eroism could not have sunk into obscurity. But this was
not to be; she was to die as a martyr to her cause.

After her death the English carried on war with new spirit for a time,
and Henry VI. of England was crowned in Paris, at Notre Dame. He was
crowned, however, by an English, not by a French prelate. None of the
great French nobles even were present. The coronation was a failure.
Gradually all France was won over to the side of Charles. He was a
contemptible monarch, but he was the legitimate King of France. All
classes desired peace; all parties were weary of war. The Treaty of
Arras, in 1435, restored peace between Charles and Philip of Burgundy;
and in the same year the Duke of Bedford died. In 1436 Charles took
possession of Paris. In 1445 Henry VI. married Margaret of Anjou, a
kinswoman of Charles VII. In 1448 Charles invaded Normandy, and expelled
the English from the duchy which for four hundred years had belonged to
the kings of England. Soon after Guienne fell. In 1453 Calais alone
remained to England, after a war of one hundred years.

At last a tardy justice was done to the memory of her who had turned the
tide of conquest. The King, ungrateful as he had been, now ennobled her
family and their descendants, even in the female line, and bestowed upon
them pensions and offices. In 1452, twenty years after the martyrdom,
the Pope commissioned the Archbishop of Rheims and two other prelates,
aided by an inquisitor, to inquire into the trial of Joan of Arc. They
met in Notre Dame. Messengers were sent into the country where she was
born, to inquire into her history; and all testified--priests and
peasants--to the moral beauty of her character, to her innocent and
blameless life, her heroism in battle, and her good sense in counsel.
And the decision of the prelates was that her visions came from God;
that the purity of her motives and the good she did to her country
justified her in leaving her parents and wearing a man's dress. They
pronounced the trial at Rouen to have been polluted with wrong and
calumny, and freed her name from every shadow of disgrace. The people of
Orleans instituted an annual religious festival to her honor. The Duke
of Orleans gave a grant of land to her brothers, who were ennobled. The
people of Rouen raised a stone cross to her memory in the market-place
where she was burned. In later times, the Duchess of Orleans, wife of
the son and heir of Louis Philippe, modelled with her own hand