But the document of the judges is not
signed by the clerks, as all such documents must be. One of them,
Manchon, who had not been present, was asked to sign it; he refused.
Another, Taquel, is said to have been present, but he did not sign. The
story is, therefore, worth nothing.

Enough. They burned Joan the Maid. She did not suffer long. Her eyes
were fixed on a cross which a priest, Martin L'Advenu, held up before
her. She maintained, he says, to her dying moment, the truth of her
Voices. With a great cry of JESUS! she gave up her breath, and her pure
soul was with God.

Even the English wept, even a secretary of the English king said that
they had burned a Saint. One of the three great crimes of the world's
history had been committed, and, of the three, this was the most
cowardly and cruel. It profited the English not at all. 'Though they
ceased not to be brave,' says Patrick Abercromby, a Scot,[26] 'yet they
were almost on all occasions defeated, and within the short space of
twenty-two years, lost not only all the conquests made by them in little
less than a hundred, but also the inheritances which they had enjoyed
for above three centuries bypast. It is not my part to follow them, as
the French and my countrymen did, from town to town, and from province
to province; I take much more pleasure in relating the glories than the
disgraces of England.'

This disgrace the English must, and do, most sorrowfully confess, and,
that it may never be forgotten while the civilised world stands, there
lives, among the plays of Shakspeare, whether he wrote or did not write
it, that first part of 'Henry VI.,' which may pair with the yet more
abominable poem of the Frenchman, Voltaire.

Twenty years after her death, as we saw, Charles VII., in his own
interest, induced the Pope and the Inquisition, to try the case of Joan
over again. It was as certain that the clergy would find her innocent,
now, as that they would find her guilty before. But, happily, they
collected the evidence of most of the living people who had known her.
Thus we have heard from the Domremy peasants how good she was as a
child, from Dunois, d'Alencon, d'Aulon, how she was beautiful,
courteous, and brave, from Isambart and L'Advenu, how nobly she died,
and how she never made one complaint, but forgave all her enemies
freely. All these old Latin documents were collected, edited, and
printed, in 1849, by Monsieur Jules Quicherat, a long and noble labour.
Af