Q. What was Saint Michael like?
A. There is no answer for you about that as yet; I am not yet allowed to say.… I wish you had the copy of that book at Poitiers.
Q. How do you know that it is Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret who talk to you?
A. I have told you often enough that they are Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret – believe me if you like.
Q. Do you always see them in the same clothes?
A. I always see them in the same shape, their heads very richly crowned. I am allowed by our Lord to say this. I know nothing of their robes.
Q. In what shape [figuram] do you see them?
A. I see their faces.
Q. Have they any hair?
A. C’est hon à savoir. [Bonum est ad sciendum.]
Q. ls their hair long and hanging down?
A. I do not know. I do not know whether they have any arms or other members.
Q. If they had no members, how could they speak?
A. I refer that to God.
Q. Does Saint Margaret speak English?
A. Why should she speak English, as she is not on the English side?
Q. What did Saint Michael look like when he appeared to you?
A. I did not see any crown, and I know nothing about his garments.
Q. Was he naked?
A. Do you think our Lord has nothing to dress him in?
Q. Had he any hair?
A. Why should it have been cut off?
She said, however, of Saint Michael that ‘If estoit en la fourme d’un tres vray preud’homme,’ though she refused again to describe his clothes or anything else.fn22 They attacked her again about the age and apparel of Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, only to be told, ‘Vous estes respondus de ce que vous en aurez de moy, et n’en airés autre chose.’fn23 They tried another trap after that, asking her whether those two saints hated the English, but she was too clever for them: ‘Elles ayment ce que nostre Seigneur ayme, et haient ce que Dieu hait.’fn24 She could answer shrewdly, as well as boldly according to the saints’ command.
VI
By her insistence on the reality of her revelations she had already placed herself in the gravest danger: there were two other major points, among the host of minor ones, which the judges were never tired of pursuing. These were the questions of her masculine dress and of her submission to the Church. It is difficult to understand exactly why the doctors and jurists laid such stress upon her choice of clothes, until, towards the end of her trial, we come upon the explanation. At first it seems as though neither heresy nor sorcery could enter into it. It seems, indeed, hard to perceive what sin, crime!, or vice could possibly be concerned. No unnatural form of immorality was ever alleged against her, and the reason she gave for her virile garb was surely convincing enough to any rational mind: simply that she ran less danger of rape than if she went about dressed as a woman. Still, to the judges, it bulked as a question of the first importance. Jeanne herself, not having the key to the riddle, was puzzled by their insistence, for when asked if a man’s dress had been prescribed for her she replied contemptuously that dress was a small thing, among the smallest things.fn25 Unfortunately for her, no one else took this point of view. To the fifteenth-century mind, there was evidently something profoundly shocking in her choice; even the kind ladies of Beaurevoir, even the soft young Duchess of Bedford, had been distressed by it, and had done everything in their power to induce her to change her ways. Jeanne, in this respect as in many others, had passed into a practical reasonableness far beyond the scope of the fifteenth-century outlook. She had gone beyond: but to the jurists of Rouen it was still a point on which she could be badgered and bullied and persecuted out of all proportion; it was still a point where they could base their findings on the local laws of a Hebrew tribe. They went back to the Old Testament. They quoted Deuteronomy, chapter xxii: ‘The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God,’ quite forgetting that the next verse of the holy book passes on to a restriction as locally and topically practical as our modem Wild Birds’ Protection Act, which we find pinned up today in the porch of our village churches: ‘If a bird’s nest chance to be before thee in the way in any tree, or on the ground, whether they be young ones, or eggs, and the dam sitting upon the young or upon the eggs, thou shalt not take the dam with the young.’ They quoted the New Testament also, with especial regard to her cropped hair (capillos tonsos in rotundum), drawing Saint Paul into the argument: ‘Every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dis-honoureth her head: for that is even all one as if she were shaven.… Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering.’fn26 Still Jeanne stuck to the contention that God and His angels were alone responsible, being clearly determined not to put the blame on any living soul, least of all on the King. In her answers on this subject a note of patient exasperation is, I think, discernible. It is compatible also with her remark that clothes were of the least importance:
