But at the crowning moment of trial there are those who assert their
belief that the woman who on her way to the field of Corrichie had
uttered her wish to be a man, that she might know all the hardship and
all the enjoyment of a soldier's life, riding forth "in jack and
knapskull"--the woman who long afterward was to hold her own for two
days together, without help of counsel, against all the array of English
law and English statesmanship, armed with irrefragable evidence and
supported by the resentment of a nation--showed herself devoid of moral
and physical resolution; too senseless to realize the significance and
too heartless to face the danger of a situation from which the simplest
exercise of reason, principle, or courage must have rescued the most
unsuspicious and inexperienced of honest women who was not helplessly
deficient in self-reliance and self-respect.
The famous correspondence produced next year in evidence against her at
the conference of York may have been, as her partisans affirm, so
craftily garbled and falsified by interpolation, suppression,
perversion, or absolute forgery as to be all but historically worthless.
Its acceptance or its rejection does not in any degree whatever affect,
for better or for worse, the rational estimate of her character.
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