t purity of morals
which the Maid was endeavouring to introduce among the Armagnacs. The
peasant soldiers of Bohemia and the peasant Maid of France bearing her
sword amidst mendicant monks had much in common. On the one hand and
on the other, we have the religious spirit in the place of the
political spirit, the fear of sin in the place of obedience to the
civil law, the spiritual introduced into the temporal. Here is indeed
a woeful sight and a piteous; the devout set one against the other,
the innocent against the innocent, the simple against the simple, the
heretic against heretics; and it is painful to think that when she is
threatening with extermination the disciples of that John Huss, who
had been treacherously taken and burned as a heretic, she herself is
on the point of being sold to her enemies and condemned to suffer as a
witch. It would have been different if this letter, at which the
accomplished wits and humorists of the day looked askance, had won the
approval of theologians. But they also found fault with it, an
illustrious canonist, a zealous inquisitor deemed highly presumptuous
this threatening of a multitude of men by a Maid.[1924]

[Footnote 1923: Another of the Hussite leaders (W.S.).]

[Footnote 1924: J. Nider, _Formicarium_ in _Trial_, vol. iv, pp.
502-504.]

We were right in saying that she was not prepared to leave the English
immediately and hasten against the Bohemians. Five days after her
appeal to the Hussites she wrote to her friends at Reims and in
mysterious words gave them to understand that she would come to them
shortly.[1925]

[Footnote 1925: _Trial_, vol. v, pp. 161, 162.]

The partisans of Duke Philip were at that time hatching plots in the
towns of Champagne, notably at Troyes and at Reims. On the 22nd of
February, 1430, a canon and a chaplain were arrested and brought
before the chapter for having conspired to deliver the city to the
English. It was well for them that they belonged to the Church, for
having been condemned to perpetual imprisonment, they obtained from
the King a mitigation of their sentence, and the canon a complete
remittance.[1926] The aldermen and ecclesiastics of the city, fearing
they would be thought badly of on the other side of the Loire, wrote
to the Maid entreating her to speak well of them to the King. The
following is her reply to their request:[1927]

[Footnote 1926: _Ibid._, vol. iv, p. 299, and H. Jadart, _Jeanne d'Arc
a Reims_, pp. 60 _et s