Joan of Arc

by Castor, Helen

  They left her alone then. The next day, Cauchon and le Maistre called a meeting of their advisers and assessors – nearly forty clerics in all – in the chapel of the city’s episcopal palace. There, the bishop rehearsed what had happened: her sentence, her recantation, and the disturbing events of the previous day. One by one, scholarly voices spoke. All offered counsel of one kind or another; some suggested that one final attempt be made to redeem her immortal soul. But every conclusion was the same. Joan was a relapsed heretic, and, as such, she must be abandoned by the Church.

  Early the following morning, while finishing touches were put to the pyre and platform in the city’s old market square, a last deputation filed into the prisoner’s cell. It was Pierre Maurice who took the lead. Her life was beyond hope, he said, on this, the day of her death, but the salvation of her soul was still within reach. He would ask, and she must answer. Had she truly heard voices and seen visions? Today, her distress was quieter, more contained. When she spoke, it was without defiance. Her apparitions were real, she said. ‘Whether they are good or evil spirits, they appeared to me.’ She heard her voices most of all when the church bells rang for matins in the morning and compline in the evening. (It was sometimes the case, Maurice told her gently, that people heard the ringing of bells and believed they could make out words within the sound.) And truly, she had seen visions: her angels had come to her in a great multitude, in the smallest dimension, as the tiniest things. What of the angel who had brought her king a golden crown? A small silence. There was no angel, she said. She herself was the angel, and the crown was her promise that she would take him to his coronation.

  The door opened again: her judges had come. It was Bishop Cauchon who spoke. Her voices had always promised her that she would be freed. They had deceived her, had they not? Another moment. Yes, she said. She had been deceived. Whether they were good or evil, Mother Church must decide. It was enough; time was running out. A friar named Brother Martin stepped forward, at a gesture from the bishop, to hear the prisoner’s confession and – as she had wanted for so long – to administer the sacrament of the Eucharist.

  The hour was at hand. She was led from her cell to a waiting cart, which jolted through the crowded streets to the market square. There was a sea of people, the morning light catching buckles and blades as English soldiers moved among them. She saw the bishop, the vice-inquisitor, the great cardinal, the clerics and lords, their faces turned, watching intently as she was helped onto the scaffold. Brother Martin murmured beside her, his task to be her last adviser and friend, but she knew the condemned could expect little dignity; onto her shaven head, before she left the castle, they had shoved a cap bearing the words ‘relapsed heretic, apostate, idolater’. She must endure another sermon, from a different cleric this time, preaching on a different text. ‘If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it,’ St Paul had written. And then, once again, Bishop Cauchon recited the litany of her sin. Joan, known as the Maid, was guilty of schism, idolatry, the invocation of demons, and many other crimes. She had abjured her heresy, and the bosom of Holy Mother Church had opened to her once more, but she had returned to her sin, like a dog (said the Book of Proverbs) returning to its vomit. To contain her deadly infection, she must be divided from the body of the Church. From this moment, she belonged to the justice of the secular power.

  The executioner was there. English soldiers held her slight figure as she was bound to the wooden stake high above the waiting crowd. Her lips moved in restless, ceaseless prayer. Now the air was shifting: a snapping in the ears; a catch of smoke in the throat. Her voice was high and urgent. ‘Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.’ The fire burned.

  PART THREE

  After

  11

  Those who called themselves Frenchmen

  The duke of Bedford had not been in Rouen to watch the Maid die. His wife had overseen the formal examination of the girl’s virginity when the trial began in January, but a few days later the duke and duchess had ridden out of the city, leaving his uncle, the cardinal, to supervise the progress of Bishop Cauchon’s conscientious work. At the end of the month Bedford had arrived in Paris to a hero’s welcome: he brought with him a convoy of around seventy boats and barges packed with supplies, all of which he had shepherded up the Seine from Rouen through lashing winds and torrential rain, dodging Armagnac ambushes along the way. By the beginning of June, in more clement weather, he was back in the field outside the capital when news finally arrived that the Armagnac whore had paid for her crimes with her life.

