Joan of Arc Read online

  Father Jean then tells the familiar story, according to which she told the king he was the true heir to the kingdom and other things that only he could know. That at any rate is what Joan told him, but there was no witness to corroborate her version of events. What sounds typical of her is Father Jean’s assertion that she was angry at being cross-questioned so much, since it stopped her from acting. She told him she had asked ‘the Messengers of her Lord, that is of God, who appeared to her’, what she should do; and they told her to take her Lord’s banner. And so she had her banner made, with the image of Our Saviour in judgement on the clouds of heaven and an angel holding in his hand a fleur-de-lis which Christ blessed. Father Jean was with her at Tours when the banner was painted. His account ties in with the treasury note that twenty-five livres tournois were paid to one ‘Hauves Poulnois, painter, living at Tours, for painting and getting materials for a great standard, and a small one for the Maid’.

  When she went to help Orléans, Father Jean went with her and did not leave her till the day she was captured at Compiègne. As her chaplain, he confessed her and sang Mass for her. She was, he said, full of piety to God and Our Lady, confessed almost daily and communicated often. If near a friary, she told him to remind her of the day when the children of the poor received the Eucharist, so she might receive it with them; and this she did often. When she made her confession she was in tears.

  When she left Tours to go to Orléans, she begged him to stay on as her Confessor; and this he promised to do. At Blois she asked him to have her banner made, which he did, and once in the morning and once in the evening he was to bring priests together ‘to sing anthems and hymns to the Blessed Mary’. Joan was with them and allowed only the soldiers who had confessed that day join her; she told her people to confess if they wished to come to the meeting, and the priests were always at hand to hear confessions. On the march to Orléans the priests were placed at the front of the army and sang the Veni Creator Spiritus and other antiphons.

  Father Jean’s version of how the supply boats got into Orléans differs slightly from that of the Bastard of Orléans. He says just that the water rose. Then he and the other priests went back to Blois, but some days later he got into the city by way of the River Beauce. Neither the priests nor their convoy were attacked by the English. He tells a familiar story about the capture of the fort of St-Loup on the eve of Ascension Day and about Joan’s distress at the sufferings of the wounded soldiers. She was worried particularly that so many English had died without having confessed. Making her own confession on the spot, she told him to invite the whole army to do so too and to thank God for the victory – and if they would not, she would give them no more help. That day she predicted that the siege would be raised within five days, and so things turned out. She would not fight on Ascension Day, but went to confession and received the host.

  On that day too she dictated yet another letter to the English, telling them to leave France. She did not send it in the normal way, by means of a herald, since her herald Guyenne had not been sent back, so she attached it to an arrow and told an archer to shoot it at the English. The gesture merely provoked yet more insults, which reduced her to tears, but she soon recovered because she had received good news, she said, from God – and on the following day the Fort des Augustins fell. Although wounded by an arrow, she refused to let any of her soldiers use charms to heal the wound. She was hurt by yet more coarse language from the English commander Glasdale, but when soon after he fell into the Loire and was drowned, she wept for his soul.

  Nothing about Joan’s life remained so vivid in Father Jean’s memory as the days that led up to the relief of Orléans. He may have put words in her mouth, for as late as May 1430 he wrote for her to warn the Hussites of Bohemia that if they persisted in their heresy, she might well come to sort them out when she had finished with the English; such sentiments confirmed her orthodoxy. He was content to make general comments, and his testimony omitted many details of her later story.

  He believed firmly that she was sent by God because of her good works and her many virtues. So much did she fear God, that not for anything in the world would she displease Him. He then repeats himself. When wounded in the shoulder by an arrow, which went through from one side to the other, and some spoke of charming her, promising in this way to cure her on the spot, she answered that it would be ‘a sin’, and said she would rather die than offend God ‘by such enchantments’.

