The maid was soon after taken prisoner by the Burgundians, while she was heading a sally upon the quarters of John of Luxembourg. The service of _Te Deum_ was publicly celebrated, on this fortunate event, at Paris. The Duke of Bedford fancied that, by her captivity, he should again recover his former ascendency over France; and, to make the most of the present advantage, he purchased the captive from John of Luxembourg, and instituted a prosecution against her. The Bishop of Beauvais, a man wholly devoted to the English interests, presented a petition against Joan, and desired to have her tried by an ecclesiastical court, for sorcery, impiety, idolatry, and magic. The university of Paris was so mean as to join in the same request. In the issue, she was condemned for all the crimes of which she had been accused, aggravated by heresy; her revelations were declared to be inventions of the devil to delude the people; and she was sentenced to be delivered over to the secular arm. Her spirit gave way to the terrors of that punishment to which she was sentenced, and she publicly declared herself ready to recant; she acknowledged the illusion of those revelations which the church had rejected, and promised never more to maintain them. Her sentence was then mitigated; she was condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and to be fed during life on bread and water.
But the barbarous vengeance of Joan’s enemies was not satisfied with this victory. Suspecting that the female dress which she now consented to wear was disagreeable to her, they purposely placed in her apartment a suit of men’s apparel, and watched for the effects of that temptation upon her. On the sight of a dress in which she had acquired so much renown, and which she once believed she wore by the particular appointment of Heaven, all her former ideas and passions revived, and she ventured in her solitude to clothe herself again in the forbidden garments. Her insidious enemies caught her in that situation; her fault was interpreted to be no less than a relapse into heresy. No recantation would now suffice; no pardon could be granted her; she was condemned to be burnt in the market-place of Rouen; and the infamous sentence was accordingly executed.