  That breathless messenger was followed, over the next weeks and months, by a stream of documents. There was a letter in Latin addressed, in the name of nine-year-old King Henry, to the Holy Roman Emperor and all other kings, dukes and Christian princes of Europe, and another, in French, to the lords spiritual and temporal of France and to the cities of this most Christian kingdom. Both missives recounted the outrageous heresies of the ‘woman whom the common people called the Maid’, and sketched the events of the trial that had been conducted by Holy Mother Church ‘with great solemnity and honourable dignity, to the honour of God and the wholesome edification of the people’. It was the need for such edification, in fact, which had moved the king (or, at least, his voice as ventriloquised by his noble council) to proclaim the news so widely. Since tales of the woman’s exploits had spread ‘almost to the entire world’, it was necessary that her just punishment be published in the same way, to warn the faithful of the dangers of false prophets.

  The prelates, nobles and cities of English France were required by this royal letter to arrange that sermons should be preached so that the common people should know the truth – and in Paris on 4 July the inquisitor of France himself, Jean Graverent, addressed a great crowd at the abbey of Saint-Martin-des-Champs about the trial over which he had been unable to preside in person. He spoke so authoritatively that the journal-writer in the city noted down his dramatic account of the three demons who had appeared to the woman Joan in the forms of St Michael, St Catherine and St Margaret, only to abandon her utterly at the last. But the tale Graverent told was already familiar to the inhabitants of Paris, complete with grim details of the Maid’s fate that had raced along the road to the capital from Rouen. After she had taken her last breath, the journal-writer reported, and her clothes were all burned away, the executioner had raked back the fire to expose her charred and naked body, still bound as it was to the stake, so that the people could see beyond any doubt that she was truly a woman. Then, when they had stared enough, he had stoked the flames higher and higher, until her flesh and bones were nothing but ashes. His masters, he knew, would not thank him for leaving fragments of the corpse to be retrieved as holy relics by deluded fools.

  In the battle to eradicate such spiritual contagion, there was more work to be done. As soon as the trial was over, Bishop Cauchon had entrusted one vital task to the notary Guillaume Manchon and to Thomas de Courcelles, a theologian who had attended many of the sessions. The notaries had recorded the interrogations, day by day, in the French in which they were conducted. Now, Manchon and de Courcelles were to produce a Latin translation of these minutes as an official transcript of the proceedings. With this text, they were to gather all the correspondence, from the bishop, the university of Paris and the king, by means of which the trial process had been established, and they were to append witness statements from the clerics who had spoken to the prisoner on the morning of her death – a pastoral visit after the end of the formal trial, which had therefore gone undocumented by the notaries – as well as the public letters in which the king announced her execution. Then they were to transcribe this composite narrative into a register and make five official copies, to be signed by the notaries and bearing the judges’ seals. And then this detailed record of the trial, written in the Latin that was the lingua franca of Church and state throughout Europe, would stand as an open testament to the diligence of the judges and the enormity of the girl’s heresy.

  Manc
hon and de Courcelles worked as quickly as they could, but there was no doubting the urgency of their assignment. It was essential that the rumours sweeping the continent should be corrected at the earliest possible opportunity. Reports reaching Venice from Bruges in the first half of July, for example, alleged that St Catherine had appeared to the Maid just before her death. ‘Daughter of God,’ the saint had said, ‘be secure in your faith, for you will be numbered among the virgins in the glory of Paradise!’ Meanwhile, the Armagnac king, the Venetians were assured, was stricken with grief, and had sworn to wreak terrible vengeance on the English.

  But this was gossip running wild on the subject of the court at Chinon as well as the court of heaven. From the lips of King Charles, there came no comment on events in Rouen. His enemies had not dignified Joan with a public response while she was winning battles against them; it was not until her capture and execution had confirmed the self-evident truth that God was not an Armagnac that a torrent of their words told the world what she truly was. And, between the lines of each sermon, letter and transcript, the weight of one further conclusion could be felt: that the taint of the Maid’s heresy hung heavy on the false king for whom she had fought. Of course, King Charles himself knew that idea to be a ludicrous misapprehension. The archbishop of Reims had already made clear the position of the Armagnac court: Joan’s regrettable pride and wilfulness had caused her fall, but her faults could not detract from God’s blessing upon her king, as embodied in the holy oil that had touched his brow during the sacred ceremony of his coronation. Nothing more need be said; and, from Chinon, the rest was an echoing silence.