  His final remarks were bolder. He was amazed that clerics as distinguished as those who caused her death at Rouen should have dared to commit such a crime as to put to death so poor and simple a Christian, cruelly and without a cause, or at least not one grave enough for capital punishment; they might have kept her in prison or elsewhere, but she had annoyed them so much that they had become her mortal enemies; and so, it seems, they were responsible for an unjust sentence. He stated that her actions and deeds were all perfectly known to the king and the Duke of Alençon, who held certain secrets they could tell if they wanted to. As for himself he had nothing more to say, ‘unless it be that many times Joan expressed to me a desire that, if she died, the king would build a chapel, where men could pray for the souls of those killed in defence of the kingdom’.

  Nobody else who came across Joan from the day she arrived in Chinon to the day she was captured at Compiègne knew her as well as d’Aulon, Alençon, the Bastard, Louis de Coutes and Father Jean, but others had encounters with her they still liked to recall twenty-five years after they had occurred. Many such comments repeat tales that other witnesses had given. For example, she was a ‘simple shepherd-maiden’, who often went to confession and took communion, who ate and drank moderately, who tried to be rid of all women camp followers unless soldiers would marry them and that she was ‘good not only to the French, but also to the enemy’. Those who had examined her at Poitiers had found ‘nothing but good in her’, and discovered nothing against the Catholic faith. Joan had a great horror of dice, was generous in giving money away and astonished soldiers for the way she handled a lance or a horse. Thibauld d’Armagnac said she was like ‘the most skilled captain in the world who all his life had been trained in the art of war’.

  Some witnesses are valuable because their evidence fills in gaps in the standard accounts. Maître Reginald Thierry, dean of the church of Meung-sur-Yèvre and surgeon to the king, told how when St-Pierre-le-Moûtier was captured, Joan stopped the soldiers from ransacking the church so that nothing should be removed. Pierre Milet, clerk to the Electors of Paris, captures precisely the tone of her voice when he transcribed part of the letter to the English in her own French dialect: ‘Messire vous mande que vous en aliez en vostre pays, car c’est son plaisir, ou sinon je vous feray ung tel hahay’ (‘Our Lord wants you to go to your own country, as it’s his pleasure, or if not I’ll give you what for’). There is a more precise witness to her idiom: Seguin Seguin, Dominican Professor of Theology and Dean of the Faculty of Theology at Poitiers.

  Seguin Seguin was the only surviving member of the distinguished group who had examined Joan in Poitiers. When asked why she had come, she replied ‘in a grand manner’, that ‘there had come to her, while she was minding the animals, a voice, which told her that God had great compassion on the people of France, and that she must come into France’. On hearing the voice she began to weep; the voice then told her to go to Vaucouleurs, where she would find a captain who would conduct her safely into France and to the king, and that she must not be afraid. She had done what the voice had ordered, and had come to the king without meeting any obstacle. She was asked this question: ‘You have said that a voice told you, God wanted to deliver the people of France from the calamity in which they now are; but, if God wills to deliver them, it is not necessary to have soldiers.’ ‘In God’s Name!’ Joan replied, ‘the soldiers will fight, and God will give the victory’ (‘En nom Dé, les gens d’armes batailleront et Dieu donnera victoire’). Seguin then asked Joan what dialect the voice spoke in: ‘A b
etter one than yours,’ was the reply. ‘He,’ said Seguin, referring to himself, ‘spoke the Limousin dialect.’ Joan spoke the dialect of Lorraine, strongly influenced by the proximity of Champagne, where ‘j’ or ‘y’ became ‘ch’, so that she pronounced ‘joyeux’ as ‘choyeux’ and used the typical Lorrainer expression en nom Dé, ‘in God’s name’.

  Seguin found it harder to cope with her tone than her accent. He stated that ‘God wills that you should not be believed unless there appear some sign to prove that you ought to be believed; and we shall not advise the king to trust in you, and to risk an army on your simple statement.’ Joan replied: ‘In God’s Name! I am not come to Poitiers to show signs, but send me to Orléans, where I shall show you the signs for which I am sent!’ She then asked to be given men in such numbers as may seem good, and went on to foretell four things that Seguin had seen occur: the siege of Orléans would be raised, the king would be crowned at Reims, Paris would return to its natural obedience, and the Duke of Orléans would be brought back from England.

