possibility have any cognizance, seems hard to comprehend; but that a great captain should have treated as an offender, a prisoner of war, taken in open fight by the fortune of war, and over whom the fortune of that war alone gave him any power whatever, seems wholly inconceivable. For conduct which nothing can vindicate, his alarm at the impression made on his superstitious soldiery by a belief in her divine mission may perhaps account, though it cannot even soften the blame which every honourable mind at once pronounces upon it. If indeed, as some have asserted in his defence, he sacrificed her against his better judgment to the popular fury, then truly must his guilt be greatly aggravated in the eyes of all who have ever turned away, with indignant scorn, from the well-known spectacle of a judge washing his hands of the blame when he had suffered lesser criminals to perpetrate the offence.

But Charles can hardly be said to have shown himself less worthy of reprobation. He who owed to the Maid his crown, possibly his liberty or his life, made no effort to rescue her from destruction by ransom, none to save her by threatening reprisals on the English captains in his power. It does not appear that any, the least, pains were taken by this ungrateful Prince to avert or to stay her fate. When, twenty-five years after her murder, her family exerted themselves to obtain an examination of the case, with a view to reversing the judgment, he favoured their proceeding; and the See of Rome

pronounced sentence, relieving her memory from the imputation of heresy. But this was the extent of Charles's gratitude towards his illustrious deliverer. Whether it was that she had, during the operations which succeeded his coronation, shown less than her former determination, and been less fortunate in the fights she bore a part in, or that Charles became weary of hearing her praises, and impatient of each success being ascribed to her, or that the whispers of his jealous officers against her found too easy access to his ear, certain it is that, without the least struggle, he suffered a deed of atrocious injustice to be perpetrated, which a firm resistance must have prevented. At the height of his fortune, in great part the result of her services, he suffered her family to languish in penury, her mother supported by a weekly dole among the poor of Orleans. No sovereign ever owed a greater debt of gratitude to a subject than Charles owed to the Maid-no man ever proved himself more ungrateful to his benefactor.1

The hopes which the English, possibly the Regent himself, had indulged of a change in the fortune of the war upon the capture of the Maid, soon ended in disappointment. The loss to their adversaries proved far less considerable than they had dreaded. The enthusiasm on the one side, the panic on the other, had for some time been gradually subsiding, and giving place to more sober feelings upon which Charles could with greater confidence rely. Retain

Note LIX.

ing the devoted attachment of his own subjects, he saw Bedford's becoming daily more averse to the English ruler. The provinces occupied by his troops, even Paris itself, the centre of the Burgundian influence, seemed to awaken from the delusion under which they had so long laboured. The dupes of unprincipled intrigue and their own violence, to defeat a rival faction they had welcomed a foreign master, and they found the yoke of the conqueror as heavy as the disgrace of the subjection was galling. The necessities of the war made imposts unavoidable; those burthens, and the state of the country, laid waste by its operations, and especially by the merciless bands of freebooters, deserters and disbanded from the armies, were evils inseparable from long-continued hostilities, but these were caused by the invasion. Then the English took no pains to mitigate the pressure of such grievous injuries by the courtesy of their demeanour. Their rudeness, their harshness, their overbearing insolence, their sense of superiority ever obtruded and proclaimed as anxiously as by others it is suppressed or disguised, were universally and sorely felt. To the people over whom they held dominion, they were unbearable; but even by those with whom they were acting as allies, it might be as fellow-soldiers, they were scarcely more patiently endured. Nay so great was the hatred of them that it extended to the Scots, because they spoke the same language, and came from the same country, although engaged in making

war upon them for the deliverance of France from their yoke. A contemporary historian, the familiar friend of Charles,' assures us that the French, at the battle of Verneuil, beheld the entire destruction of their Scotch auxiliaries with such delight as consoled them for that great defeat; yet the Scots were the strength of the Armagnac army, and their commander was a Scot, who led them at Beaugé to the only victory they had ever gained against the English arms.

Bedford had long perceived the fatal effects of the feelings which thus generally prevailed, and which, far from yielding to the influence of time, became daily more intense, connected as they were with the people's real interests, which every hour's reflection showed had been sacrificed to personal and party animosity. In some places the inhabitants had risen upon his troops when detachments reduced their numbers; or the gates had been opened by stratagem, in concert with the forces of the enemy; or conspiracies had been discovered on the eve of accomplishing their purpose, and new plots been formed during the exemplary punishment of the detected parties. The disposition of the Parisians themselves. had become as hostile as they ever were friendly before, and it seemed as if their ostentatious preference of the Burgundian was less to favour Philip

'Amelgard of Liège (Leodensis), Hist. de Rebus Gestis à Carolo VII. Francorum Rege, lib. ii. cap. 4, MS.; ap. Sismondi xiii. 36. M. Sismondi justly praises Amelgard, but omits the important fact of his intimacy with Charles, which the historian himself has stated in the beginning of his work.

than to mortify Bedford. His habitual disregard of all selfish considerations when the public service was concerned, had made him without a moment's hesitation consent to press the Regency upon his ally; but he is known to have felt acutely the University, the Parliament, and the citizens of Paris in concert pressing upon him a step which confined his high office to the province of Normandy, and made Philip governor of the realm. Nor can we doubt that he was equally chagrined at finding the whole proceedings against the Maid openly reprobated by the Bourguignon party, who extolled her valour, and even inclined to believe in her mission. The zealots of the English party alone took their side against her; and it was Bedford's lot not only to see that these were few, but to feel that the general indignation was just.

He now conceived that some benefit might result from performing the ceremony of the young King's coronation, he having been crowned at

1431.

Westminster the year before, as Charles was at Rheims. But it was found impossible to hold the festival at that place, appointed by the ancient usages of the monarchy, as the intermediate country was partly in possession of the Armagnac forces. The conflict, too, of the rival parties under the Cardinal and Gloster prevented the obtaining of the needful supplies for so expensive an attempt. The ceremony was therefore performed at Paris; and its effects were the reverse of what had been expected,