Saint Joan of Arc

by Vita Sackville-West

  It must never be forgotten, either – a vital point which I have left to the end – that the trial of Jeanne as a sorceress really involved an attack on the King who had employed her.

  III

  The argument is frequently advanced, and with some foundation that Jeanne was not tried by the Church at all, but only by a small and hostile section of it. Even the most impartially minded arbitrator must find himself unable to deny the force of this assertion. It has already been pointed out that the tribunal, purporting to be a religious and non-political body, or at any rate a body constituted to deal with offences against the Church, not against the State, was actually composed entirely of men directly or indirectly ruled by the interests of the English cause. Whatever the authority of the Bishop of Beauvais within his own diocese, there is no getting away from the fact that, in the name of justice, the tribunal ought to have included at least a proportion of unprejudiced divines, even allowing that we might be going too far in expecting to find a proportion drawn from the party specifically favourable to Jeanne. Then there is no getting away from the further fact that Jeanne herself did several times appeal to be taken before the Pope – an appeal which was inadequately and even ludicrously answered by the objection that Rome was too far awayfn9 – nor from the fact that she did express herself willing, and even anxious, to be taken before the Council of Basle. That she appealed to be taken before the Pope is indisputable, for it is written in the official record of the trial; the information that she appealed to be taken before the Council of Basie we owe principally, with the corroboration of Manchon, to the favourable witness Isambard de la Pierre, testifying on her behalf nineteen years after her death. The evidence of these posthumous witnesses must always be taken with a grain of salt; nevertheless this particular account is so circumstantial and so credible that it is worth transcribing here in its entirety. It will be noticed that a definite accusation is brought, both by de la Pierre and by Jeanne herself, against Cauchon, of ordering the clerk to suppress the relative passage in his written report – a significant fact, i:11 view of the charges often levelled against the judges, of corrupting the text both by falsi-fication and omissions.

  Frère Isambard, on his own showing, was, if he is wholly to be believed, one of the very few who dared hold out a helping hand to the perplexed captive:

  ‘Frère Isambard de la Pierre depones that once, he and several others being present, the said Jeanne was exhorted and admonished to submit herself to the Church. To which she replied that she would gladly submit herself to the Holy Father, requesting to be taken to him, and that she would not submit herself to the judgement of her enemies. And when Frère Isambard advised her to submit herself to the General Council of Basie, the said Jeanne asked him what a general council was. He replied that it was a congregation of the universal Church and of Christianity, and that there were as many of her party in that council as of the English party. When she had heard and understood this, she began to exclaim, “Oh! since there are some of our party, I will willingly go and submit to the Council of Basie.” And immediately, in great indignation and displeasure, the Bishop of Beauvais cried out, “Be silent, de par le diable!” and he forbade the clerk to set down that she had made her submission to the General Council of Baslc. Because of this and other things, Frère Isambard was horribly menaced by the English, and by their officers, that if he did not hold his tongue they would throw him into the Seine.’fn10

  This is one account given by Frère Isambard; later on he added that Jeanne said to the Bishop, ‘Oh, you write the things which are against me, but not the things which are in my favour.’fn11

  IV

  Apart from these appeals, where she was acting entirely within her rights, it must be admitted that Jeanne made everything easy for them at every tum by playing into their hands. She almost saved them the trouble of condemning her by doing so over and over again out of her own mouth. Never did a prisoner so generously, and even eagerly, provide evidence against herself. It was not through stupidity that she did it, for, when she wished, her answers to their questions would defeat them in their very shrewdness and bluntness, as surely as the answers of a practised lawyer – in much the same way as in the old days she had bewildered the captains by her habit of cutting straight through the recognised laws of military tactics. But more often she suffered under the enormous disadvantage of approaching every question with a single, believing, feeling heart, which the tortuosity of their own minds could not understand, but which the experience of their training could only too skilfully exploit. She suffered also from the disadvantage of betraying no fear even ifshe felt it, so that, far from trembling before her mighty judges, she treated them with a lack of ceremony which on occasions amounted to impertinence. It must have outraged them to find that she could joke and go gay (de quo gavisa est ipsa Johanna) in the midst of such solemnity. But so she did, for having caught Boisguillaume out in an inaccuracy over one of her answers, given eight days earlier – her memory being better than his, although he had it all written down in his own hand, and she, being unable either to write or read, had nothing but her recollection to rely on – she told him, in full court, that if he made such a mistake again, she would pull his ears.fn12 It was a peasant’s joke, perhaps; a countrified joke; not the sort of joke that the University of Paris would have thought very funny; but it must have considerably surprised an assembly of priests and jurists trying a girl for her life. On more serious questions, apart from pulling the ears of the clerk of the court, she could prove herself equally lacking in respect. Not content with refusing to take oaths they wanted her to take, not content with refusing to answer questions she felt disinclined to answer, she could go so far as to warn Cauchon himself to be very careful. ‘You say you are my judge; I do not know if you are or not; but be very careful not to judge me wrongly, for you would be putting yourself in grave danger. I am warning you of it now, so that if our Lord punishes you for it, I shall have done my duty in telling you.’fn13

