Joan of Arc Read online

  Work began to make the city virtually impregnable. Boulevards were placed before the gates, houses by the walls were pulled down, gunpowder and stones were stored ready for use, ditches and moats were cleared of debris. A diplomatic campaign was also set in motion to win friends for the Anglo-Burgundian cause. The English concluded an alliance, for what that was worth, with the changeable Jean V, Duke of Brittany, and offered his younger brother Richemont, the Constable of France currently out of favour with Charles VII, a similar rank in the English army; though Richemont was not drawn, he remained detached from the French cause. At the same time, Bedford still defied Charles, saying to him ‘[you] now without reason call yourself king’ in the name of his nephew, ‘Henry, by the grace of God, true, natural and lawful King of France and England’. He blamed Charles for trusting in the ignorant people who were seduced by ‘a disordered and defamed woman, dressed in man’s clothing and base in conduct’. He blamed the French for disturbing the peace and to secure it he took command.

  Philip of Burgundy, as so often, was devious. On 17 July, the day of the coronation at which he should have been present, Joan wrote to him in her inimitable style: ‘the Maid calls upon you by the King of Heaven, my rightful and sovereign Lord, to make a firm and lasting peace with the King of France’. She goes on to say that he and Charles should pardon one another – she must have thought of the bridge of Montereau – and, if Philip must fight, then he should fight the ‘Saracens’, that is the Turks. She assured him that Charles wished to make peace with him and warned him that he would win no more battles against royalists. Cunning as ever, Philip did offer Charles a truce of fifteen days, at the end of which he would surrender Paris and then prepare for further negotiations. Joan, rightly, was not convinced that Philip was trustworthy and told the people of Reims that she retained her instinct for fighting. After the two weeks were up, Paris had not yielded; instead it had been made harder to capture. Joan began to move against Paris early in August. Hitherto she had acted in accordance with the advice of her voices, but on this occasion there are grounds for arguing that she was acting as a leader of a faction rather than as the inspiration of the royalist cause. Her letter to the English had mentioned Paris; at the nullification trial Seguin Seguin, who had interrogated her at Poitiers, and Alençon, her chief royalist supporter, both asserted that the capture of Paris was a part of her mission; during the heresy trial at Rouen, after she had failed to take the city, she maintained that she had acted to please certain noblemen, in other words the war party. Even before the coronation she had ignored the king’s wishes in accepting Richemont’s help. In the last months of her military career less and less did she seem to act as the king wanted and less and less confident was she that she was following the advice of her voices. The tone of her own voice became shriller, her actions became more independent and she lost her reputation for invincibility.

  In 1453 Sultan Mehmet II was to demonstrate how to conduct a successful siege against an enormous city – with overwhelming superiority in numbers, with inventiveness and with well-directed cannon. A generation earlier, Joan had lacked such advantages. Unlike Constantinople, which was almost deserted by 1453, Paris in 1429 had a population large enough to frustrate a besieger; only a vast army could invest it on all sides and make its inhabitants hunger; only an army with the appropriate siege machines could damage its defences. Joan’s preferred idea of attack was direct assault. Charles did not yet have the resources that at the close of the war would enable him to eject the English from city after city. Yet he would never have what he needed to take Paris by force, and he was only to win the city as a reward for a policy of dogged diplomacy of the kind favoured by Joan’s opponent at court, the rich, obese and wily Georges de La Trémoïlle. Against Paris Joan’s stubborn impetuosity never had a chance.

  On 21 July the army left Reims and on the 23rd reached Soissons, which surrendered to the king. It moved on to Château-Thierry four days later, where it stayed until 1 August. While there, Joan was enough in royal favour to ask the king to exempt Domremy and the neighbouring village of Greux from taxation, a privilege they retained until 1789. At Provins on 2 August the army was joined by René of Anjou, duc de Bar, son-in-law of the Duke of Lorraine and thus again connected with Joan’s part of the country; but even more important was the fact that yet another royal relation pledged himself to support the head of the family. The army marched to the northern side of Paris, and on 15 August was camping outside the cathedral city of Senlis when at last the English under Bedford offered battle. Though it was the feast of the Assumption, Joan was keen to fight, preferably to attack first, but the army commanders, only too aware of how unwise French armies had been in the past, had no intention of being caught yet once more in an English defensive trap. As a result, in the field near the village of Montépilloy, between 6,000 and 7,000 Frenchmen spent the day staring at 8,000–9,000 English soldiers, among whom were between 6,000 and 8,000 Burgundians. Joan, accompanied by Alençon, tried to taunt the English into coming out from behind their stakes, ditches and wagons, but they equally would not be moved. As night fell, the French returned to their lines. At break of day the English left for Senlis and Paris.

