Joan of Arc Read online

  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.

  PART TWO

  The Maid Vindicated

  NINE

  The King on Trial

  Everyone 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.

  Upon the King! Let us our lives, our souls,

  Our debts, our careful wives,

  Our children, and our sins, lay on the King!

  . . . I know

  ’Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball,

  The sword, the mace,

  the crown imperial,

  The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,

  The farced title running ’fore the king,

  The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp

  That beats upon the high shore of this world,

  No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,

  Not all these, laid in bed majestical,

  Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,

  Who with a body filled and vacant mind

  Get him to bed, crammed with distressful bread.1

  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.

  TEN

  National Salvation

  Joan 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.

  The king, in view of his necessity and that of his kingdom, and considering the continuous prayers of his poor people to God and to all other lovers of peace and justice, should not turn away nor reject the Maid who says she is sent by God to give him help, even conceding that her promises consist only of human works.1

  The theological wording means that the ‘necessity’ in which the king finds himself is the need for salvation. This may involve material salvation, but the emphasis is on the peace and justice that the Maid may bring to those who pray. The way she will achieve her aims, however, is purely human and material. Those who examined Joan knew that she was committed to war, unless the English and their allies withdraw from the lands that were not theirs by right; but it was a special kind of war. It was a moral commonplace that a war of self-defence is just; and this right of self-defence could cover attempts to recover what had been unjustly taken away, in this case parts of the land of France. But Joan did not see her war as merely a just war. It was also in some sense a holy war, as the king held France from God as a sacred trust. This was not quite like struggling to regain Christ’s lands, which was the business of a Crusade, but it was analogous to crusading. It is not surprising that once her work in France was accomplished, Joan thought of crusading against the Hussites in Bohemia.2

  The résumé concludes with a recommendation on the immediate action to be taken:

  The king, in view of the testing carried out on the said Maid, so far as he can, and that no evil is found in her, and considering her answer, which is to give a divine sign at Orléans; seeing her constancy and perseverance in her purpose, and her instantaneous requests to go to Orléans to show there the sign of divine help, must not prevent her from going to Orléans with her men-at-arms, but must have her led there in good faith, trusting in God. For doubting her or dismissing her without appearance of evil, would be to repudiate the Holy Spirit, and render one unworthy of God’s help, as Gamaliel stated in a council of Jews regarding the apostles.3

  The reference to Gamaliel, the Pharisee who advised caution to the Jews who condemned the early preaching of St Peter and St John, makes clear that at least some Poitiers theologians, being of the party of Gerson, were familiar with his persistent researches into the art of the discernment of spirits. In her trial at Rouen, Joan was wronged partly because correct inquisitorial procedure was not followed and partly because her judges chose to see certain aspects of her behaviour, notably her decision to wear men’s clothes, as inherently heretical. The fundamental point at issue, however, was her willingness to trust her voices rather than what her judges told her she should believe. Her voices did not teach her any doctrine opposed to the Catholic faith, and, if they did, then it was the opinion of the leading theologian of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, that such questions should be referred to the pope. But her judges refused to allow her appeal to the pope. In so doing they were arrogating to themselves the right to decide the doctrine of the Church.

  In the nullification process, the new judges concerned themselves largely with matters of procedure. It was more prudent to declare that the verdict of the Rouen court was unsafe than to defend the right of certain women to wear men’s clothes, which many clerics would have found shocking in fact, even if defensible in principle. But it was hard to deny that if Joan should not have been condemned, the overriding reason for that view was that a devout Christian has a duty to obey the Holy Spirit. As one of the theological consultants wrote, ‘they who are led by the private law are moved by the spirit of God and are not under the public law, because where the spirit is, there is liberty’.4

  Between Joan’s first examination by clerics at Poitiers in March 1429 and the nullification in 1456 of her condemnation by clerics at Rouen in May 1431 there had been a theological sea change. In 1456 it was clear that in certain rare cases the clergy had to learn to be sensitive to the workings of the Spirit in private individuals, and that included the laity and, worse still, lay women. Further, the surest sign that the Spirit was working in an unusual person was that person’s holiness of life; and many of the witnesses to Joan’s life attested to her holiness.

  There was another consequence of the nullification. Joan always claimed that her mission was to restore the kingdom of France to France’s rightful king. She did not live to see this happen, but by 1456 it was hard to deny that Charles VII, anointed and crowned for a sacred charge, was God’s chosen to be King of France. After the raising of the siege of Orléans and subsequent victories in the Loire valley, Joan had seemed to be the person who had saved France for its sacred king. Another 450 years elapsed before she was considered to be the girl who had saved France and a saint of the Catholic Church.

