Joan of Arc

by Helen Castor

  Suddenly the room was still. The moment lengthened. What had she said? It was the voice of St Catherine and St Margaret. Their forms were crowned with precious diadems. ‘And I have leave from the Lord about this. If you doubt it, send to Poitiers where I was interrogated another time.’ Now, the questions came tumbling one after the other. How did she know there were two saints? How did she know who they were? Were they dressed in the same cloth? Were they the same age? Which one came to her first? Again, the answers danced away. She knew very well who they were, and they had told her their names. ‘I will tell you nothing else now; I don’t have permission to reveal it.’ But then: she had received comfort first of all from St Michael. Another silence. Had much time passed since she first heard the archangel’s voice? ‘I do not name the voice of St Michael to you, I speak rather of great comfort.’ But still, she had seen him surrounded by angels from heaven. Had she seen the saint and the angels bodily, and really? ‘I saw them with my bodily eyes, just as well as I see you; and when they left me, I wept and truly wished they had taken me with them.’

  Beaupère’s mind was racing. At last, this was progress. He knew, like all the men in the room who had studied the two-hundred-year-old writings of the saintly scholar Thomas Aquinas, that angels were beings of the spirit, capable of assuming bodily form when they appeared before humans, but not truly corporeal by nature. It was clear that the warrior St Michael might show himself on earth, and the virgin martyrs Catherine and Margaret too, but, if Joan had really seen them, she would need to prove it by describing the true essence of their angelic and saintly selves – and ‘real’ bodies would give the lie to her claims. Not only that, but the saints would surely have given her a sign through which she could convince others of the truth of their revelations. This, out loud: did she have a sign? ‘I’ve told you often enough that they are St Catherine and St Margaret: believe me if you wish.’

  That would do for now; there was much more to ask. A good inquisitor, he knew, should expose the untruths and contradictions in a heretic’s answers by changing tack, doubling back, feinting and repeating. Had she been commanded to wear men’s clothes? It was a small matter, she said, one of the least. In any case, ‘all that I have done is by the Lord’s command’. Why had her king believed her? The clergy at Poitiers had questioned her for three weeks, and, besides, he had a sign. Her weapons: Beaupère knew the story of the sword for which she had sent to the church in Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, and of the silken banner that she carried into battle. Her voices had told her the sword could be found at the altar there, she said, but she much preferred her banner, which she carried in order to avoid killing anyone; she never did take anyone’s life. And the battles themselves? She had known she would raise the siege at Orléans, and she had known she would be wounded there, when an arrow grazed her neck: St Catherine and St Margaret had told her so. Sorcery and superstition were the words in Beaupère’s mind when he talked of special weapons, talismans and foreknowledge of the future. Sorcery and superstition: words worth pursuing in days to come.

  Sure enough, when the court reconvened two days later, she was asked again about the fairy tree, and about mandrake roots and healing rings. But she dismissed them all. More difficult – and here the quiet of the room took on a particular intensity – were the questions about her saints. In what shape did she see them? Faces, richly crowned. How did they speak if they had no other parts of the body? ‘I leave that to God.’ They spoke French, she said. But did St Margaret not speak English? ‘Why would she speak English, when she is not on the English side?’ Answering questions with questions served her for a while, but the tactic could not be sustained forever, and when it came to the subject of the sign she had given her king to prove that she was sent by God, she resorted to flat refusal. ‘I have always told you that you will not drag that out of me. Go ask him.’

  The last day of public interrogation was a long one. Beaupère took her through her journey from Troyes to Reims to Lagny, to her encounters with the preacher Brother Richard and the woman Catherine de La Rochelle who claimed to see visions from God. (Joan had stayed up all night watching for the ‘white lady’ the woman pretended to see, but – as St Catherine and St Margaret had already told her – it was foolish nonsense.) He spoke of her saints, and her clothes, and her failure to enter La Charité despite God’s command. (‘Who told you I was commanded so by God?’) And he talked of her leap from the tower in which she had been imprisoned at Jean de Luxembourg’s castle of Beaurevoir. Her voices had told her not to do it, she said, but she had preferred to deliver her soul to God than fall into the hands of the English, so she had commended herself to God and the Virgin, and jumped.

  With that, Bishop Cauchon declared that the record of her responses would be studied, and notes made of subjects on which more questioning was required. It took a week; then Joan learned that her inquisitors – or a small group of them, led by the bishop himself and the examiner Jean de La Fontaine – would visit her in the confined space of her cell. There, like Beaupère before him, de La Fontaine wove webs with his questions, moving lightly from topic to topic, retreating and returning as he sought to expose what might be erroneous in her thinking. And at the heart of this interrogation, it soon became clear, was the sign that had convinced her king of the truth of her mission.

