done her. ‘That the world’, says a modern writer, ‘might have no relic of her of whom the world was not worthy, the English threw her ashes into the Seine.’ France, that had betrayed Jeanne d’Arc, needed no relic to keep her memory alive. To-day men and women call her Saint, and one miracle she certainly wrought, for she restored to her country, that through years of anarchy had almost lost belief in itself, the undying sense of its own nationality. ‘As to peace with the English,’ she had said, ‘the only peace possible is for them to return to their own land.’ Within little more than twenty years from her death the mission on which she had ridden forth from Domremy had been accomplished, and Calais, of all their French possessions, alone remained to the enemies of France. In summary of the Hundred Years’ War it may be said that from the beginning the English fought in a lost cause. Fortune, military genius, and dogged courage gave to their conquests a fictitious endurance; but nationality is a foe invincible because it has discovered the elixir of life; and when the tide of fortune turned with the coming of ‘the Maid’ the ebb of English discomfiture was very swift.