Joan of Arc

by Castor, Helen

  They left her then. Another two weeks passed, of slow and grim recuperation. On 2 May, she was told to make herself ready to face the court once again, while, in the robing room near the castle’s great hall, Bishop Cauchon rose to make a preparatory address to an attentive and closely packed audience of sixty-four of his fellow clerics. The woman had been fully examined, he declared, and her confessions scrutinised by doctors of theology and of canon and civil law. For a long time it had been evident that she appeared to be at fault, but before a final decision could be taken, it was necessary to warn her, with love, of the ways in which she had departed from the true faith, and to attempt, with all gentleness, to secure her repentance. Many worthy experts had spoken to her in private, but the devil’s wiles had bested them. It was his hope that the public warning of this solemn assembly, given with love and kindness, might succeed where they had failed.

  Then Joan was brought in: thinner, paler, a quieter presence than at the start of this long ordeal. To deliver the loving admonition of the court, the bishop had nominated an archdeacon of Évreux named Jean de Châtillon, an aged theologian who now stood, stiffly, to address her. He began at the beginning: did she understand that all the faithful in Christ were required to maintain the articles of the Christian faith? ‘Read your book’, she said, with a nod at the manuscript in his hand, containing the schedule of charges on which he was about to expound, ‘and then I will answer you. I wait on God, my Creator, in everything. I love Him with all my heart.’

  And so de Châtillon embarked on his lecture. He explained the infallible authority of the Church militant; the perversion of wearing men’s clothes without being driven by necessity to do so, contrary to God’s commandment in the book of Deuteronomy; the falseness and presumption of her claims about her revelations; and the grave danger in which she stood because of her obstinate refusal to repent of her errors. Would she submit? She was no longer ill, but she was still weary, and still waiting for the rescue that would vindicate everything she had said. Now, her answers neither danced nor swerved. ‘I do believe that the Church militant cannot err or fail; but, as for my words and deeds, I lay them before God and refer in all things to Him, who had me do what I have done.’ Did she understand that, though the Church could not take a life, a convicted heretic would be punished with fire by other judges, those of the secular arm? ‘I will say nothing more to you about this. And if I saw the fire, I would say all that I am saying to you now, and would not act differently.’ Would she submit to the pope and cardinals, if they were here? ‘You will get nothing more from me on this.’

  Her resistance was impenetrable; only at the end did she raise her voice with scornful defiance. Would she submit, de Châtillon asked, to clerics of her own party, to the Church of Poitiers, if her apparitions were referred to them? ‘Do you think you can catch me like this and drag me towards you?’ He warned her again: did she truly understand that, if she did not submit, the Church would have no choice but to abandon her, leaving her soul to be consumed by the eternal fires of hell, her body by the fire of this world? This time, all the certainty of her mission was distilled into each word of her response. ‘You will not do what you are saying against me’, she said evenly, ‘without evil seizing upon you, body and soul.’ Other learned voices joined in the chorus of warning and entreaty, until at last Bishop Cauchon himself spoke, telling her how carefully she must consider this wise advice. ‘Within what time shall I decide?’ she asked. She must make up her mind now, the bishop said. But Joan did not reply, and the guards led her back to her cell.

  It was another week, but when she saw her judge and tormenter again, everything was different. On 9 May, when Joan was escorted into an unfamiliar room in the great tower of the castle, the bishop was there to greet her, along with ten of his colleagues, including the elderly figure of Jean de Châtillon. With them were other men, their faces blank, and by their sides various tools of worked metal with teeth and blades and pincers. Bishop Cauchon had offered up the best and most magnanimous demonstration of Christian love he was capable of choreographing, and she had refused to respond. Now, it seemed, he had decided to try the opposite of kindness.

