THE TRIAL OP JEANNE DARC. *451 passed were more magnificently decorated than they had ever been before on sacramental days. At the gate were banners on which were blazoned the arms of England and France ; and on his way to the cathedral the people cheered him so loudly that the little king told them to cease, for they made too much noise. Shows were exhib- ited in the streets, and the king looked at them ; and when at last he entered his castle, the bells rang out a peal as if God himself had descended from heaven. There he remained for a year with his uncle Bedford, the regent, his grand-uncle Beaufort, Cardinal of Winchester, his governor, the Earl of Warwick, and the chief officers of both the royal and the vice-royal courts, all intent upon undoing in France what a village maiden had wrought in fifteen months. The castle was pervaded with intense life, and an ill-disciplined host of guards and men-at-arms were posted about it. Jeanne Dare, treated by her French captors with decency and consideration, and detained in a lordly chateau more as a guest than a prisoner, bore the first months of her confinement with patience and dignity. On one point only she showed herself obstinate : she refused to lay aside her man's dress. The people of that day, if we may judge from these old records, held. in par- ticular horror the wearing of man's clothes by a woman. The ladies of the chateau, knowing what an advantage this costume gave her enemies, provided her with woman's clothes, and besought her to put them on. She could not be persuaded to so, alleging that she had assumed her man's dress by Divine command-, and had not yet received Divine permission to change it. In other respects she was tractable, and seemed absorbed in the events of the war, ever longing to be again in the field. The news reached her at length that she had been sold to the English — the dreadful English ! — and was about to
