The Maid and the Queen (41 page)

By the time Rouen fell to the French, Charles had enough distance from the events of his early reign to no longer worry about his dignity or feel embarrassment over his relationship with the Maid, and Bouillé’s arguments held a definite appeal. Despite the French king’s recent military successes, the war was not yet over completely. The English still occupied some (albeit much-reduced) territory on the continent, and anything that could be done to further decrease their influence or demoralize their troops should be attempted. That it would also be personally satisfying to turn the tables on his enemies by pointing out that they had behaved atrociously and against the word of God was just an added incentive.

And who better to conduct the royal inquiry than the man who had urged it in the first place? By putting Bouillé himself in charge, Charles was as assured that the commission would find in favor of Joan as the duke of Bedford had once been certain, by appointing Pierre Cauchon to a position of authority, that the Inquisition would find against her.

Bouillé threw himself into his work and within three weeks of receiving the king’s decree had already begun to query Joan’s former assessors as to her treatment during captivity and the protocol associated with her
condemnation. Since it had been almost twenty years since her trial, many of these people were no longer living. Cauchon, her chief tormentor, had died eight years before, from being bled by an overly enthusiastic physician. Her other judge, the vice-inquisitor, was nowhere to be found and presumed dead. A number of their collaborators had also succumbed in the intervening years, including the priest who had delivered the haranguing sermon just prior to Joan’s execution, and who had subsequently expired, fittingly, from leprosy.

Bouillé’s investigation was therefore limited to interviews with just seven people over a period of two days. Of these seven, all but one distanced themselves from the proceedings, laying the blame for Joan’s execution squarely on her judges, who, as one of the witnesses testified, “[acted] more through love of the English and the favor they had from them… than through zeal for justice of the Faith.” The only holdout was the elderly theologian Jean Beaupère, whose question “Do you know if you are in God’s grace?” had elicited perhaps the most eloquent of Joan’s responses during her trial: “If I am not, may God bring me to it; if I am, may God keep me in it.” In his seventies, Beaupère was apparently too old and crotchety to change his opinion for the sake of political expediency and insisted that Joan had gotten what she deserved.

On the basis of these seven interviews, Bouillé found enough improprieties as regards Joan’s treatment and sentencing to strongly recommend to Charles that a more thorough inquiry be conducted with the goal of having her condemnation revoked. The secular authority had now done all it could to redeem Joan. Because the verdict had been delivered by the Inquisition, the question of Joan’s heresy was, as it had always been, in the hands of the Church. Somebody was going to have to approach the pope.

T
HE POPE IN 1450
was an Italian scholar who took the name Nicholas V. Nicholas, who loved books and art and whose principal achievement would be the establishment of the Vatican Library, had inherited a host of world problems from his predecessors. As a result of decades of internal conflict, the papacy’s reputation had been seriously weakened. A council in Basel had elected an antipope; the emperor was trying to assume powers regarding the dispensing of benefices and other Church offices that had traditionally resided solely with the pontiff; the Turks were threatening to overrun the ancient
city of Constantinople. On a more mundane level, 1450 was a Jubilee year, which meant that thousands of pilgrims and other tourists would be descending on Rome in anticipation of spending their hard-earned savings and visiting the more important religious sites, and it was the pope’s responsibility to see to it that the city and its monuments were spruced up and sufficient accommodations made available to capitalize fully on the moneymaking potential of this event. Obviously, with so much to do, the question of whether some obscure French peasant woman had been unfairly accused of heresy two decades earlier did not occupy a position of prominence on Nicholas’s agenda.

However, the pope did need the English and French to stop fighting each other so that the attention of Christendom could be turned toward addressing what Nicholas considered to be the real threat: the aggressive military posturing of the Turks and the vulnerability of Constantinople. So he sent a legate, Cardinal Guillaume d’Estouteville, to France to negotiate a peace treaty. Cardinal Estouteville did not exactly qualify as an impartial arbiter. He was a native Frenchman, originally from Normandy. A number of the members of his family had fought against the occupation and lost their property to England, and the whole clan was consequently staunchly loyal to Charles VII. Moreover, Estouteville was an old University of Paris man himself (during his visit from Rome he took time off from his official duties to reform the teaching schedule there) and understood Bouillé’s point perfectly. Before any peace could be concluded, the king must be absolved of the charge of having gained his throne through the interference of a condemned heretic, and the only way to do this was to have the sentence against Joan officially overturned. “I know that the matter greatly concerns your honor and estate [and] I am working on it with all my power… just as a good and loyal servant should do for his lord,” the cardinal hastened to assure Charles in a letter of 1452.