  This was scarcely the language that the Bishop of Beauvais was accustomed to hearing used towards him. He was not accustomed to being told by prisoners what the Lord would or would not punish him for. He had probably never had so intractable a prisoner before him, and on the whole his patience towards Jeanne seems to have been commendable. He might, and did, lose his temper with his subordinates, but there is only one instance on record in which he lost his temper with Jeanne. Not that she ever made any concessions calculated to propitiate him. Indeed, by the first words she uttered at her first appearance at the trial she set the tone for what was to follow, and only for one brief hour of piteous panic did she depart from the calmly arrogant attitude of firmness and certainty she had from the first adopted.

  V

  The preliminaries of the trial had already lasted for nearly six weeks (January 9th to February 20th, 1431), during which ten sittings had been held, before Jeanne was brought before the court for the first time at its first public sitting, by Jean Massieu, shortly after eight o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, February 21st. Massieu had been sent to warn her on the previous day that her presence would be required, and she had returned the answer that she would willingly appear, but begged that ecclesiastics of the French party should be represented in equal numbers as ecclesiastics of the English, also that she might be allowed to hear Mass before appearing at the trial. One wonders what compassionate or taunting voice had been informing her of the composition of the tribunal, since her first request makes it clear that she knew she would have none but enemies to confront. In any case, the request, although faithfully repeated by Massieu, was ignored. The second request, at d’Estivet’s instigation, was categorically refused. Without a friend, without even an adviser, the nineteen-year-old prisoner was led before the assembled tribunal in the Chapel Royal of the castle of Rouen.fn14

  She was allowed to sit before them.

  They did not take long to discover that they had no terrified, humble girl to deal with, but tha
t the young captive of Rouen was in fact the very same person as the young captain of Patay and Orleans. Her first words revealed it. Asked to swear on the Gospels that she would answer nothing but the truth, she replied that she did not know what they wanted to ask her. ‘Perhaps,’ she added, ‘you may ask me things that I will not tell you.’fn15

  It was not a good beginning. They did not, however, insist too much. They got her to say that she would willingly tell the truth about her father and mother, and about everything she had done since she set out for France, and, after frequent admonitions, about everything which concerned the Catholic faith. With this they had to be content, seeing that she would not promise to answer anything about the revelations made to her by God, which, she said, she had told only to her King, and which she would tell to no other person, even if her head were to be cut off. They were possibly somewhat appeased by her remark that, before a week had passed, she would know whether she would tell tl1em or not – an evasion with which, in the days to follow, they were to become familiar. Kneeling, with her hands on the Book, she was allowed to take the oath in its modified form, nor in spite of other struggles on the subject, renewed on subsequent sittings, were they ever able to induce her to depart from her original determination.

  The trial which thus opened is reported in its entirety in one of the most remarkable and enthralling of historical documents. It was transcribed in Latin, but large portions of it exist also in the original French minutes. On the first reading, we are left with the impression of an inconsecutive and incoherent jumble, which makes us sympathise with Jeanne in her complaintsthat they were trying to confuse her, and also that they were asking her questions which had nothing to do with the matter in hand – ‘Give me the chance to speak’; ‘Ce n’est pas de votre procès’; ‘Am I obliged to tell you that?’ ‘Passez outre’ she objects repeatedly.fn16 It must indeed have been puzzling for her to discover the general trend of their examination. Little by little, however, it must have become clear to her that certain subjects were recurrent: her insistence on adopting men’s clothes; her refusal to abandon them; and of course, and above all, over and over again, the Voices, always the Voices. In one way or another, directly or indirectly, nearly all the questions could be linked up with the Voices. The source of her inspiration, the extent of her claim to be in real communication with God and His saints, her obedience or disobedience to the Church, her exaltation of herselfas a holy person endowed with miraculous powers, her relations with the King – there was no subject which could not be associated with that dangerous, danming claim. And it was a point upon which she was absolutely unshakable. She had heard the voices; she had received their instructions; what she had done she had done at their bidding; God Himself had sent them to her; God Himself had sent her to France; she had not only heard the voices, but had seen the saints, seen them, spoken with them, touched them, smelt them, embraced them.… The wonder is that the trial went on for so long as it did. Jeanne had said enough to convict all the virgins in Lorraine.

