Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/390

 374 POLITICAL HERESY.— THE STATE. were burned off the blazing fagots were dragged aside, that the crowd might see, from her blackened corpse, that she really was a woman, and when their curiosity was satisfied the incineration was completed, the ashes being thrown into the Seine.* It only remained for those who had taken part in the tragedy to justify themselves by blackening the character of their victim and circulating false reports as to the proceedings. That the judges felt that, in spite of sheltering themselves behind the Uni- versity of Paris, they had incurred dangerous responsibility is shown by their obtaining royal letters shielding them from accountabil- ity for what they had done, the king pledging himself to constitute himself a party in any prosecution which might be brought against them before a general council or the pope. That the regency felt that justification was needed in the face of Europe is seen in the letters which were sent to the sovereigns and the bishops in the name of Henry VI., explaining how Joan had exercised inhuman cruelties until the divine power had in pity to the suffering people caused her capture ; how, though she could have been punished by the secular courts for her crimes, she had been handed to the Church, which had treated her kindly and benignantly, and on her confession had mercifully imposed on her the penance of imprison- ment ; how her pride had burst forth in pestilential flames, and she had relapsed into her errors and madness ; how she had then been abandoned to the secular arm, and, finding her end approaching, had confessed that the spirits which she invoked were false and lying, and that she was deceived and mocked by them, and how she had finally been burned in sight of the people. This official lying was outdone by the reports which were industriously circu- Bourgeois de Paris, an 1431. When the excitement which led to Joan's condemuation passed away, and she was found to have been a useless victim, there was an effort made to shift the responsibility from the ecclesiastical to the secular authorities : it was claimed that there had been an irregularity in her execution without a formal judgment in the lay court. Two years afterwards, Louis de Luxembourg, then Archbishop of Rouen, and Guillaume Duval, vicar of the inquisitor, condemned for heresy a certain Georges Solenfant, and in delivering him to the Bailli of Rouen they gave instructions that he should not be put to death, as Joan had been, without a definitive judgment, in consequence of which there was a form of sentencing him. — L'Averdy, p. 498.
 * Le Bran de Charmettes, IV. 188-210.— Prods, pp. 509-10.— Journal d'un