On his own initiative, Estouteville secured the services of the then Inquisitor of France, a man named Jean Bréhal, who was also by coincidence originally from Normandy, and who similarly loathed the English and was a loyal partisan of the king. The two churchmen established themselves in Rouen at the end of April 1452, where they studied the transcript of Joan’s trial and listened to the testimony of witnesses. This pair was even more efficient than Bouillé. By May 4 they had produced an official document noting the existence of some twenty-seven instances of irregularities
associated with Joan’s trial. As a result, they concluded that “the preceding and other points being weighed, the case and the sentence are both null and most unjust,” and recommended that the question of Joan’s heresy be reexamined in the light of these errors.

By the next year, Estouteville had given up all pretense of negotiating a peace between England and France (there never was an official treaty marking the end of the Hundred Years War) and had returned to Rome. But neither he nor the inquisitor, Bréhal, ceased in his efforts to have Joan’s sentence reversed. Seeking to authenticate his findings, Bréhal spent the next two years soliciting opinions from theologians from as far away as the University of Vienna, while Estouteville tried to get Nicholas to authorize a retrial. But by this time Constantinople had fallen to the Turks and the pope had far more serious matters to attend to; also, it was likely he did not wish to offend the English, whose help he still hoped to gain against the Eastern threat.

It wasn’t until after Nicholas’s death in 1455, and the election of a new pope, Calixtus III, that Estouteville was able to make progress. By this time, he and Bréhal had revised their approach. In the process of seeking opinions from other theologians, Bréhal had received this piece of valuable advice from a sympathetic faculty member at the University of Paris: “Although many persons could be plaintiffs, as all those whom the thing concerns could be so considered… and the thing concerns many persons in general and in particular… it seems to us that the near relatives of the deceased Maid must have an advantage over the others and ought to be… prosecuting [bringing suit] for the injury done to one of their family.” Joan’s mother and two of her brothers were still alive, so Bréhal approached them to inquire whether they would be willing to petition the pope for a retrial. The result was a new application to Rome in the name of Joan’s family, seeking redress for the injuries done to the Maid and her lineage and demanding that her case be retried before “a tribunal of rehabilitation.”

Calixtus was already seventy-seven years old when he was elected pope in 1455. He would live only another three years, and during that time he would devote himself almost single-mindedly to organizing a crusade against the Turks for the purpose of recovering Constantinople. For this, he knew he would need the support of the French king and was probably persuaded by Estouteville (erroneously, as it turned out) that reopening the case against Joan would please Charles VII sufficiently so as to cause that monarch to
consider aiding the new pope in his military venture. Also, Calixtus “loved to converse upon legal matters, and was as familiar with laws and canons as if he had but just left the University,” observed distinguished papal scholar Dr. Ludwig Pastor. The lawful petition from Joan’s family and the massive supporting scholarship from Bréhal impressed him. On June 11, 1455, Calixtus replied favorably to Joan’s family’s request and called upon three prominent members of the Church in France to work with the inquisitor to reopen proceedings in order to determine the validity of the Maid’s former sentence of condemnation.

By 1455, Joan’s mother, Isabelle, was in her sixties and widowed. She had been left in poverty by the death of her husband and was subsequently invited by the citizens of Orléans, who to their great credit never forgot what Joan had done for them, to take up residence in their town. The municipal government even provided Isabelle with a monthly stipend to help her meet her expenses and paid for a doctor to visit her when she became ill. Her son Pierre, who had fought with Joan, lived with her. Upon his return to France, the duke of Orléans, in recognition of the role Joan and her family had played in saving his birthright from the English, had awarded Pierre a small island in the Loire near Rouen.