  In any case, as the archbishop had told the king’s faithful subjects, another envoy from God was presently riding with the Armagnac forces. William the Shepherd, they called him, this boy who could hardly have been less like the Maid: full of wondering innocence, he rode side-saddle on his horse, his holiness made manifest by the bloody stigmata on his hands, feet and side. That August, the Shepherd was with the captain Poton de Xaintrailles when they chased after some English outriders who had dared to approach the walls of Beauvais. Too late, they realised it was an ambush laid by the earls of Arundel and Warwick. And, as the soldier and the boy disappeared into English custody, the silence from Chinon deepened.

  The summer was not going well. The autumn, it transpired, was worse. In October 1431, the town of Louviers – a vital staging-post on the Seine between Rouen and Paris, which had been captured by La Hire while Joan was struggling in the mud outside La Charité – fell to an English siege. The mighty Château Gaillard was already back in English hands, and, as a result of these two Armagnac losses, the route along the river from the seat of English government in Rouen to the kingdom’s capital now lay open once again. For the duke of Bedford and his uncle the cardinal, there was no time to lose: at long last, eighteen months after his arrival in France, the young King Henry could safely grace Paris with his presence.

  On Advent Sunday, 2 December, the boy rode into the city to a rapturous welcome. The guilds took it in turns to hold over his head an azure-blue canopy starred with golden fleurs-de-lis – first the drapers, then the grocers, the money-changers, the goldsmiths, the mercers, the furriers and the butchers – while cries of ‘Noël!’ warmed the freezing air. Ingenious pageants were presented at every turn: the beheading of the glorious martyr St Denis, the hunting of a stag in a small wood, and then, at the Châtelet, a doppelgänger of the king himself decked out in scarlet and fur, surrounded by the lords of England and France, with the two crowns of his twin kingdoms glittering above. At the window of the Hôtel Saint-Pol the dowager Queen Isabeau, with tears in her eyes, bowed to the royal grandson she had never met. And at the back of this stately parade, wretched and bound with rope like a common thief, came the holy fool William the Shepherd, now abandoned, it seemed, by his God. The simpleton was not seen again; rumour had it that he was dumped in the Seine and left to drown once the celebrations were over.

  Two weeks later, another great procession assembled on the Île de la Cité to accompany the king on the short walk from his royal palace to the cathedral of Notre-Dame. In the vast splendour of the church, a flight of steps broad enough for ten men to stand abreast rose to a newly built platform that led into the choir. There, as heavenly music soared to the vaults above, King Henry VI of England was anointed and crowned King Henry II of France. Notre-Dame was not Reims, and the balm on the boy’s royal head was not the holy oil of Clovis – but that could not be helped, since both were in the hands of the usurping Armagnacs. Still, the ancient regalia of the most Christian kingdom had been brought from Saint-Denis, and now the young king received them solemnly from his great-uncle, Cardinal Beaufort, who pronounced God’s blessing on his sovereign. After the ceremony the company returned to the palace for a feast, its courses punctuated by elaborately sculpted sugar ‘subtleties’, one an image of the Virgin with the child-king of heaven, another a golden fleur-de-lis carried by two angels and topped with a shining crown. And there, among the lords of Church and state who drank the health of their newly consecrated monarch, was the gratified figure of Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais.

