evidence at the
rehabilitation trial we see that the Poitiers clerks were not desirous
for much to be said of their inquiry.]

But they were afraid of the University of Paris. They feared lest
Jeanne might be after all what so many learned doctors maintained her
to be, a heretic, a miscreant seduced by the prince of darkness. Satan
transforms himself into an angel of light, and it is difficult to
distinguish the true prophets from the false. The hapless Maid was
deserted by the very clergy whose croziers had so recently been
carried before her; of all the Poitiers masters not one was found to
testify in the chateau of Rouen to that innocence which they had
officially recognised eighteen months before.

It would be very interesting to trace the reputation of the Maid down
the ages. But to do so would require a whole book. I shall merely
indicate the most striking revolutions of public opinion concerning
her. The humanists of the Renaissance display no great interest in
her: she was too Gothic for them. The Reformers, for whom she was
tainted with idolatry, could not tolerate her picture.[108] It seems
strange to us to-day, but it is none the less certain, and in
conformity with all we know of French feeling for royalty, that whilst
the monarchy endured it was the memory of Charles VII that kept alive
the memory of Jeanne d'Arc and saved her from oblivion.[109] Respect
due to the Prince generally hindered his faithful subjects from too
closely inquiring into the legends of Jeanne as well as into those of
the Holy Ampulla, the cures for King's evil, the _oriflamme_ and all
other popular traditions relating to the antiquity and celebrity of
the royal throne of France. In 1609, when in a college of Paris, the
Maid was the subject of sundry literary themes in which she was
unfavourably treated,[110] a certain lawyer, Jean Hordal, who boasted
that he came of the same race as the heroine, complained of these
academic disputes as being derogatory to royal majesty--"I am greatly
astonished," he said, "that ... public declamations against the honour
of France, of King Charles VII and his Council,[111] should be
suffered in France." Had Jeanne not been so closely associated with
royalty, her memory would have been very much neglected by the wits of
the seventeenth century. In the minds of scholars, Catholics and
Protestants alike, who considered the life of St. Margaret as mere
superstition,[112] her apparitions did her harm. In