  Like the English, Charles also left, in his case for the royal residence of Compiègne, which he found so agreeable that he stayed there for days. Joan remained with him, fretting at her inactivity. Philip of Burgundy had not given up Paris; surely now was the time to take it from him? La Trémoïlle spoke against the idea, Charles was unwilling to press forward and Joan had to be content that he allowed her the Dukes of Alençon and Bourbon and lesser nobles such as Gilles de Rais and professionals such as La Hire to march towards Paris; she would have been disillusioned had she known that while she went south, Regnault of Chartres, the Archbishop of Reims, was in touch with Philip the Good. Remorseful perhaps for the death of Philip’s father and anxious to detach Philip from the English alliance, Charles asked Philip what his terms would be. He promised to vacate Compiègne, Senlis, Creil and Pont-St-Maxence, all towns that had submitted to him, in return for a four-month truce (he did not know that simultaneously Philip was offering more troops to the English, in return for titles to Brie and Champagne). It was then, and with halfhearted support, that Charles sanctioned the attack on Paris.

  The army made for St-Denis, home of the royal abbey where traditionally kings of France were buried. From there skirmishers were sent out to discover the weakest point in the walls, but no attack could start without Charles’s permission. Eventually, on 7 September, the king arrived and ordered the attack. The assault, made the following day, failed, and Joan was wounded. On 9 September Charles suspended the siege.

  The failure before Paris proved that Joan did not always win. Her enemies were quick to learn from her recent successes and failure. While Paris was Anglo-Burgundian in sympathy, its university regarded her as a foe to the faith and its Parlement still upheld the Treaty of Troyes that had disinherited Charles. Inevitably, Paris became the setting for a ceremony to rival the one Joan had inspired for Charles at Reims. In November 1431, when Joan was dead, King Henri II (Henry VI of England) came to St-Denis, as Joan had done, and on 2 December, unlike her, from the abbey made a joyeuse entrée into Paris. In the cathedral of Notre-Dame his uncle Cardinal Beaufort anointed him as true King of France, although without the oil of St Rémi. The occasion was mismanaged, however: English lay peers had to take the place of the lay peers of ‘France’ (as none of the appropriate French ones was available); the rights of the Bishop of Paris were ignored; the feast was chaotic and the food stale. Nevertheless, the people of Paris were loyal to their Anglo-French king. His rival, Charles VII, was not yet de facto master of the country; and until arms had settled the question de jure, the canny Parisians waited to decide whom to back.

  Philip of Burgundy learnt a second lesson about Paris. In 1429 he was still hedging his bets, still trying to keep the kind of watch over French affairs that his father had done. But in 1430 he marri
ed into the pro-English Portuguese royal family and he began to think that his future lay in acquiring yet more of the Netherlands, so that spending money on fighting in France began to look like a bad investment. Others around him had their own reason for wanting an accommodation with Charles. Georges de La Trémoïlle had a brother at the Burgundian court. If Joan were out of the way, such men were thinking, the tortuous route to a Franco-Burgundian rapprochement could be opened. Voices at the court of France began to speak in the same sense. In late September the king dissolved Joan’s army and sent Alençon home. In late October Joan was sent off to the upper Loire.

