Orleans, Rheims, even her attack upon Paris were nothing in comparison with the black art which they believed to be her inspiration.  The guidance of Heaven which was not the guidance of the Church was to them a claim which meant only rebellion of the direst kind.  They had longed to seize her and strip her of her presumptuous pretensions from the first moment of her appearance.  They could not allow a day of her overthrow to pass by without snatching at this much-desired victim.

No one perhaps will ever be able to say what it is that makes a trial for heresy and sorcery, especially in the days when fire and flame, the rack and the stake, stood at the end, so exciting and horribly attractive to the mind.  Whether it is the revelations that are hoped for, of these strange commerces between earth and the unknown, into which we would all fain pry if we could, in pursuit of some better understanding than has ever yet fallen to the lot of man; whether it is the strange and dreadful pleasure of seeing a soul driven to extremity and fighting for its life through all the subtleties of thought and fierce attacks of interrogation—­or the mere love of inflicting torture, misery, and death, which the Church was prevented from doing in the common way, it is impossible to tell; but there is no doubt that a thrill like the wings of vultures crowding to the prey, a sense of horrible claws and beaks and greedy eyes is in the air, whenever such a tribunal is thought of.  The thrill, the stir, the eagerness among those black birds of doom is more evident than usual in the headlong haste of that demand. Sous l’influence de l’Angleterre, say the historians; the more shame for them if it was so; but they were clearly under influence wider and more infallible, the influence of that instinct, whatever it may be, which makes a trial for heresy ten thousand times more cruel, less restrained by any humanities of nature, than any other kind of trial which history records.

That is what the Inquisitor demanded after a long description of Jeanne, “called the Maid,” as having “dogmatised, sown, published, and caused to be published, many and diverse errors from which have ensued great scandals against the divine honour and our holy faith.”  “Using the rights of our office and the authority committed to us by the Holy See of Rome we instantly command, and enjoin you in the name of the Catholic faith, and under penalty of the law:  and all other Catholic persons of whatsoever condition, pre-eminence, authority, or estate, to send or to bring as prisoner before us with all speed and surety the said Jeanne, vehemently suspected of various crimes springing from heresy, that proceedings may be taken against her before us in the name of the Holy Inquisition, and with the favour and aid of the doctors and masters of the University of Paris, and other notable counsellors present there.”