Joan of Arc (14 page)

Joan had been unwilling to listen. All she said in her defence was ‘As for my words and deeds, which I declared in the trial, I refer to them and will maintain them.’ If she were condemned, she added, and ‘she saw the fire and the faggots lit and the executioner ready to kindle the fire, and she herself were in it, she would say nothing else and would maintain till death what she said in the trial.’ But on 24 May, after the public sermon, the proceedings took an unexpected turn. Quite suddenly, in her own style she recanted: ‘Let all I have said and done be sent to Rome to our Holy Father the Pope to whom after God I refer myself. As for my words and deeds, they were done at God’s command.’ If there were any fault it was hers and no other person’s. She referred herself ‘to God and our Holy Father the Pope’. This, she was told, was to no avail, as they could not seek the pope ‘at such a distance’, and anyway a bishop in his own diocese was a competent judge. Then she recanted in French and the document was then translated into Latin; it was said that she had renounced her apparitions, had broken God’s law by dressing like a man and having her hair cropped like a man’s, by bearing arms, by wishing to shed blood, by calling up evil spirits.

And I vow, swear and promise to you, to my lord St Peter, Prince of the Apostles, to Our Holy Father the Pope of Rome, His vicar and his successors, to you, my lords, to the lord Bishop of Beauvais and the religious Brother Jean Lemaître, vicar of the lord Inquisitor of the faith, my judges, that I will never let myself be persuaded or for any other reason return to the said errors, from which it has pleased God to free me; but I will always live in the unity of Our Holy Mother Church and the obedience of our Holy Father the Pope of Rome. This I say, affirm and swear by God almighty and the Holy Gospels. In sign of which I have signed this schedule with my mark.

Signed ‘Jehanne +’

For this statement she was sentenced to ‘perpetual imprisonment, with the bread of sorrow and water of affliction’, so as to weep for her failings and ‘never from this time on commit anything to make others weep’.

On the afternoon of 24 May Joan put on woman’s dress and she was visited in prison by Jean Le Maistre, Nicolas Midi, Nicolas Loiselleur, Thomas de Courcelles, and Brother Ysambard de La Pierre, who said how mercifully she had been treated. She said she would willingly wear women’s clothes and would let her hair be shaved off. Her resolutions did not last, for on 28 May she went back to male costume – ‘a short mantle, a hood, a doublet and other garments used by men’ – which she claimed she preferred to women’s clothes. ‘She was told she had promised and sworn not to wear man’s dress again, and replied that she never meant to take such an oath.’ The reason, she added, was that promises to her had not been kept; she was not allowed to go to Mass and she was still in chains and she was not put in a prison with a woman companion. ‘We her judges had heard from certain people that she had not yet cut herself off from her illusions and pretended revelations.’ Her voices had told her to answer boldly. The preacher, she said, had falsely accused her of many things she had not done. She said too that what she had declared and recanted on Thursday was done because she was afraid of the fire. She believed her voices to be those of St Catherine and St Margaret and that they came from God. If her judges wished it, she would wear women’s clothes. To nothing else would she agree.

Accordingly, on 29 May in the archiepiscopal chapel of Rouen, Cauchon sentenced her as a lapsed heretic. ‘We exhorted her to believe the advice of the clergy and the distinguished people who instructed and taught her things relevant to her salvation, and especially that of the two venerable Preaching brothers who were then standing near her’ – he was referring to Martin Ladvenu and Ysambard de La Pierre – and ‘we denounce you as a rotten member, which, so that you shall not infect the other members of Christ, must be cast out of the unity of the Church, cut off from her body, and given over to the secular power: we cast you off, separate and abandon you.’ He prayed that the secular power would be merciful to her if there were any signs of repentance in her. Her death sentence, however, he knew was now inevitable. The sentence was witnessed by the three notaries, Boisguillaume, Manchon and Taquel.

O
n 30 May 1431, in the market square of Rouen, Joan was burnt to death. She died quickly. There are many affecting descriptions of her last moments, but all date from the 1450s; not a single one was written down in 1431. Her judges had not worried about the manner of her death. What concerned them was an urge to justify themselves to the world beyond Rouen. On Thursday 7 June 1431, they announced that they had received sworn information on certain words, before many trustworthy persons, spoken by the late Joan while still in prison and before she was brought to judgement.

First, the ‘venerable and circumspect’ Master Nicolas de Venderès, licentiate in canon law, Archdeacon of Eu and canon of the church of Rouen, aged fifty-two or thereabouts:

declared on oath that on Wednesday the last day of May, on the Eve of Corpus Christi last, the said Joan, being still in the prison where she was detained in the castle of Rouen, said that since the voices who came to her had promised her she should be freed from prison, and she saw the contrary, she realised and knew that she had been and was deceived by them.

Brother Martin Ladvenu, Dominican priest, aged about thirty-three,

said and declared on oath that this Joan on the morning of the day on which sentence was passed against her . . . admitted before she was brought to judgement, in front of Masters Pierre Maurice, Nicolas Loiselleur, and the Dominican brother Toutmouillé, that she knew and recognised she had been deceived by the voices and apparitions which came to her; for these voices promised her, Joan, that she should be saved and set free from prison, and she clearly realised the opposite had happened.

Asked who induced her to say this, he said that he himself, Master Pierre Maurice and Master Nicolas Loiselleur urged her for the salvation of her soul, and they asked her if it were true that she had received these voices and apparitions. She answered that it was but she did not precisely describe . . . in what form they came to her, except as far as he could recall, that they came in large numbers and in the smallest size. Besides, he heard Joan ‘say and confess that because the clergy held and believed that any spirits which might come to her came and proceeded from evil spirits, she also held and believed in this matter as the clergy did, and would no longer put trust these spirits’. And in his opinion when she said this Joan was in her right mind.