  It is to be noted, however, that on one point she was curiously reticent. Willing though she was to answer ad nauseam that the voices had told her this, that, or the other, she was correspondingly unwilling to answer questions of a more personal nature about the saints. The first time that the interrogation seemed to threaten an advance towards the heart of the mystery, she evinced great uneasiness and discomfort and asked for a delay: ‘I am not telling you everything I know. I am more afraid of failing them, by saying something which might dis-please the voices, than of answering you.’fn17 Perhaps with the same instinct as had made her keep her own counsel as a child, she now shrank from the open discussion of the sacred subject. Asked if she had seen anything of them except their faces, she replied that she would sooner have her throat cut than say all she knew.fn18 Perhaps, also, when her acute examiners tried to pin her down to any precise descriptions, she discovered to her chagrin that the image in her mind was not quite so definite as she had supposed; an argument which will certainly appeal to those who dismiss the apparitions as purely hallucinatory. It was easier to imagine golden gracious visions glimmering through a cloud of light than to say whether they had hair or not, or how they were dressed, or what age they were. Yet she maintained that she had seen them with her bodily eyes, as clearly as she saw the judges before her.fn19 Whatever the explanation, her reluctance to discuss their personal attributes is manifest and consistent. She had several methods of getting herself out of the disagreeable situation. One method was by flat refusal. Another was by saying she had not received permission. Another was by asking for delay, trying to stave them off by promising an answer at a later date, when she should have had time to seek advice of her visitants. Another was by saying that she had already answered at Poitiers, and by appealing to them to produce the ‘Book of Poitiers,’ a document by which she evidently set great store, but which was never to reappear. (Small wonder, for several of the men who had examined her at Poitiers, and on whose recommendation she had been despatched to the relief of Orleans, were now sitting in judgment upon her.)

  Some extracts from the trial may speak for themselves:fn20

  Question. When did you last hear the voice speaking to you?

  Answer. Yesterday and today.

  Q. At what time did you hear it yesterday?

  A. I heard it three times: once in the morning, once at the hour of vespers, and the third time in the evening, at the hour of the Ave Maria. Very often I hear it more frequently than I tell you.

  Q. What were you doing when you heard it yesterday morning?

  A. I was asleep, and the voice woke me.

  Q. Did it wake you by touching your arm? [A curious question, for how could a voice touch an arm? Probably a trap to make her admit physical contact.]

  A. It woke me without touching me.

  Q. Was the voice in your room?

  A. I do not know. It was in the castle.

  Q. Did you not thank it and go down on your knees? [This rather suggests that her guards had been giving information, true or false, about her. What probably happened was that they presently saw her at her prayers.]

  A. I did thank it, but I was sitting up in my bed. I clasped my hands and prayed for advice. The voice told me to answer boldly. [She repeated this statement four times running about answering boldly.]

  Q. Did the voice not say certain things to you, before you prayed to it?

  A. Yes, but I did not understand them all. But when I was aroused from sleep it told me to answer boldly.fn21

  Q. Has the voice forbidden you to answer fully about everything you may be asked?

  A. I will not answer that. And I have had great revelations concerning the King which I will not tell you.

  Q. Has the voice forbidden you to tell these revelations?

  A. I have had no instructions. Give me fifteen days and I will answer.

  Q. Do you see anything accompanying the voice?

  A. I will not tell you all; I am not allowed to, nor does my oath apply to that.

  Q. Are the said saints (Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret] dressed alike?

  A. I will not tell you anything more about them now; I am not allowed to. If you do not believe me, go to Poitiers.

  Q. Are they of the same age?

  A. I am not allowed to say.

  Q. Which of them appeared to you first?

  A. I did not recognise them at once; I used to know which had appeared first, but I have forgotten; if I were allowed to tell you I would do so willingly. It is recorded in the register at Poitiers.