Q. The first time you saw your King, did he ask you if it was by revelation that you had altered your dress?
A. I have already answered that. In any case, I do not remember. It is written at Poitiers.
Q. Do you remember whether the examiners of the other party [i.e. Charles’ party] asked you about it?
A. I do not remember. They asked me where I had taken the man’s dress, and I told them, at Vaucouleurs.
Q. Did neither the King, nor the Queen, nor others of your party not sometimes require you to abandon it?
A. That has nothing to do with your case.fn27
She was not to be tricked into compromising ine King, the Queen, or any of her friends.
In spite of her irritation, however, she was prepared to be reasonable about the dress:
Q. Since you ask to hear Mass, would it not be more seemly [honestius] that you should hear it in woman’s clothes? Would you rather take woman’s clothes and hear Mass, or retain man’s clothes and not hear it?
A. Guarantee that I shall hear it if I dress as a woman, and then I will answer.
Cautious Jeanne! she had little faith in their insinuations. The examinerfn28 gave the required promise. It is easy to detect a note of mockery in her reply, when one remembers the ever-renewed arguments she had had with them over the taking of her oath: ‘And what would you say, ifl had sworn and promised our King not to abandon this dress? Nevertheless, I answer you: have a dress made for me reaching the ground, without a train, and give it to me to wear at Mass; then on my return, I will resume the one I have.’fn29
The offers came to nothing, though the point was being constantly revived.
VII
The question of her submission to the Church, which to our own way of thinking seems far more vital to the judges of an ecclesiastical court than the question whether she wore a skirt or breeches, was of course implicit throughout the whole of the trial, even though it appears to play a subordinate part in the interrogation, and was in fact not specifically mentioned until the trial had been going on for nearly four weeks. It was then (March 15th) that Cauchon and six others visited her in her prison, and asked her for the first time whether she would abide by the decision of the Church, as was her duty, should it be found that she had acted against the faith. She replied that her answers should be read by the clerks, and that she should then be told whether they contained anything opposed to the Christian faith, when she would lay the matter before her conseil, meaning her voices, and then would declare to them what the conseil had said.fn30 She did add that she would not persist in any opposition to the Christian faith as ordained by God, but it was evident that she was not giving the answers she ought to have given if she wished to save her life. She was, in fact, proving herself guilty of the major offence of adhering ‘steadfastly to the principle of privat
e judgment which was in conflict with the attitude of simple obedience exacted by the Church.’fn31
Father Thurston’s clear and authoritative words really summarise the whole matter. In setting the judgment of her voices, i.e. her own private source of revelation, above the judgment of those appointed as God’s representatives on earth, she was of course violating a major law of the Church. The Church Militant on earth permits no such direct appeal to the Church Triumphant in Heaven. By claiming to act under the direct guidance of Heaven, Jeanne was committing the unpardonable sin of short-circuiting the Bishop of Beauvais and all his colleagues. It was even apparent that she would, if given the chance, short-circuit the Pope himself, for, although she repeatedly asked to be led before him, she made it quite clear that, for all her veneration for His Holiness and his apostolic office, God alone would remain her authority in the last resort.
The first article of the Act of Accusation plainly sets forth the powers of the alarmed and resolute divines.