  She had been shown the proof of her errors many times, the bishop told her sternly, and in response she had lied and lied again, and denied the truth despite the efforts of many learned scholars to teach and advise her. She left them no choice but to put her to the torture, in order to lead her back to the path of righteousness for the good of her soul and body which she had exposed to so much danger. She looked, steadily, at these instruments of pious violence, and at the silent men whose task it was to inflict pain in the name of God. ‘In truth’, she said at last, ‘if you were to have me torn limb from limb and my soul separated from my body, I still won’t tell you anything more. And if I did tell you anything else about this, afterwards I would always say that you had made me say it by force.’

  This was not, she could see, what the bishop wanted to hear. Fear, yes, and self-doubt in the face of the implacable authority of the Church militant. But not implacable certainty in return. She spoke again. A few days earlier, she had received great comfort from the archangel Gabriel; she was sure it was St Gabriel because her voices had told her it was so. She had asked her voices whether she would be burned, and they had said that God would help her. Cauchon was quiet; then a look at his associates, and a few whispered words. If they could not break her will, then breaking her body might do more harm than good to the progress and the reputation of this most carefully conducted and publicly scrutinised trial. A wave of the episcopal hand, and the session was over.

  This time, she had two weeks to wait. Every day that passed, while Cauchon and his advisers deliberated elsewhere in the castle, made it less likely that she would be recalled to that chamber of horrors. But every day that passed was also a day when heaven’s help had not yet brought her rescue. Finally, on 23 May, she was taken from her cell, not to the tower room, nor to the robing chamber where the plenary hearings were held, but to another room near her prison. There the bishop sat in state, the vice-inquisitor Jean le Maistre beside him. Around these two judges were assembled nine theologians and canon and civil lawyers, as well as priests belonging to Rouen’s cathedral. This would not be just another day in the trial; this was its culmination.

  Joan had been asked many questions, and she had given many answers. On that basis, the court could already have proceeded to judgement. But over the past two weeks, Bishop Cauchon explained, he had deemed it expedient to consult one further eminent authority: the university of Paris, and in particular its faculties of theology and canon law. Now, with the benefit of their conclusions, the learned theologian Pierre Maurice would explain once more the position of Holy Mother Church. Maurice was a younger man, not yet forty, whose own brilliant studies at the university were not long behind him, and his address, it soon became clear, had been prepared with erudition and elan.

  Point by point, he moved through the twelve articles of accusation, demonstrating in each case Joan’s transgression. Either her voices and visions were stories she had invented, or, if she had truly heard and seen them, they were diabolical in origin. If the latter, then not only had she believed in them too rashly, but her reverence for them made her an idolater and an invoker of demons. Her sign of the angel bringing her king a golden crown was ‘not plausible’, he declared, ‘but a presumptuous, misleading and pernicious falsehood, a fabricated matter that diminishes the dignity of angels’. Her claim to know of things to come was an empty boast, full of superstition and divination. Her insistence on wearing men’s clothes, against nature, God and the authority of the Church, implicated her in blasphemy, idolatry and transgression of the faith. She had encouraged tyranny and bloodshed. In leaving home without her parents’ permission she had broken God’s command to honour her father and mother. Her claims about her saints’ enmity towards the English and Burgundians were blasphemous, and a violation of the commandment that she should love her neig
hbour. Her leap from the tower at Beaurevoir showed her sin in risking suicide, and her presumption in claiming to know that she was forgiven. Above all else, there could be no doubt that she was schismatic and apostate, since, by refusing to submit to the judgement of God’s Church on earth, she had withdrawn herself from the community of the faithful.

  ‘Joan, dearest friend,’ – the man’s voice was full of sorrow – ‘now it is time, at the end of your trial, to think carefully about what has been said.’ Her judges begged her, he said, they urged and warned her in the name of Christ to return to the path of truth by offering her obedience to His Church. ‘By so doing, you will save your soul and, I believe, redeem your body from death. But if you do not do this, and if you persist, know that your soul will be utterly damned, and I fear the destruction of your body. From such a fate may Jesus Christ preserve you.’ At last, Maurice stepped back. All eyes turned to Joan. She raised her head. What more could she say? ‘As for my words and deeds that I spoke of in the trial, I refer to them and wish to stand by them.’ The question came again: would she not submit? ‘I will maintain what I always said during the trial.’ If she saw the fire burning, with wood prepared for the pyre, if she saw the executioner with the torch in his hands, if she herself were in the fire, still, still she would say nothing else, even until death. A moment passed. Then Bishop Cauchon consulted the schedule in his hands, and declared the trial at an end. Tomorrow, she would face her sentence.