  Joan had her uses. Much of the upper Loire was dominated by a freebooting captain, Perrinet Gressaert, nominally an ally of the English and Burgundians, but in fact a self-seeking mercenary, one of the last survivors of a military type that the Hundred Years War had fostered. Gressaert was not much more than an irritant, a fly soon forgotten when he was swotted. In October Joan set out from Bourges on her least memorable and least-known campaign. She moved on St-Pierre-le-Moûtier, a stronghold on the River Allier – and therefore difficult to help – and in early November she took the town, retaining enough authority to be able to prevent a massacre. For the last time her characteristic plan of impetuous frontal attack was successful. But on turning east to the River Loire she was faced with the formidable defences of La Charité-sur-Loire. In vain she pleaded for reinforcements from local people, as in Riom. The weather was harsh, the bombardment had little effect and in a grim mood the siege had to be lifted. Back at Jargeau, which she had attacked so enthusiastically and taken just six months earlier, Joan learnt that she and her family had been ennobled. It was perhaps a pay-off, but she did not take the hint.

  In 1430 she acted on her own initiative. One of the terms of the truce between Charles VII and Philip the Good had been that Charles would give up certain towns he had recently captured, including Compiègne, while his cousin of Burgundy had earlier promised to vacate Paris. Alhough the duke had not yet surrendered the capital, the king wanted to keep his part of the bargain by returning Compiègne. At the end of March Joan heard that the townsmen were preparing to disobey Charles’s wishes. She hurried off to help them and on the way defeated an Anglo-Burgundian force at Lagny. On 14 May she reached her target, and entered the town; her objective, to relieve it, proved beyond her. Eight days after her arrival an Anglo-Burgundian force surrounded Compiègne and during a sortie on the following day she was cut off and pulled from her horse by an archer called Lyonnel. She was handed over to Jean de Luxembourg, who, according to a later testimony, was willing to have her ransomed if she would cease to fight the Burgundians. According to the witness Haimond de Maincy, she refused. She would have been cheered to find out that Compiègne was to humiliate the troops investing it by not falling to them. To her captors she was worth more than any royal city, since her capture discredited her cause.

  FIVE

  Coming to Trial

  In late April 1429 Joan joined the royal army at Blois. In late May 1430 she was captured outside Compiègne. At the end of May 1431 she was burnt to death in Rouen. Her public career is thus neatly divisible into two nearly equal parts, the first involving her military career, the second her trial and execution; but this division does not correspond to a neat division in her way of thinking or of behaving. Her voices impelled her to take up arms and her voices were tested by her judges. Her masculine dress and political pronouncements scandalised her foes long before she was questioned, judged and condemned. The mission she had fulfilled so spectacularly in 1429 was vilified for its seeming ultimate failure in 1431.

  There was never any doubt that she would be put on trial and found guilty; the only point at issue was how. She was a prisoner of war and therefore she might be worthy of ransom, although not as much as a king, like John II of France who had died in England before the ransom money could be paid, or as a royal duke, like Charles of Orléans, who was still in gaol fifteen years after Agincourt. That she was valuable was indicated by English anxiety to pay a significant amount to have her, but the purpose of the money exchange was to gain control of her fate: she was bought so she could be given a show trial. She could have been accused of treachery to her lawful king, Henry, and yet Bedford, acting in Henry’s name, was keen to arraign her before an ecclesiastical court. The only court considered suitable was an inquisitorial court.

  Historical myth has given the inquisitions a bad name, but in 1430 an inquisitorial trial properly conducted was probably the fairest trial anywhere in Europe. In England at this time, for example, whereas the local courts did not allow the accused to have counsel or to produce witnesses on their behalf and did not grant them time to prepare a defence, an inquisitorial court conceded a right to be informed of any charges, to know the names of the prosecution witnesses (except in cases where the witnesses’ lives would have been put at risk), to receive copies of their depositions, to have the help of counsel, to dispute and challenge charges. Inquisitions also conceded to the accused a right of silence.