Brother Martin said that on the same day he heard Joan say and admit that though in her confessions and answers she had boasted that an angel from God had brought the crown to the man she called her king, and that she had gone with the angel when he brought the crown, and many other things that were reported at greater length in the trial, all the same, with no use of force and of her own free will she saw and admitted that in spite of all she had said and boasted on this subject, there was no angel who brought the crown; that she, Joan, was the angel who had told and promised her king that she would have him crowned at Reims if she were set to work; that there has been no other crown sent from God, whatever she had said and affirmed in the course of her trial on the subject of the crown and of the sign given to the man she called her king.

The ‘venerable and discreet’ Master Pierre Maurice, professor of sacred theology, canon of Rouen, aged about thirty-eight years, had asked her if they really had appeared to her: she replied, in French: ‘
Soint bons, soint mauvais esperits, ilz me sont apparus
’ (‘whether good or evil spirits, they appeared to me’) and she usually heard them at the hour of Compline, in the morning when the bells were rung. Brother Jean Toutmouillé, a Dominican priest, about thirty-four years old, told how on the Eve of Corpus Christi he and Brother Martin Ladvenu had visited Joan to exhort her to save her soul, and heard her tell Pierre Maurice that what she had said about the crown was pure fiction, and that she herself was the angel. This ‘the said Master Pierre’ took down in Latin.

Her voices had deceived her, she told the good bishop, for they had told her she would be freed. She would trust herself to the judgement of the Church or ‘to you who are of the Church’. Jacques Le Camus, a canon of Reims, about fifty-three years old, swore to much the same story, stating: ‘I believe in God alone, and will no longer put faith in these voices, because they have deceived me.’ Master Thomas de Courcelles, master of arts and bachelor of theology, aged about thirty years, also heard her say she had been deceived by her voices. So too did Master Nicolas Loiselleur, master of arts, canon of the churches of Rouen and Chartres, about forty years old. Asked if she had really sent a crown to the man she called her king, she replied that there was nothing beyond the promise of coronation which she herself made to him, promising him that he would be crowned. Loiselleur thought that Joan was of sound mind, for she showed great signs of contrition and penitence for the crimes she had committed. He heard her, in prison before many witnesses and in public afterwards, ask with great contrition of heart pardon of the English and Burgundians for ‘having caused them to be slain, put to flight and sorely afflicted’.
¹

The English and Burgundians had reason to be content. No divine agent had rescued Joan. Her painful death confirmed her military failure to transform the unrelenting, harsh, meaningless nature of the war. She would soon be a distant memory.

In the harsh winter of 1434/5, while the Thames was frozen over and wine ships from Bordeaux had to dock at Sandwich, authorities in Arras kept records of the special snowmen set up in the town streets and squares. They included the figure of Danger, the Grand Veneur or huntsman with his dogs, the Seven Sleepers, the Danse Macabre and Joan of Arc and her men. Once spring came, the figure of Joan melted away. In Arras, however, only a few months later, her cause, the cause of Charles VII, started on a long, arduous route towards vindication and final triumph.

E
veryone knew that in condemning Joan, the court was judging her king. If Charles had been deceived by a witch and heretic, then her role in the relief of Orléans, her part in the victories in the Loire, even his own anointing and crowning might be the work of the devil. Charles had been the unmentionable presence at her trial, just as he had been that mission’s chief concern, the beneficiary of her success and the man whom his enemies wished to associate with her final failure.

Shakespeare portrayed Henry V as his ideal king of England. It is an ideal of kingship that Joan would have recognised, even though she would have added that the actual Henry V had been wrong to claim the throne of France. From Charles VII’s point of view and hers, the Treaty of Troyes had justified the unjustifiable – an act of usurpation.

In Henry V’s soliloquy before Agincourt Shakespeare takes for granted the sacred nature of Christian monarchy. This assumption, as fundamental to Joan as to the real or imagined Henry V, was dramatised symbolically in the ceremony of anointing and coronation. As the soliloquy also reveals, there was another side to kingship: the lonely role of one born to rule, a burden taken up at the moment of succession that must be endured to the moment of death. As far as the lawyers were concerned, this truth was expressed by the declaration, ‘The King is dead, long live the King!’ From the moment the old king died, the new king took over his authority. For this reason, all laws made in a new reign were dated from this moment. Charles VII may have been known as the Dauphin to his friends and as the King of Bourges to his foes, but in the eyes of his legal officials all laws he approved were royal.

When he first met Joan in March 1429, Charles the Dauphin was isolated partly by feelings of inadequacy; and it is possible that her private interview with him and the spectacular change in French morale that ensued in the following few weeks began a transformation in his character that helped make him a formidable politician. But he remained isolated by his office as well as his character. To such a man Joan had her uses, but he also understood, which she did not, that he could not fight continuously and might have to treat with his cousin of Burgundy and even his nephew of England.

The king, the only person who was always at the centre of affairs, might discard Georges de la Trémoïlle or Alençon or Joan, but never his own kingship, for it was as king that he, not his generals or his counsellors, would earn the title of
le très victorieux
(the very victorious) by winning the Hundred Years War; and, when the final triumph was imminent, it became timely to remember the strange, difficult girl who had held such a high view of his own authority and yet had not always obeyed him, who was uncommonly Catholic and yet would not yield to bishops and priests who did not accept her private revelations. On the nullification of her sentence depended the silencing of any doubts that he was indeed God’s anointed.

J
oan had first been examined by theologians at Poitiers. The opening words of the so-called Poitiers résumé make clear why Charles VII had asked their advice about Joan.