It is preceded by a formidable indictment. The jurists of the Inquisition and of the University of Paris certainly did their powers of invective justice on this occasion:
‘That the woman commonly named Jeanne la Pucelle … shall be denounced and declared as a sorceress, diviner, pseudo-prophetess, invoker of evil spirits, conspiratrix, superstitious, implicated in and given to the practice of magic, wrongheaded as to our Catholic faith, schismatic as to the article Unam Sanctam, etc.,fn32 and in several other articles of our faith sceptical and astray, sacrilegious, idolatrous, apostate, accursed and mischievous, blasphemous towards God and His saints, scandalous, seditious, disturber of peace, inciter of war, cruelly avid of human blood, inciting to bloodshed, having completely and shamelessly abandoned the decencies proper to her sex, and having immodestly adopted the dress and status of a man-at-arms; for that, and for other things abominable to God and men, a traitor to laws divine and natural and to the discipline of the Church, seductress of princes and the populace, having in contempt and disdain of God permitted herself to be venerated and adored, by giving her hands and her garments to be kissed, heretical, or at any rate vehemently suspected of heresy, for that she shall be punished and corrected according to divine and canonical laws.…’
Then follows the first article of the seventy which constitute the Act of Accusation. It expounds the authority of the Bishop of Beauvais to deal with offenders taken within his diocese, also of Lemaistre as Inquisitor of the Faith. Jeanne had already had the difference between the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant carefully explained to her, so that she could be under no misapprehension on that subject. Nevertheless her reply to the first article was given with her usual dauntless obstinacy:
‘She fully believes that our Holy Father the Pope of Rome, the bishops, and other churchmen are appointed to guard the Christian faith and to punish those who transgress it, but, so far as her own actions are concerned, she will submit herself only to the Church in Heaven – that is to say, to God, to the Virgin Mary, and to the saints who are in Paradise. And she believes firmly that she has not trans-gressed the faith, nor would she wish to do so.’fn33
VIII
Cauchon and his associates were hardly to be blamed for interpreting Jeanne’s attitude towards the Church and its supreme head as subversive and schismatic in the extreme. It was not their fault if they could not attain to the simplified plane of their tired young prisoner, who could still see the wood where they had never been able to see anything but the trees. The foreground of their vision was so bulkily occupied by the Church Militant and by the ordinances essential to its preservation, that the Church Triumphant, as a working factor, was almost entirely blocked from sight. They rendered due homage to it, in its sublime consummation, but in cases such as the present it could scarcely be allowed to play any part in practical politics. What Jeanne did not, and could not, or would not, realise, was that practical politics entered into such fundamental matters at all. To her, the whole thing was quite logical and simple: one obeyed the Church and observed its rulings in daily life and throughout the Christian year, but in deep matters of the soul the last word lay with God, who knew better than even His Holiness in Rome. Admittedly, she had had the advantage of exceptional direct instruction, and, having enjoyed that advantage, any other instruction must necessarily reach her at second hand.
The Bishop of Beauvais and his kindred could naturally not be expected to see it from that point of view. For one thing, they perhaps sincerely regarded Jeanne as an instrument of evil, and, even if they did not thus sincerely regard her, they must at least have regarded her as a bad and rebellious daughter of the Church to which she professed to belong. In which case she was striking at the very roots of their delegated authority. If she was allowed to get away with her contentions, she would be creating a most pernicious precedent. ‘If the prelates of the Church do not see to it, subversion of the whole authority of the Church may ensue; men and women may arise on every side, pretending to revelations from God or His angels, sowing lies, and errors, as we have experienced many times since this woman arose and began to scandalise Christian people and to promulgate her impostures.’fn34 Of course they were worried.Jeanne’s responses, cutting clean through all the safeguards of their orthodoxy, were the responses of a mind they could not deal with, save by the destruction of the body:
Q. Will you submit yourself in all your words and deeds, either good or evil, to the determination of our holy mother, the Church?
A. I love the Church, and would uphold it with all my strength for the Christian faith. It is not I who ought to be prevented from going to church or from hearing Mass!
The question being repeated, she held firm: ‘I refer myself to God who sent me, to Our Lady, and to all the blesséd saints in Paradise. As I see it, God and the Church are one and the same thing, and you ought not to make difficulties over that. Why do you make difficulties about it?’fn35
Q. Would you not consider yourselfbound to answer the Pope, Vicar of God, the whole truth on anything you might be asked on matters of faith or touching your conscience?
A. Take me to him, and I will answer anything I ought to answer.
The reservation cannot have pleased them: it meant that Pope or no Pope, she still intended to act according to her private judgment.
