'The wall is high; and yet will I leap down:--
Good ground, be pitiful, and hurt me not!...
As good to die, and go, as die, and stay'
she knotted some thongs together and let herself out of a window; but
the thongs broke, and she fell from a great height--the tower is
supposed to have been no less than sixty feet high. She was found
unconscious at its foot, and for several days she was not expected to
recover from the injuries she had received. But she was doomed for a
far more terrible death.
For several days Joan of Arc took no nourishment. Gradually she
revived, and she told her jailers that her beloved Saint Catherine had
visited and comforted her; and she also told them that she knew
Compiegne would not be taken, and would be free from its enemies
before the Feast of Saint Martin.
Beaurevoir is now a ruin: although above the lintel can still be seen
the coat-of-arms of the jailer of the Maid, the tower in which she was
imprisoned, and from which she so nearly met her death, has been
destroyed.
In the month of November of that year (1430), in spite of the
entreaties of his wife and aunt, Ligny delivered up his prisoner into
the custody of the Duke of Burgundy, from whose keeping she was soon
transferred into that of the English.
On the 20th of November the University of Paris sent a message to
Cauchon, advising him to bring Joan of Arc before a tribunal. Cauchon,
however, waited the arrival of Winchester, bringing with him his
great-nephew, Henry VI. Winchester arrived with the boy-king on the
2nd of December. The Cardinal intended the function of the crowning of
his great-nephew to be as imposing a ceremony as possible; and he
also meant, by defaming the source of the French King's successes, to
show the French people that Charles' coronation at Rheims had been
brought about by what the Regent Bedford called a 'limb of the evil
one.' It was, therefore, Bedford's plan that it should be declared
before the world that Joan of Arc was inspired by Satanic agencies,
and that consequently the French King's coronation was also due to
these agencies. By similar means it would be made clear that all the
French victories were owing to the same influence; for were it not,
argued the English, they would be proved to have been themselves
fighting against and defeated by--not the spirit of evil but--the
spirit of righteousness.
Nothing, indeed, could be clearer than Winchester's argument. It was
now only necessary that Joan of Arc should be at once placed on her
trial as a sorceress and a witch--one who was in league with the evil
one; and, when that had been satisfactorily proved, that she should
publicly meet with the fate which a merciful Church had, in its
infinite wisdom, ordained for such as she. Thus would the English army
and people be avenged, and the French King's crown and prerogative
suffer an irreparable damage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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