  The next morning, Joan was taken from the castle to the abbey of Saint-Ouen in the centre of the city, where a scaffold had been built in the open space of the cemetery, upon which she would stand to hear her sentence publicly pronounced. The bishop and the vice-inquisitor were there, and with them an august figure swathed in the red robes of a cardinal: Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, cardinal of England, great-uncle of the child-king, and head of the royal council in English France, a prince of Church and state together. A great gathering of churchmen clustered around them; Joan could see the young orator Pierre Maurice, the venerable Jean de Châtillon, and Jean Beaupère, who had questioned her at the start of the trial all those weeks ago. Below her, at the scaffold’s foot, the entire city, it seemed, was elbowing and jostling for a better view of the infamous Armagnac whore. But Joan fixed her gaze on the filigree spires of the abbey church, reaching high into the sky that she had hardly seen during the twelve months of her imprisonment.

  She was waiting for the help she had been promised, and that she knew would come. Now she saw one of the clerics stepping forward to deliver a sermon, struggling to make himself heard over the noise of the heaving crowd. There was still time. ‘The branch cannot bear fruit of itself’, he intoned, ‘unless it remain in the vine.’ His gospel text told of the true vine of Holy Mother Church, planted by Christ’s right hand, and of the withering of those who – like Joan – cut themselves off from its divine sustenance. And now he was talking directly to her, imploring her once again to submit. She had answered so often already, but, out here in the dancing air, she needed more time, so she spoke again. All that she had said and done had been at God’s command. She raised her voice. After God, she would yield to the Holy Father in Rome. Let everything be reported to him for judgement; that was her submission.

  The judges muttered behind their hands. She had said twice before, at points in the trial when they had pressed her hard on the question of obedience to the Church, that she wished her case to be heard by the pope, but then it had been part of the cat-and-mouse game of question and answer. (Would she submit to her lord the pope? ‘Take me to him and I’ll answer him.’) Now, this was evasion of a different kind: a public appeal to Rome as an attempt to stop this moment in its tracks. It could not be allowed, not only because, at a stroke, it would sweep aside the authority of the court that had spent almost five months hearing her case with all possible diligence, but also – and here Cauchon was acutely aware of Cardinal Beaufort’s imposing presence at his side – because the English would never allow the prisoner to be removed from their keeping. After a moment, the bishop spoke. Her answer was not a sufficient submission. The pope was too far away to be consulted; her judges were here, and she must accept the authority of Holy Mother Church that they represented. Three times he repeated his warning. She did not speak again. Cauchon shuffled the documents in his hand, and began to read the final sentence.

  Joan stood, bound and immobilised. She listened as the bishop declared that her obduracy left the Church no choice but to abandon her to the secular power – the English guards surrounding her, and the executioner with his cart standing by – to be burned alive in purifying fire. Heaven’s help was coming, she had been certain. But there was no more time. She spoke. Cauchon hesitated, and a hush stilled the crowd. She spoke again. She wished to obey the Church and her judges. They had said that her visions should not be believed, so she would not uphold them. She said it urgently, over and over. She wished to submit.

  There was uproar. As the crowd howled, the bishop stood for a moment, then spoke to the cardinal, who nodded. Cauchon gestured to Jean Massieu, the executor of the court, who stepped forward with a document, a statement of abjuration, which he read aloud. Did she confess her grievous sins – here itemised again in all their wretchedness – and did she renounce her crimes, never to return to them? She did, and, as the court required, she would swear to it by almighty God and His holy gospels. Massieu brought her the text, a quill in his other hand, and, haltingly, she marked the page to sign her submission.