  Clearly, Bishop Cauchon, the man who masterminded Joan’s trial and sentenced her, despite his expertise as a licentiate in canon law, with his unrivalled experience of pleading a hard case at a General Council of the Church, was disqualified from presiding by one simple fact: he, like all the assessors, was her avowed enemy. But he claimed he had the right to try her because she had been captured in his diocese of Beauvais, and yet, even though one of the spiritual peers of France, he had stayed away from Charles VII’s coronation. He had also been ejected from his diocese by Joan’s supporters, so that he had a possible motive of revenge that was in itself enough to disqualify him from acting in the case. Worse still, his whole career had been based round the cause of the Anglo-Burgundian alliance and its current concomitant, the ‘dual monarchy’ (Henry V’s rule as King of England, and, in his eyes, King of France also). In 1397–1403 he had been Rector of Paris University, an institution committed to political policies he shared. In 1415, at the Council of Constance, he had defended the view of the Paris theologian Jean Petit that John, Duke of Burgundy, had been right to murder Louis, Duke of Orléans, and on that occasion he had shown a precise knowledge of correct procedure. When trying Joan, however, he interrogated her under oath before she was charged; he also demanded answers to questions she was not obliged to reply to and never allowed her advice, never sought out evidence that might conflict with his case. It may well be that he genuinely believed her guilty of sorcery and heresy, and that his opinions were sound; but the trial he conducted violated the best practices of inquisitions.

  How such a trial should be conducted Cauchon had seen at the Council of Constance, when the Czech priest John Huss and a lay disciple of his were examined on charges of heresy and condemned. There was a difference between Huss and Joan, however: Huss was an educated man who believed that he could demonstrate the soundness of his personal interpretation of Christianity, whereas Joan had no special doctrine to teach and was marked out from other lay Christians only by spiritual experiences she thought authentic. As such experiences are rare, Joan needed to be examined not by dialecticians but by experts at discerning spirits, who might discover if she were deluded. The trial she was in fact granted was technically unfair, on a par with the average secular trial in England or France at the time, where those in power did not lose.

  The English did not have much experience of inquisitions till their recent experience of heresy. Inquisitions had been set up in southern France, where they had been used to root out the Cathars, a sect who held a dualistic view of God and the world. Although by about 1300 the Cathars were vanquished, inquisitions remained a procedure useful to the Church, and so they survived. They were employed partly to keep religious dissenters of any kind under control, the most dangerous of whom were university lecturers, with the training to question Church teaching. Such a person was John Wyclif, an Englishman prominent at Oxford, the country’s one influential university, before becoming notorious
nationwide for his attack on authority. While the bishops took steps against him, they remained worried at the attraction his anticlerical theology held for leading laymen. They wanted the cooperation of the ruling classes in parliament, lay as well as clerical; and this they obtained when the statute De haeretico comburendo laid down rulings similar to Continental practice: heretics whose guilt had been proven in Church courts – and by definition a heretic was guilty of bad faith – could be liable to the penalty of burning under the secular law if they ‘relapsed’, that is, if they obdurately stuck to their heresy or, worse still, reverted to it. The statute became law in the reign of Henry IV, whose uncertain title to the throne made him all the more keen to please the Church. No king, however, was so enthusiastic to crush heresy as his son, Henry V.

  Although when he was Prince of Wales, Henry was squeamish about the horrid fate awaiting heretics, he changed his mind at the beginning of his reign when he had to cope with heretics who turned rebels. In 1413, proceedings were begun against the well-connected knight Sir John Oldcastle for possessing heretical tracts. Sir John was put in the Tower to reflect on his errors, but when friends contrived his escape he moved from religious to civil disobedience and plotted to kill the king and his brothers. When the plot was discovered, the government reacted swiftly and decisively against the knights who led the ‘Lollards’, as Wycliffites were called, and those, drawn mainly from the artisan class, society’s natural nonconformists, who made up the mass of the dissenters. As a political threat, Lollardy was finished, and until the coming of the Reformation survived only as an underground movement. The shock of these events, however, left Henry V and probably also his brother John of Lancaster, later Duke of Bedford, with a pathological hatred of heresy. It was at the same time as the Lollard revolt that Huss became an internationally renowned heretic; he could be regarded as a scion of England’s religious deviance, for the spread of Wycliffite ideas to the Czech people had coincided with Richard II’s first marriage to Anne of Bohemia. The Lancastrian dynasty dedicated itself to the uprooting of dangerous beliefs; in 1428 Cardinal Beaufort, half-brother to Henry IV, was charged by the pope with leading a crusade against the Hussites; and Bedford, the conscience of the Lancastrians in France after the death of his elder brother Henry V, called Joan ‘a disciple and limb of the fiend’, who ‘used false enchantments and sorcery’.1