  The committee at Poitiers had then reported all this to the King’s Council and given its view that in the existing extreme circumstances the king might as well send her to Orléans. They also made enquiries about her life and morals, found she was a good Christian, living as a Catholic, never idle, and arranged for her to live with women who were to keep the committee informed about her. ‘As for me,’ said Seguin, ‘I believed she was sent from God, because at the time when she appeared the king and all the French people who supported him had lost hope: everyone thought the cause was lost.’ He also remembered Joan was asked why she always marched with a banner in her hand: because she did not wish to use her sword or to kill anyone, she replied. Finally, Seguin, like so many others, testified to her hatred of swearing and to the way that she told the foul-mouthed La Hire to swear only by his staff; and in her presence he did so. ‘The soldiers thought her holy,’ said another witness.

  Apart from Maître Thierry’s reference to the capture of St-Pierre-le-Moûtier, nobody knew about the months between the check before Paris (in September 1429) and Joan’s capture outside Compiègne (in May 1430); and the narrative resumes only when she was a prisoner. She was taken to Rouen Castle, where she was put in a prison opposite some fields. Raymond, Sieur de Macy, had much to say. The comte de Ligny, on whom Raymond attended, came to see her there. De Ligny also visited her with the earls of Warwick and Stafford, the comte’s brother, Louis de Luxembourg, the English chancellor of France and bishop of Thérouanne, and Raymond himself. De Ligny said: ‘Joan, I have come to ransom you, if you will promise never again to take up arms against us.’ She replied: ‘In God’s Name [En nom Dé], you must be having me on, for I know well that you have neither the will nor the power,’ and this she said over and over again, while the count persisted. She knew well, she ended by saying, that the English would have her killed, thinking that after her death they would gain the kingdom of France, but if there were a hundred thousand more ‘godons’ than there are at present, they would not have the kingdom ‘godons’ or ‘goddams’ was the common French name for the English). The Earl of Stafford was so furious at these words that he began to draw his dagger to kill her, but the Earl of Warwick stopped him.

  After this, while Macy was still in Rouen, Joan was taken to the place St-Ouen, where a sermon was preached to her by Maître Nicolas Midi – his memory tricked him, for the preacher’s name was Erard – and this man said among other things: ‘Joan, we have great pity on you; you ought to unsay what you have said, or we must give you up to the secular judges.’ She answered that she had done no evil, that she believed in the twelve Articles of the Faith and the Ten Commandments, that she referred herself to the court of Rome and that she wished to believe all things in which Holy Church believed. All the same they pressed her to recant, to which she answered: ‘You take great pains to seduce me,’ and, to escape danger, she said at last that she was content to do all they required. Then the secretary of the King of England, Lawrence Calot, drew out of his pocket a little written schedule, which he handed to Joan to sign. She replied she could neither read nor write. Nevertheless, Secretary Calot handed her the schedule and a pen to sign it and for whatever motive – Macy thinks it was as a sign of contempt – she made a circular mark. Then Calot took her hand with the pen and caused her to make some sort of signature, probably a cross (Macy was not sure). Macy concluded: ‘I believe her to be in Paradise.’

  SIXTEEN

  Witnesses to the Trial

  The many witnesses who had come forward to share their memories of Joan twenty-five years or so after they had known her regarded her with a mixture of awe and admiration, not just because of her piety and purity, but also because of her competence, courage and kindness. Indirectly, the often long depositions by acquaintances, colleagues and friends revealed how shocking had been the bias of the judges who had condemned her. Her questioners had seen her as a deceiver, yet she was transparent; as a witch, yet she remained a virgin; as heretical, yet she was scrupulously Catholic; as a sorceress, yet she claimed no special powers. They had seen her decision to revert to male costume as the conclusive sign of her wickedness, yet those who had lived with her thought her merely sensible in her choice – they had not been shocked. Some of them knew she heard ‘voices’, but none of those who did found her experiences unusually preposterous or even interesting – they were plain matter-of-fact about them.