  It was a different sentence that Bishop Cauchon was now called upon to deliver. He had thought to preside over the condemnation of a heretic, but, at the eleventh hour, the devil’s grasp on the girl had loosened. Now, shouting over the waves of noise, he described again the wickedness of her crimes and the care with which her case had been considered by her judges. At last, with God’s help, she had recanted her error with a contrite heart and unfeigned faith. She would be welcomed back into the bosom of Holy Mother Church, and, according to this final sentence of the court, she would live out her days in the penance of perpetual imprisonment, eating the bread of sorrow and drinking the water of affliction as she wept for her sin.

  Joan was bundled away. Some hours passed before the vice-inquisitor came to her cell, attended, as always, by an escort of learned clerics. She must be grateful, they said, for the grace of God and the mercy of His Church in receiving her into their embrace. She must submit to the sentence of imprisonment with humble obedience, and never, on any account, return to the invented stories she had previously told. And now, as the Church had commanded, she must lay aside the shameful clothing she wore. A dress was proffered; she put it on at once, taking off the doublet, tunic and hose to which she had clung for so long. Then she bowed her neck for the shaving of her head. As the priests watched, her dark hair – which, dirty and grown though it was, had still recognisably been cut short and round over her ears in the manner of a fashionable young man – fell lock by lock to the floor.

  At last, it was over. Many people were filled with rage, Bishop Cauchon knew, at the thought that the slut of the Armagnacs had escaped the fire. But he was a shepherd to his flock, and he had saved a soul for Christ. Her guilt had never seriously been in doubt, but he had drawn it out into public view, step by step, with all the rigour of which he was capable. Many of the English lords – whom she had insulted, threatened and defied, and whose soldiers’ blood she had spilled – had wanted her dead. But the bishop could reflect with satisfaction upon the fact that the great cardinal of England had stood with him to receive her recantation. She had publicly abjured her wicked claim of God’s support for the so-called dauphin and the false French who dared to follow him. Now, the girl who had seemed to perform miracles would rot in an English jail for the rest of her life, in abject contemplation of the sins she had committed.

  Three days later, the bishop received word that his presence was required once more at the castle. The next morning, 28 May, he and Jean le
Maistre, with an escort of clerics and guards, were shown to Joan’s cell. The black stubble of her shorn hair was rough upon her scalp, and she appeared agitated, but for a moment they saw nothing except her clothes. Why, Cauchon asked, was she dressed as a man, when she had promised and sworn never to do so again? When she spoke, her answers raced and tumbled, slipping and sliding from one to the next. She preferred these clothes, she said, to a woman’s dress. She had not understood that she was taking an oath not to wear such garments again. It was more suitable, she thought, to wear men’s clothes since she was forced to live among men. She had put them back on because the promise that she might go to mass and be freed from her shackles had not been kept. She would rather die than be bound in irons, but if she could go to mass, and her shackles could be removed, and if she were placed in a more gracious prison, with female company, then she would be good and do what the Church wanted.

  There was a pause. Had she, the judges asked, heard the voices of St Catherine and St Margaret in the four days that had passed since her abjuration in the abbey cemetery? She nodded. What had they said? This time her distress was clear in every thread she pulled from the tangled bundle of her thoughts. Her voices said that she had damned her soul to save her life. Before, they had said she should speak boldly on the platform. The preacher at Saint-Ouen had accused her falsely. If she said God had not sent her, she would be damned, because she had truly been sent by God. She had not meant to deny her visions. Her recantation was utterly false. Everything she had done on the scaffold was from fear of the fire. Then what, Cauchon asked, was the truth about her voices, and about the angel with the golden crown? ‘I told you the truth about everything in the trial, as best I knew how.’ She would rather do penance once and for all by dying than suffer prison any longer. She had understood nothing in the words of her abjuration, and she had done nothing against God. She would put on women’s clothes if the judges wanted, but she would do nothing else.