[Footnote 56: As a matter of recorded fact no sentence was then pronounced on her save by the impatient soldiers. The Bailli of Rouen, Messire Raoul le Bouteiller, only said the words I have given above, as his lieutenant swore in the second Procès, and this is why the sentence is not recorded in the minutes of the Baillage.]
Her ashes were cast into the Seine. They were scarcely cold before the rumour of her saintliness, and the miracles of her passing spread through Rouen and through France. Soon afterwards Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, died of apoplexy. Nicole Midi was struck with leprosy within a few days of her death. Loyseleur died suddenly at Bâle. The corpse of d'Estivet was found in a gutter outside the gates of Rouen.
Not a single attempt was made to rescue her in Rouen at the last, not a solitary effort had been made before to save her by the French. Judged by the Church, and appealing for fair hearing, Jeanne was not supported in her trial by a single French ecclesiastic. Not a single reference to her death occurs on subsequent occasions, when the Court of France had official opportunity to make it. An age still so strongly imbued with the principles of feudalism could not believe in that intense patriotism and worship of nationality which was as foreign to their instincts as was the doctrine of liberty of conscience. This peasant-girl personified them both. "Il y a ès livres de nostre Seigneur plus que ès vostres," she had said in her first questioning at Chinon; and laymen and ecclesiastics alike were unable to reconcile her with any scheme of philosophy they knew. In English writings there is no contemporary mention of her except a line in William of Worcester. Caxton's English Chronicles only give the lie that Shakespeare has preserved against her tainted purity. Thomas Fuller classed her with the Witch of Endor. It was not for twenty-four years that the very town which saw her martyrdom was moved to declare judicially her innocence. In the "Procès de Réhabilitation," begun on the first of June 1456, everyone who had known her came forward--too late--to testify to her innocence. On the seventh of July, in the presence of her brother and her mother's representative in the great hall of the palace of the Archbishop of Rouen, it was ordered that her memory should be publicly reinstated both in the Cemetery of St. Ouen and in the Vieux Marché.