  Of this sign, she had always claimed she was forbidden to speak. Now, closed within the four walls of her prison, she no longer stood before an intent audience of dozens of clerics. Still, she responded boldly – as her voices instructed, she had always said – to the eight men who now faced her. But, little by little, the pressure began to tell. Why would she not reveal her sign, de La Fontaine asked, given that she herself had demanded to know the sign of Catherine de La Rochelle? She would not have done so, she said, if it had already been shown, as her own sign had been, to many bishops and lords – the archbishop of Reims, the count of Clermont, the lord de La Trémoille and the duke of Alençon among them. The sign was a physical thing, then, perhaps, if it could be shown to the king’s noble advisers: did it still exist? It would last, she declared, for a thousand years and more – and it lay even now in her king’s treasury. Was it gold or silver, a precious stone or a crown? ‘I won’t tell you anything else about it. No one could describe a thing as rich as the sign is.’ Then a flash of the familiar defiance. ‘And in any case, the sign you need is that God will deliver me from your hands, and it is the most certain one He could send you.’ Had her sign come from God? An angel of God had brought it to her king, she said, and she thanked Him for it many times.

  They were getting close. The next time they entered her cell, she told them that this angel – the same one, she said, who always came to her, and never failed her – had directed the king to put her to work. What was the sign the angel brought? That was a subject upon which she would consult St Catherine. And then the next day they pressed her again, and at last, in staccato bursts punctuated by the prompting of their questions, she offered up her story. At Chinon after Easter in 1429, an angel had brought her king a crown of pure gold, its richness unfathomable, wrought so finely that no goldsmith in the world could have made it. The heavenly being had bowed before the king, and Joan could see – though the others present could not – that he was attended by myriad other angels, some with wings, some with crowns, and among them were her own beloved saints, Catherine and Margaret. ‘Sire, here is your sign; take it,’ Joan had said. And the crown signified, the angel declared, that the king would have his kingdom of France with God’s help, if he would give Joan soldiers and put her to work. The angel gave the crown to the archbishop of Reims, who gave it to the king. And why had all this happened to her, instead of someone else? Because it pleased God, she said, to drive back the king’s enemies by means of a simple maid.

  At last, they had her sign: an angel who could walk up stairs and through a door, and speak to the king’s court, and hand a crown to an archbishop. Her king had known it to be an angel because his l
earned clerics had confirmed it, she claimed. The learned clerics in Rouen had other ideas; but for now they would keep their conclusions to themselves while their questions continued. For three of the next four days, Joan faced more deputations in her cell. Had she meant to kill herself when she leaped from the tower at Beaurevoir? No, she had commended herself to God; she had wanted to help the desperate people of besieged Compiègne, and it was true that she would rather have died than fall into the hands of the English – but her voices had told her not to jump. As she lay injured, St Catherine had comforted her and told her to seek God’s forgiveness for what she had done. And, now that she was in an English prison, St Catherine had reassured her that help would come. Perhaps she would be freed from her cell, or perhaps some disturbance would intervene in the trial to secure her liberty – one or the other, she supposed.

  Did she believe, they asked, that she had committed a mortal sin in throwing herself from the tower, in consenting to the execution of the Burgundian Franquet d’Arras at Lagny, in wearing men’s clothes, in attacking Paris on a feast day? She committed herself entirely to God, she said, but she knew – because her voices had told her – that she would come to heaven in the end. Here, the clerics were well aware, they had a duty to act as confessors and pastors as well as inquisitors and scholars, with tender care for the prisoner’s soul. Did she understand that the heavenly Church triumphant – God, the saints, the angels and the saved – was represented on earth by the Church militant, the pope, the cardinals, prelates and clergy and all good Christians, a body which, when assembled, could not err? And would she therefore submit – they entreated her warmly – to the decision of Holy Mother Church? But it was from the Church victorious in heaven – from God, the blessed Virgin and all the saints – that she came to the king of France, she said, and it was to that Church that she would submit. ‘It seems to me that God and the Church are one and the same, and there should be no difficulty about that. Why do you make this a difficulty?’

  By Passion Sunday, 18 March, Bishop Cauchon and the vice-inquisitor Jean le Maistre – who had finally been persuaded, despite his protests, to take up his official role – had decided that formal articles of accusation based on Joan’s testimony should be drafted for the next stage of the trial. Nine days later, after much discussion among the learned assessors about the best and most correct way to proceed, the promoter Jean d’Estivet presented seventy such articles to the court, each one read out and explained in detail to the prisoner. ‘Let her be pronounced and declared a sorceress or soothsayer, diviner, false prophetess, invoker and conjurer of evil spirits, superstitious, engaged in and practising the magic arts, evil-thinking in and about our Catholic faith, schismatic, wavering and inconstant in the article “One holy Church” etc, and other articles of the faith, sacrilegious, idolatrous, apostate from the faith, evil-speaking and evil-doing, blaspheming God and his saints, scandalous, seditious, a disturber of peace and an obstacle to it, inciting wars, cruelly thirsting for human blood and encouraging its shedding, wholly forsaking the decency and reserve of her sex … A heretic,’ d’Estivet declared, ‘or, at least, vehemently suspected of heresy.’