In the fall of 1455, aware that a new tribunal had been commissioned to take up the question of her daughter’s trial and execution, the aging Isabelle, in the company of Pierre and a group of supporters from Orléans, made her way to Paris in order to plead personally for justice on her daughter’s behalf. On November 7, she and her entourage appeared at the cathedral of Notre Dame. They were ushered into the presence of Inquisitor Bréhal and the three ecclesiastics appointed to aid him in his inquiry, and Isabelle was allowed to present her case for rehabilitation. Because hers was the name on the papal petition, and it was she who was bringing suit against the former findings, the old woman’s passionate appeal for redemption for her child was recorded as part of the official proceedings. It remains today as perhaps the most searing and poignant expression of the indefensible atrocity of the case. Joan is in every word.

“I had a daughter, born in legitimate marriage, whom I fortified worthily with the sacraments of baptism and confirmation and raised in the fear of God and respect for the tradition of the church, as much as her age and the simplicity of her condition permitted,” Isabelle testified. “So well that, having grown up in the middle of the fields and of the pastures, she went
frequently to church and every month, after confession, received the sacrament of the Eucharist despite her young age and gave herself to fasting and to prayer with great devotion and fervor, on account of the necessities then so grave in which the people found themselves and with which she sympathized with all her heart.

“Nevertheless,” the mother continued, “certain enemies… betrayed her in a trial concerning the Faith, and… without any aid given to her innocence in a perfidious, violent, and iniquitous trial, without shadow of right… they condemned her in a damnable and criminal fashion and made her die most cruelly by fire.” With that, Isabelle threw herself at the feet of the commissioners and burst into tears, waving the document she had brought to validate her suit; her grief was so profound that those who had accompanied her also cried out, and it was reported that the tribunal, visibly moved, accepted her petition.

So began the Church proceedings that would result in the rehabilitation of Joan of Arc.

I
N CONTRAST
to the earlier inquests by Bouillé and Cardinal Estouteville, which were rushed and superficial affairs designed only to prompt further action, this official retrial of the Maid of Orléans by the Inquisitor Bréhal and his three eminent colleagues was a painstakingly comprehensive examination carried out over a period of eight months. Determined that the judgment rendered by his tribunal be considered authoritative, and so permanently discredit and erase the previous ruling, Bréhal brought the same careful, thorough scholarship to the process that he had used when first researching the question of Joan’s alleged heresy. A diligent effort was made to solicit statements from all those who were still living who had ever known or come into contact with the Maid, or who could shed light upon the events in question, and the result was that scores of people testified on her behalf—some 115 in all. Moreover, as it was recognized that many of these witnesses were now older and might find it difficult or inconvenient to travel, the inquisitor made the innovative decision to physically move the court from place to place, and in particular to those towns where Joan herself had appeared, on the grounds that it was at these venues that the judges would be most likely to find informants. Additionally, in order that no evidence be overlooked or neglected, the proceedings were made public and the
sessions opened to spectators, of which there were many, for persons of both the very highest and lowest birth were heard with equal attention. In a further effort to reach the largest audience possible, proclamations were read out in all the public squares by the local town criers well in advance of the tribunal’s visit, summoning anyone who could give testimony to appear before the court on a specific date.

The result was a collective catharsis staged at the national level, in which not only Joan but the entire French populace achieved redemption. The inquisitor remained in Paris throughout November 1455, and it was here that spectators were treated to the stirring eyewitness reports of great men like the Bastard (now raised to the count of Dunois) and the duke of Alençon, who relived in vivid detail the mesmerizing, miraculous events leading up to the lifting of the siege of Orléans and beyond to the coronation at Reims, in what each now recognized to be among the most glorious adventures of the kingdom’s long history. From Paris, the tribunal moved to Rouen, where it sat in session from the twelfth of December through the twentieth and where the audience was electrified by the evidence of Guillaume Manchon, the notary from Joan’s Trial of Condemnation, who testified that Pierre Cauchon and others had deliberately conspired to falsify the official records, offering as proof a number of original documents that he had retained for over two decades, and which he now placed into the hands of the inquisitor. In January, Bréhal sent a representative to Joan’s home village of Domrémy to take depositions from her neighbors and childhood friends, as well as acquaintances and supporters from around the region, including two of the men who had made up the Maid’s original escort from Vaucouleurs to the royal court at Chinon in 1429. The final location was Orléans, where so many witnesses came forward that the tribunal was forced to stay in session for a full three weeks, from February 22 to March 16, in order to hear all the evidence.