  But Joan’s new judges dealt in legal niceties rather than character assessment. As Macy realised, the key evidence concerned the trial; and what mattered most in the royal inquest and in the ecclesiastical inquests was the evidence of theologians and Church lawyers, for Joan, who could have been tried as a traitor to Henry VI and II, was tried for sorcery and heresy. Charles VII’s royal lawyers did not restore Joan’s good name because they could not: only a Church court could do that. Indeed, one royal official produced a witness who could have hindered Joan’s case, for in 1450 the king’s commissioner, Maître Guillaume Bouillé, secured the testimony of an unrepentant critic of Joan, who disappeared from history before he could speak to papal officials.

  Maître Jean Beaupère, one of Joan’s most implacable interrogators twenty years earlier and who had by now retired to Besançon, just happened to come to Rouen to collect dues from his canonry in Rouen Cathedral. He felt free to express a view of Joan not unlike that he had maintained in 1431. For a royal inquest of the mid-fifteenth century, Bouille’s inquest proved to be remarkably fair. Beaupère himself still had no doubt that in many details his snide view of Joan had been sound. He believed Joan’s ‘apparitions’ had natural and human rather than supernatural and divine causes, and he referred back to the evidence of the trial.1

  Before she was taken to St-Ouen to be admonished on the following morning, Beaupère went alone, with permission, into Joan’s prison, and warned her that she would soon be led to the scaffold to be preached to, telling her that, if she were a good Christian, she would say on the scaffold that she referred all her actions and words to the care of Holy Mother Church, and especially of the Church’s judges. And this she said on the scaffold, having been asked to do so by Maître Nicolas Midi. On due consideration she was sent back to prison for a time, after abjuring, though some Englishmen accused Cauchon and the Parisian delegates of favouring her errors.

  After her abjuration, and, after taking her woman’s dress which she was given in prison, the judges were told the next Friday or Saturday that Joan had not repented of having put off a man’s dress and had taken a woman’s dress. For this reason,

  my Lord of Beauvais (Cauchon) . . . sent me and Maître Nicolas Midi to her, hoping we would speak to Joan and persuade her to persevere in the good intent she had on the scaffold and be careful not to relapse. But we could not find the keeper of the prison key, of the three keys to the prison, the Promoter had one, the Inquisitor a second and the Cardinal the third; and, while we were waiting for the prison guard, several Englishmen in the castle
court-yard threatened, as Maître Nicolas Midi told me, that anyone throwing both of us into the water would be well occupied. We went back, when we had heard this. On the castle bridge, said Midi, other Englishmen said much the same. We were afraid and went away without speaking to Joan.

  As for Joan’s innocence, she showed a woman’s subtlety, thought Beaupère. He did not understand from any of her words that she had been violated. As for her final penitence, he did not know what to say, for on the Monday after the abjuration (28 May) he left Rouen to go to Basel, as a delegate of the University of Paris. For this reason he had no news of the condemnation till he heard it mentioned at Lille in Flanders.

  Careful though he had been to present himself favourably, Beaupère had not become an admirer of Joan’s. He had, however, fashioned a way of becoming rich: in 1432 he was a canon of Besançon, Paris, Laon and Rouen and soon a canon of Autun as well; he was pro-English when he acquired his benefices, anti-papal when it paid him at Basel and pro-French when Charles VII reconquered his kingdom. He remained constant only in his mistrust of a woman who had dared to answer back to her betters.

  Of the six other clerics interviewed who had taken part in the trial, four were Black Friars, or Dominicans – Jean Toutmouillé, Ysambard de La Pierre, Martin Ladvenu and Guillaume Duval – and two were secular priests – Guillaume Manchon, the notary, and Jean Massieu, clerk to Maître ‘Jean Benedicite’, the nickname of the Promoter, Estivet. They were willing to suggest that the proceedings of that trial had been vitiated by lies and intimidation. They had much to worry about, for if they supported Joan now, they knew that they had been too craven to support her then. In defending her in middle or old age, they had to confront the moral failures of their youth.