comrades covered
their retreat. The Burgundians were coming up in mass upon Compiegne,
and Flavy gave orders to pull up the draw-bridge and let down the
portcullis. Joan and some of her following lingered outside, still
fighting. She wore a rich surcoat and a red sash, and all the efforts of
the Burgundians were directed against her. Twenty men thronged round her
horse; and a Picard archer, "a tough fellow and mighty sour," seized her
by her dress, and flung her on the ground. All, at once, called on her
to surrender. "Yield you to me," said one of them; "pledge your faith to
me; I am a gentleman." It was an archer of the bastard of Wandonne, one
of the lieutenants of John of Luxembourg, Count of Ligny. "I have
pledged my faith to one other than you," said Joan, "and to Him I will
keep my oath." The archer took her and conducted her to Count John,
whose prisoner she became.

Was she betrayed and delivered up, as she had predicted? Did William de
Flavy purposely have the drawbridge raised and the portcullis lowered
before she could get back into Compiegne? He was suspected of it at the
time, and many historians have indorsed the suspicion. But there is
nothing to prove it. That La Tremoille, prime minister of Charles VII.,
and Reginald de Chartres, Archbishop of Rheims, had an antipathy to Joan
of Arc, and did all they could on every occasion to compromise her and
destroy her influence, and that they were glad to see her a prisoner, is
as certain as anything can be. On announcing her capture to the
inhabitants of Rheims, the arch-bishop said, "She would not listen to
counsel, and did everything according to her pleasure." But there is a
long distance between such expressions and a premeditated plot to deliver
to the enemy the young heroine who had just raised the siege of Orleans
and brought the king to be crowned at Rheims. History must not, without
proof, impute crimes so odious and so shameful to even the most depraved
of men.

However that may be, Joan remained for six months the prisoner of John of
Luxembourg, who, to make his possession of her secure, sent her, under
good escort, successively to his two castles of Beaulieu and Beaurevoir,
one in the Vermandois and the other in the Cambresis. Twice, in July and
in October, 1430, Joan attempted, unsuccessfully, to escape. The second
time she carried despair and hardihood so far as to throw herself down
from the platform of her prison. She was pick