Rehabilitation

Over the thirty years between Joan's condemnation and her trial of rehabilitation treaties were made, alliances refigured battles won and eventually the English were gone everywhere except the pas de Calais which they controlled into the eighteenth century. A new Pope ordered a new Inquisitor to look into the first trial. Witnesses came forth who could not for reasons of safety or politics present themselves earlier.

Both her former colleagues in war, La Hire and Dunois, the Bastard of Orleans testified as to her virtue and prowess. King Charles VII sent a royal letter to the tribunal. Joan's father, her brother, her childhood friends all spoke in her behalf. Clerics who had actually participated in the first trial testified. The Inquisition exonerated Joan and stated she was no longer considered a heretic. They passed over the crime of wearing men's clothing that which had damned her to the pyre. The Church rehabilitated her but it could not unburn her. Sainthood was still 500 years away.

This was the last trial by the Inquisition in France. The populace was so horrified by its lack of justice and ready compliance with the politics of the moment that a trial by the Inquisition never happened again in France. Pity poor Spain where the last trial by the Inquisition took place in 1835. Spain's continuing allegiance to the Inquisition resulted in the loss of its intellectual class and its relegation to the fringes of history for centuries.