  But seventy articles was too many, and, at the beginning of April, Cauchon and his colleagues spent three headache-inducing days distilling their contents into twelve. And it was on these twelve articles of accusation that, the following week, sixteen of the theologians who had attended the trial pronounced their expert opinion: ‘… the apparitions and revelations of which she boasts, and which she claims she had from God through angels and saints, were not from God through the said angels and saints, but were instead humanly fabricated stories, or they proceeded from an evil spirit, and she did not have sufficient signs to believe and know this.’ The twelve articles showed her, they solemnly and sorrowfully concluded, to be under the gravest suspicion of errors in the faith, of blasphemy and heresy. Further advice was sought from the canon and civil lawyers; they, in their turn, overwhelmingly concurred.

  For more than three months, the bishop had conducted a trial more rigorously scrutinised and painstakingly recorded than any other that this assembly of the greatest scholars and clerics in English France could recall. The case had been made. What remained was the attempt to save a soul, to convince the prisoner of her fault, to seek her repentance. No one could know what God, in His mercy, had in store for the girl. But the end – whatever it might be – was near.

  10

  Fear of the fire

  Joan was ill. She had been a prisoner for ten months. For the last two she had been under interrogation, first in the intimidating public theatre of Bishop Cauchon’s court, and then in the claustrophobic intimacy of her own cell. She had held her own with the boldness that was her watchword, but the pressure had been relentless, and her initial refusal to speak of her revelations – her voices and her sign – had proved impossible to sustain. The Armagnac theologians she had faced at Poitiers had been well disposed to her mission; they had satisfied themselves of the blamelessness of her life, and then they had put her to the test at Orléans. But Burgundian clerics would never be convinced by a sign that took the form of an Armagnac victory. As a result, she had been driven to tell them more than she wanted, to talk of angels, saints and the gift of a golden crown. And still they did not believe her.

  She had last seen the bishop on 31 March, when he visited her cell with seven other theologians in an attempt to convince her to submit to the judgement of God’s Church on earth. She had said what she always did: she submitted to the Church, so long as it did not require her to reject the commands that came to her from God Himself. That she would not do for anything. And so they had departed, closing the door of her prison behind them. For more than two weeks, she had been left to contemplate the shackles in which she was bound. And now she was not just bone-weary, but sick.

  She was certain, of course, that God’s help would come, but sometimes the waiting was hard. ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ she had told her judges, and she knew the proverb to be true. She had tried to escape from her first prison at Beaulieu, squeezing between the planks in the floor of her cell, until she was caught by a porter, and she had been so filled with anguish during her second incarceration at Beaurevoir – so intent on freedom, and so desperate not to become a prisoner of the English – that she had risked death by jumping from the tower. But it had been God’s will that she should live as a captive a while longer, so she had asked His forgiveness, and found comfort in the counsel of her voice – the voice, she had said, of St Catherine, the young and holy virgin who had resisted the interrogation of pagan scholars with eloquence and courage, and who, in statues and stained glass, always carried the sword of her own martyrdom. Joan had found her own holy sword at the altar in St Catherine’s church at Fierbois, but here in Rouen she had no weapons. Here, she was alone in an English fortress, guarded by men who ogled and touched, and jeered in a language she did not understand.

  At least her clothes – her tunic, doublet and hose, stained and ragged though they were – gave her some protection against grabbing hands. They had been the armour of her mission from the beginning, before she had had real armour to put on, and she would not give them up for a woman’s dress – not even in return for the chance to hear mass, something for which she longed, and with which the bishop had tried again and again to entice her. Now, as the bolts were drawn back and the key turned in the lock, she knew he was here again. The faces around him changed – today, eight other clerics filed into the small space of her cell behind him – but he remained the same, in fur-lined episcopal robes, a man of about sixty, old enough to be her grandfather, smiling kindly, chillingly.

  They had come, he said, in love and friendship, to offer her comfort and encouragement in her illness. Over the past weeks she had been questioned on great and difficult matters before many wise and learned men, who had studied her answers and had found in them many dangers to the faith. They understood, he said soothingly, that she
was a woman, unlearned and ignorant of the scriptures, and they stood ready to teach her, for the salvation of her body and soul, just as they would do for their neighbours or themselves. Holy Mother Church would not close her heart to any strays from her flock who wished to return. But if Joan refused – and here the bishop’s voice grew sombre – the Church would have no choice but to abandon her. That was the fate from which he was trying to protect her, with all his power and out of Christian love.

  Joan looked up. She was grateful for their concern, she said. ‘It seems to me, given the illness that I have, that I am in great danger of death. And if it is so that God wishes to do His will with me, I ask you that I may have confession and the sacrament of the Eucharist, and that I should be buried in holy ground.’ The answer came again: submission to the Church was required if she wished to receive the sacraments. She said heavily, ‘I don’t know what else to tell you.’ But the bishop had more to say. The more she feared for her life, he argued, the greater her need to change it for the better – and she could not receive the rites of the Church if she refused to submit to the Church’s authority. ‘If my body dies in prison, I trust you will bury it in holy ground. If you don’t bury it, I trust in God.’ She did not understand why the Christian love of which this man talked would not allow him to see that obeying the command of heaven could not be a sin, that the authority of the earthly Church could not trump that of God Himself. But still he would not stop. Holy scripture, one of his assistants said, showing her the verses, taught the necessity of obedience. She had already answered this, over and over. ‘Whatever should happen to me, I will not do or say anything other than I have said before in the trial.’