In the end, they took to threatening her. She would be burnt, they said, if she persisted in her heresy. She answered – and the clerk wrote the words Superba responsio in the margin of his manuscript – ‘I will say no more about that. Were I to see the fire, I would still say all that I have said, and would not do otherwise.’fn36
It may remain an open question whether they ever seriously considered taking her to Rome or not. Most probably not, even if the English would have allowed them to do so. They had accumulated ample evidence without going to that trouble and expense, and, on the last day of March, they made quite certain that she in no way intended to repudiate her previous undutiful assertions. ‘Would she obey the dictates of the Church on earth, they asked her for the last time? Her answers, as before, were unequivocal and clear: she will obey the Church, provided it does not command the impossible. She will never, for anything on earth, revoke the declarations she has made during the course of her trial about her visions and revelations. She will never, for anything on earth, obey the Church in the event of its commanding her to do anything contrary to the commandments which she says God has given her. She will refer always to God, were the Church to describe her revelations as illusory, diabolic, superstitious, or evil. She will submit herself to the Church Militant – that is to say to the Pope, the cardinals, archbishops, bishops and other clergy, but God must come first.fn37
Having received these answers, they retired to consider what now remained to be done about the trial as touching matters of faith.
IX
One very curious and suggestive incident remains to be recorded before the trial can be quickly taken through its stages towards its logical conclusion. Th
is incident concerns the sign given to the King. It is an incident not so very important in itself, but interesting if only for the light it throws on to a most unexpected and almost impish facet of Jeanne’s character. It is a facet which has revealed itself already once or twice in her brief history, a facet which shines like a brightly coloured jewel of imagination in the plain setting of her humorous common sense. For Jeanne was not, as a rule, an imaginative person. Even if we admit the theory that her visions and voices were entirely the product of the imagination, it was not of an imagination deliberately so employed by its owner; it was, rather, imposed upon her from without, and was not the outcome of any conscious effort on her part towards a flight of fancy. Over the sign given to the King, she seems to have let herself go. It seems as though, suddenly turned reckless, she had allowed herself deliberately to tease, confuse, and perplex the conscientious doctors. Were the subject not so solemn and serious, one might say that she had allowed herself to have a little fun with them – a sort of respite from the deadly routine of question and answer in the trial. It is the kind of fun one might imagine her having in her gay early mood at Poitiers; it is the more surprising when it makes its appearance within the grisly surroundings of Rouen. She becomes like a child telling a story to an open-mouthed circle of listeners, embroidering and embellishing as she goes.
Stated very briefly, Jeanne’s story was that an angel from Heaven had accompanied her on the occasion of her audience of the King, and had brought with him a crown finer than gold.
Her judges themselves had first put the idea into her mind. On March 1st they asked her whether she had seen a crown on the head of her King, when she first gave him the sign. This is the first mention of any such manifestation, and on this occasion there is no suggestion that the crown was brought by an angel. On February 27th, however, they had asked her whether there was an angel above the King’s head when first she saw him, and had received the scornful answer, ‘By our Lady, if there was one, I was unaware of it and did not see it.’ By March 10th her tone has completely changed: this time she says the sign was brought by an angel from God, and by no other; that she curtsied to him, went down on her knees, and took off her cap. The sign itself, she says, was beautiful, honourable, and credible; the best and richest that could be. It would last a thousand years, and more. She would give no more exact details; she would not say if it was of gold, of silver, or of precious stones; she would only say that no man could describe so rich a thing. But it was evident that she was already beginning to let her inventiveness go, on the suggestion so carelessly provided by her judges. By this time the parable of the angel, the crown, and the King was definitely forming in her mind. It is as though she said to herself, ‘They want to discover what I really said to the King, and what was the convincing sign I gave him: I cannot, in loyalty, tell these his enemies that I reassured him as to his legitimacy; but some story they are determined to have, and, en nom Dé, they shall have it.’ The story that she could tell them was assuming shape, and on March 13th she let them have it in all its elaborated splendour.
Saint Joan of Arc Page 32