  ELEVEN

  The Alliance of 1435

  Arras was one of those Franco-Flemish towns that had grown rich on the textile trade, and was especially well known for its tapestries. In the 1430s it was one of several such towns in the lands of Philip, Duke of Burgundy, and a fit meeting place for kings and grandees. Accordingly, from 4 August 1435 the town’s abbey of St-Vaast, or Vedast, was the setting for a conference meant to bring about a general peace between England, France and Burgundy. Two cardinals presided at the sessions. The pope, anxious to encourage Latin Christians to combine against the Turks, had sent one, the Council of Basel another.

  The Duke of Burgundy, ever a man for gesture politics, was good at entertaining heralds in gorgeous costumes and hundreds of retainers, but less effective in achieving his grandiose ambitions. The English and the French representatives at the conference refused to be in the same room, even in the same chapel, and early in September the English walked out. One week later the English Regent, John Duke of Bedford died and was buried in the heart of English France, in Rouen Cathedral. A week later still, the French and Burgundians made terms. The French delegates, led by Philip’s brothers-in-law, the Duke of Bourbon and Arthur, Count of Richemont (who had once come to Joan’s aid) had much to offer Philip, who was preoccupied with the conquest of Holland and the pacification of Flanders. Towns he held without royal sanction, such as Auxerre, would be his; for a mortgage he could hold towns like Abbeville, Amiens and St-Quentin in the Somme valley; and in return, as a sign of his good intentions, Charles VII promised to make a formal apology for the murder of Philip’s father at Montereau. Some in Philip’s council argued vehemently that any quarrel with the English would be harmful for Flemish trade, but many councillors had been bribed, among them the chancellor, Nicolas Rolin.

  While Philip indicated his willingness to resume the role of a Valois, Rolin commissioned a painting, The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, from Jan van Eyck. Van Eyck lived in Bruges, in Flanders, while Rolin came from Autun, in Burgundy; and it was the union of the international commercial towns of the coastal county with the inland vineyards of the royal duchy that had made Philip incomparably rich.1 For the merchants of Bruges and Ghent, the Liverpool and Manchester of the day, it was vital to keep the sea lanes to England open. In the long run, the 1435 treaty probably did not promote the cause of either Flanders or of the dukes of Burgundy; it certainly weakened England, but for Charles VII and, briefly, for a subtle Burgundian like Rolin, it was a diplomatic triumph. Rolin behaved in a suitably pious way. In the foreground of van Eyck’s picture he kneels in prayer before a Madonna being crowned by angels, a scene that refers to his gift of a statue to his native cathedral, while in the middle distance on a bridge tiny figures re-enact the murder of Montereau. At the same time Rolin gives thanks and celebrates forgiveness. With a mixture of hypocrisy, calculation and fine feeling, the Burgundians – Joan’s captors – at last made possible the attainment of her ultimate goal: the expulsion of the English from France.

  There were other ironies in the new situation. The policy of the Franco-Burgundian rapprochement had been the policy of Joan’s arch enemy at the French court, Georges de La Trémoïlle, but he had fallen from power in 1433, largely through the restoration to favour of Ric
hemont, the man whom Joan had been criticised for dealing with. It can be argued that the Treaty of Arras did little more in the short-term for Philip the Good than to make him feel good. He was assured by the papal envoy Cardinal Albergati that he had done no dishonour to his English allies, whom he might attack only if they first attacked the French. Van Eyck had meticulously studied the cardinal’s patient features, as he had the harsh traits of Rolin; and like Rolin, his motives deserve close scrutiny. Both would benefit from the reconciliation, but, whereas Rolin was after riches, the cardinal was more idealistic: he hoped to save Constantinople. Those who thought like him were to suffer the worst form of disillusionment. The Treaty of Arras did not bring the Hundred Years War to a rapid end; instead it dragged itself on wearily till 1453, the year when Constantinople became Istanbul.

  It was their use of cannon that enabled Sultan Mehmet II to defeat the Greeks and Charles VII to drive out the English. Joan herself had been modern enough to see the advantages of guns. When talking about this method of warfare, Alençon had had to use the new French word, artillerie, for there was no equivalent term in Latin, the ancient tongue of learned men.2

  TWELVE

  The End of English France

  Shortly after Joan of Arc’s death the English had a symbolic success. Days before Christmas 1431, on a dais whose steps were painted blue and which was studded with golden fleur-de-lis, young Henry was anointed King of France according to the English Sarum rite in the cathedral of Notre-Dame, Paris, by his uncle Cardinal Beaufort. The manner of the ceremony confirmed Joan’s view that in France the English were foreigners. Worse still, while the king was present, the cardinal insisted that Bedford resign as regent. This was not only an imperious but also a foolish act, for the Regent had many French admirers. The following year the tenuousness of the English hold on French land was revealed by the temporary capture of the Grosse Tour at Rouen and the conclusive capture of Chartres. At Lagny, too, the Bastard of Orléans beat off Bedford’s attack. Bedford’s position was further weakened by the death of his wife Anne of Burgundy, sister of Duke Philip, and he then annoyed Philip by marrying the wealthy Jacquetta de Luxembourg without first gaining the duke’s approval.