Jeanne d'Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France: Being the Story of Her Life, Her Achievements, and Her Death, as Attested on Oath and Set Forth in the Original Documents
History
Jeanne d'Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France: Being the Story of Her Life, Her Achievements, and Her Death, as Attested on Oath and Set Forth in the Original Documents
Joan, of Arc, Saint, 1412-1431 -- Trials, litigation, etc.
Many of those who appeared in the Court did so more from love of the
English and the favour they bore them than on account of true zeal for
justice and the Catholic Faith. In the extreme prejudice of Messire
Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, there were, I assert, two proofs of
ill-feeling: the first, when the Bishop, acting as Judge, commanded
Jeanne to be kept in the secular prison and in the hands of her mortal
enemies; and although he might easily have had her detained and guarded
in an ecclesiastical prison, yet he allowed her, from the beginning of
the trial to the end, to be tormented and cruelly treated in a secular
prison. Moreover, at the first session or meeting, the Bishop aforesaid
asked and required the opinion of all present, as to whether it was more
suitable to detain her in the secular ward or in the prisons of the
Church. It was decided as more correct that she be kept in
ecclesiastical prisons rather than in the secular; but this the Bishop
said he would not do for fear of displeasing the English. The second
proof was that on the day when the Bishop and several others declared
her a heretic, relapsed, and returned to her evil deeds, because, in
prison, she had resumed a man’s dress, the Bishop, coming out of the
prison, met the Earl of Warwick and a great many English with him, to
whom he said, laughing, in a loud and clear voice: “Farewell! farewell!
it is done; be of good cheer,” or such-like words.
The Maid revealed to me that, after her abjuration and recantation, she
was violently treated in the prison, molested, beaten, and ill-used; and
that an English lord had insulted her. She also said, publicly, that on
this account she had resumed a man’s dress; and, towards the end, she
said to the Bishop of Beauvais: “Alas! I die through you, for had you
given me over to be kept in the prisons of the Church, I should not have
been here!”
When she had been finally preached to in the Old Market-Place and
abandoned to the secular authority, although the secular Judges were
seated on the platform, in no way was she condemned by any of these
Judges; but, without being condemned, she was forced by two sergeants to
come down from the platform and was taken by the said sergeants to the
place where she was to be burned, and by them delivered into the hands
of the executioner.
And in proof of this, a short time after, one called Georges Folenfant
was apprehended on account of the Faith and for the crime of heresy, and
was in the same way handed over to the secular justice. In this case,
the Judges—to wit, Messire Louis de Luxembourg, Archbishop of Rouen, and
Brother Guillaume Duval, Deputy of the Inquisitor of the Faith—sent me
to the Bailly of Rouen to warn him that the said Georges should not be
treated as was the Maid, who, without final sentence or definite
judgment, had been burned in the fire.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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