he inhabitants of Rheims, his native town, or of Rouen,
in which _his_ trial and downfall took place as well as Jeanne's,
pronounced for the King of Prussia in the last war, and proclaimed
themselves his subjects, the traitors would have been hung with infamy
from their own high towers, or driven into their river headlong. But
things were very different in the fifteenth century. There has never
been a moment in our history when either England or Scotland has
pronounced for a foreign sway. Scotland fought with desperation for
centuries against the mere name of suzerainty, though of a kindred race.
There have been terrible moments of forced subjugation at the point of
the sword; but never any such phenomena as appeared in France, so far
on in the world's history as was that brilliant and highly cultured
age. Such a state of affairs is to our minds impossible to understand
or almost to believe: but in the interests of justice it must be fully
acknowledged and understood.

Cauchon arises accordingly, not at first with any infamy, out of the
obscurity. He had been expelled and dethroned from his See, but this
only for political reasons. He was ecclesiastically Bishop of Beauvais
still; it was within his diocese that the Maid had taken prisoner, and
there also her last acts of magic, if magic there was, had taken place.
He had therefore a legal right to claim the jurisdiction, a right which
no one had any interest in taking from him. If Paris was disappointed
at not having so interesting a trial carried on before its courts, there
was compensation in the fact that many doctors of the University were
called to assist Cauchon in his examination of the Maid, and to bring
her, witch, sorceress, heretic, whatever she might be, to question.
These doctors were not undistinguished or unworthy men. A number of them
held high office in the Church; almost all were honourably connected
with the University, the source of learning in France. "With what art
were they chosen!" exclaims M. Blaze de Bury. "A number of theologians,
the elite of the time, had been named to represent France at the council
of Bale; of these Cauchon chose the flower." This does not seem on the
face of it to be a fact against, but rather in favour of, the tribunal,
which the reader naturally supposes must have been the better, the more
just, for being chosen among the flower of learning in France. They were
not men who could be imagined to be the tools of any Bishop.