  And yet, among the smiles and the celebrations, there were signs that all was not quite as it should be in the kingdom of English France. The bishop of Paris did not appreciate being elbowed aside by the English cardinal for a coronation in his own cathedral, and there was a spat between the officers of the king’s household and the canons of Notre-Dame over who should keep the silver-gilt cup in which the wine had been offered at mass. The Parisian journal-writer, meanwhile, was scathing about the incompetence with which the English had organised the feast, and how dreadful the food had been. ‘Truly,’ he wrote, ‘no one could find a good word to say about it’; and the half-hearted tournament held the day after the ceremony was similarly underwhelming. ‘Really, many a time a citizen of Paris marrying off his child has done more for tradespeople, for goldsmiths, goldbeaters, all the luxury trades, than the king’s consecration now did, or his tournament or all his Englishmen. But probably it is because we don’t understand what they say and they don’t understand us …’

  This mutual incomprehension was hardly improved when the royal party hurried away from Paris only ten days after the coronation, back through flurries of snow and freezing rain to Rouen, then Calais and England. And with the king’s departure from France, all eyes turned to the greatest of his French subjects. Philip of Burgundy had been present in Paris in the proxy form of an actor, bending his knee to his sovereign in the tableau at the Châtelet, but at the coronation the duke himself was nowhere to be seen. It was true that he had been much occupied during the previous eighteen months with the practical challenges of war. Despite the triumph of the Maid’s capture, Compiègne had not fallen to the Burgundians in 1430, a failure which the duke angrily blamed on inadequate funding by the English. By that autumn, however, it was clear that Burgundian interests in the Low Countries – where he had just added the duchy of Brabant to his control of Hainaut, Holland and Zeeland – were reclaiming the duke’s attention, and observers could not help noticing that his absence from the French capital in December 1431 meant that he was called upon to swear no personal oath of fealty to the young king. Not only that but, more than a hundred miles north in his Flemish town of Lille, he was occupied instead in negotiating a new six-year truce with the Armagnac enemy.

  The meteoric moment of the Maid’s career – her blazing rise and her dying fall – had briefly hardened the divisions between the two rival kingdoms of France, strengthening the Armagnac position while driving the duke of Burgundy into a closer embrace with the English. Thanks to Joan and the momentum of her mission, both kings had been anointed and crowned; but, now that she was gone, old fault-lines in the political landscape were beginning to open up once again. With every month that passed, the duke of Burgundy’s gaze was more obviously fixed on the horizon to the north and east, where his new Burgundian state was emerging into independent b
eing. And the dawning realisation that his policy would be shaped by whatever best served the interests of that autonomous power-bloc left the loyal French subjects of King Henry increasingly uneasy about what the future might hold.

  The brittleness of English France was made disquietingly apparent in a series of conspiracies in 1432 that shook the English hold on Rouen, Argentan and Pontoise, and succeeded – through an improvised Trojan horse of soldiers hidden in barrels by turncoat merchants – in delivering Chartres to the Armagnacs. That summer, the duke of Bedford’s satisfaction at retrieving the reins of power from the departed Cardinal Beaufort was cut short by his failure to take Lagny-sur-Marne, to the east of the capital, where the Maid had fought before her fateful move to defend Compiègne. Bedford’s siege – conducted in a punishing heatwave that had followed the biting winter – had to be lifted in August after the Bastard of Orléans, Raoul de Gaucourt and Gilles de Rais led their troops in a slick manoeuvre to rescue the hard-pressed garrison and thereby maintain the military pressure on Paris. And the autumn, when it came, brought Bedford a body-blow that combined personal tragedy with political disaster.

  Plague had been raging in Paris for weeks, and the spectacular luxury of the duke’s home in the capital proved no defence against its ravages. In the early hours of the morning on Friday 14 November, his wife Anne succumbed to the epidemic, at the age of just twenty-eight. She was ‘the most delightful of all the ladies then in France’, lamented the journal-writer, and ‘much loved by the people of Paris’. Bedford had loved her too, and so had her brother of Burgundy; and, once she was gone, the remaining bonds of loyalty that tethered the Burgundian duke within the fold of English France began to fray and loosen. She was buried in the church of the Celestines in the east of the city, English singers weaving melodies in haunting counterpoint as her body was lowered into the grave, ‘… and with her died most of the hope that Paris had’, the journal-writer said, ‘though it had to be endured’.