tude to clothe herself
again in the forbidden garment. Her insidious enemies caught her in that
situation: her fault was interpreted to be no less than a relapse into
heresy: no recantation would now suffice; and no pardon could be granted
her. She was condemned to be burned in the market-place of Rouen; and
the infamous sentence was accordingly executed. This admirable heroine,
to whom the more generous superstition of the ancients would have
erected altars, was, on pretence of heresy and magic, delivered over
alive to the flames, and expiated, by that dreadful punishment, the
signal services which she had rendered to her prince and to her native
country.

{1432.} The affairs of the English, far from being advanced by this
execution, went every day more and more to decay: the great abilities of
the regent were unable to resist the strong inclination which had seized
the French to return under the obedience of their rightful sovereign,
and which that act of cruelty was ill fitted to remove. Chartres was
surprised, by a stratagem of the count of Dunois: a body of the English,
under Lord Willoughby, was defeated at St. Celerin upon the Sarte:[*]
the fair in the suburbs of Caen, seated in the midst of the English
territories, was pillaged by De Lore, a French officer: the duke of
Bedford himself was obliged by Dunois to raise the siege of Lagni with
some loss of reputation: and all these misfortunes, though light, yet
being continued and uninterrupted, brought discredit on the English,
and menaced them with an approaching revolution. But the chief detriment
which the regent sustained, was by the death of his duchess, who had
hitherto preserved some appearance of friendship between him and her
brother, the duke of Burgundy:[**] and his marriage, soon afterwards,
with Jaqueline of Luxembourg, was the beginning of a breach between
them.[***] Philip complained, that the regent had never had the civility
to inform him of his intentions, and that so sudden a marriage was a
slight on his sister's memory.

* Monstrelet, vol. ii. p. 100.

** Monstrolet, vol. ii. p. 87.

*** Stowe, p. 373. Grafton, p. 554.

The cardinal of Winchester meditated a reconciliation between these
princes, and brought both of them to St. Omers for that purpose. The
duke of Bedford here expected the first visit, both as he was son,
brother, and uncle to a king, and because he had already made such
advances as to come into the duke of Bu