section_path: Trials and execution/Aftermath and rehabilitation trial
section_name: Aftermath and rehabilitation trial
paragraph_text: Aftermath and rehabilitation trial
  
  The military situation was not changed by Joan's execution. Her triumphs had raised Armagnac morale, and the English were not able to regain momentum. Charles remained king of France, despite a rival coronation held for the ten-year-old Henry VI of England at Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris in 1431. In 1435, the Burgundians signed the Treaty of Arras, abandoning their alliance with England. Twenty-two years after Joan's death, the war ended with a French victory at the Battle of Castillon in 1453, and the English were expelled from all of France except Calais.
  
  Joan's execution created a political liability for Charles, implying that his consecration as the king of France had been achieved through the actions of a heretic. On 15 February 1450, a few months after he regained Rouen, Charles ordered Guillaume Bouillé, a theologian and former rector of the University of Paris, to open an inquest. In a brief investigation, Bouillé interviewed seven witnesses of Joan's trial and concluded that the judgment of Joan as a heretic was arbitrary. She had been a prisoner of war treated as a political prisoner, and was put to death without basis. Bouillé's report could not overturn the verdict but it opened the way for the later retrial.
  
  In 1452, a second inquest into Joan's trial was opened by Cardinal Guillaume d'Estouteville, papal legate and relative of Charles, and Jean Bréhal, the recently appointed Inquisitor of France, who interviewed about 20 witnesses. The inquest was guided by 27 articles describing how Joan's trial had been biased. Immediately after the inquest, d'Estouteville went to Orléans on 9 June and granted an indulgence to those who participated in the ceremonies in Joan's honor on 8 May commemorating the lifting of the siege.
  
  For the next two years d'Estouteville and Bréhal worked on the case. Bréhal forwarded a petition from Joan's mother, Isabelle, and Joan's two brothers Jean and Pierre, to Pope Nicholas V in 1454. Bréhal submitted a summary of his findings to theologians and lawyers in France and Italy, as well as a professor at the University of Vienna, most of whom gave opinions favorable to Joan. After Nicholas V died in early 1455, the new pope Callixtus III gave permission for a rehabilitation trial, and appointed three commissioners to oversee the process: Jean Juvénal des Ursins, archbishop of Reims; Guillaume Chartier, bishop of Paris; and Richard Olivier de Longueil, bishop of Coutances. They chose Bréhal as Inquisitor.
  
  The rehabilitation trial began on 7 November 1455 at Notre Dame Cathedral when Joan's mother publicly delivered a formal request for her daughter's rehabilitation, and ended on 7 July 1456 at Rouen Cathedral, having heard from about 115 witnesses. The court found that the original trial was unjust and deceitful; Joan's abjuration, execution and their consequences were nullified. In his summary of the trial, Bréhal suggested that Cauchon and the assessors who supported him might be guilty of malice and heresy. To emphasize the court's decision, a copy of the Articles of Accusation was formally torn up. The court ordered that a cross should be erected on the site of Joan's execution.