The regent Bedford was now in a desperate position. His field army had been destroyed, and on all sides the provinces which had long lain inert beneath the English yoke were beginning to stir. When Joan led forth the French king to crown him at Reims, all the towns of Champagne opened their gates to her one after another. A large reinforcement received from England only just enabled Bedford to save Paris and some of the fortresses of the Île de France. The rest revolted at the sight of the Maid's white banner. If Joan had been well supported by her master and his counsellors, it is probable that she might have completed her mission by expelling the English from France. But, despite all that she had done, Charles VII. and his favourites had a profound disbelief in her inspiration, and generally thwarted her plans. After an ill-concerted attack on Paris, in which Joan was wounded, the French army broke up for the winter. They had shaken the grip of the English on the north, and reconquered a vast stretch of territory, but they had failed by their own fault to achieve complete success. Nevertheless the crucial point of the war had passed; after 1429 the Burgundian party began to slacken in its support of the English cause, and to pass over piecemeal to the national side. This was but natural: the partisans who could remember nothing but the foul deed of Montereau were yearly growing fewer, and it was clear that Charles VII., personally despicable though he might be, represented the cause of French nationality.
The natural drift of circumstances was not stayed even by the disastrous end of the career of Joan of Arc in 1430. The king's ministers had refused to take her counsels or to entrust her with another army, but she went forth with a small force of volunteers to relieve the important fortress of Compiègne. The place was saved, but in a sortie she was captured by the Burgundians, who sold her for 10,000 francs to Bedford. The regent handed her over for punishment as a sorceress to the French clergy of his own party. After a long trial, carried out with elaborate formality and great unfairness, the unhappy Joan was found guilty of proclaiming as divine visions what were delusions of the evil one, or of her own vain imagination, and when she persisted in maintaining their reality she was declared a relapsed heretic, and burnt at Rouen on the 30th of May 1431. Charles VII. took little interest in her fate, which he might easily have prevented by threatening to retaliate on the numerous English prisoners who were in his power. Seldom had a good cause such an unworthy figurehead as that callous and apathetic prince.