Joan of Arc

by Helen Castor

  In Paris, as the years went by, the spectre of Joan herself – a wandering revenant haunting the kingdom’s memories of the war – was a provocative presence. She had led King Charles to his coronation and proclaimed his God-given right to the throne, but she had also appeared at the head of an army outside the walls of the capital, and died as a heretic condemned by the expert theological judgement of its university’s scholars. In such circumstances, the king’s silence on the subject of the Maid entirely suited the leading inhabitants of his first city. If the unhappy names of Armagnac and Burgundian were now to be consigned to the pages of history, then surely they should be joined by that of the girl who had claimed the mandate of heaven in defining ‘Armagnac’ as ‘French’ and ‘Burgundian’ as ‘traitor’.

  But one problem remained. If the verdict of heresy still stood against the Maid, whose victory at Orléans had been the sign of heaven’s blessing on her king, then did a shadow still fall on the most Christian monarch? There was nothing to be done while Rouen and the archive of the court that had tried her there remained part of English France, and in any case the argument for letting past divisions rest was a powerful one. But in February 1450, four months after the English had finally been driven from Rouen, and three since the king had entered the city in majesty, Charles spoke, at last, of Joan. ‘A long time ago, Joan the Maid was taken and captured by our ancient enemies and adversaries, the English, and brought to the city of Rouen. They had her tried by certain persons who had been chosen and given this task by them, and during this trial they made and committed several errors and abuses, such that, by means of this trial and the great hatred that our enemy had against her, they had her put to death very cruelly, iniquitously and against reason.’ Of course, only a trial perverted by hatred could have condemned the Maid, and now the purpose of this royal letter, addressed to a theologian named Guillaume Bouillé, was to discover exactly what form that perversion had taken. ‘Because we wish to know the truth of this trial,’ the king went on, ‘and the manner in which it was carried out, we command, instruct and expressly charge you to inquire and diligently ask about this and what was said. And bring to us and the men of our great council the information that you find concerning this, or faithfully send it in a sealed letter.’

  Bouillé was, like so many of the Maid’s judges, a professor of the university of Paris, but his career had been in its infancy when she was tried nineteen years earlier, and his standing as a loyal servant of King Charles was unquestioned. He was ideally placed to review the technicalities of the process over which Bishop Cauchon had presided, and he lost no time in beginning his investigation. In early March, he questioned seven witnesses who had participated in the trial, including the notary Guillaume Manchon, the executor, Jean Massieu, and Martin Lavenu, the friar who had been at Joan’s side in her last hours. They had sat among the packed ranks of French clerics who had condemned the Maid, at a moment when the due process of God’s law had seemed wholly compatible with the rejection of her claims. Since then, of course, it had become clear that Charles was in fact the true heir to France, exactly as Joan had said, and now these men of God were moved to agree with their king that the defining influence on the trial had been the prejudice of his enemies, the English, in whose castle the hearings had taken place.

  Two of them – the friars Isambard de la Pierre, who had been much involved in the judges’ deliberations, and Guillaume Duval, who had been there only a little – insisted that the earl of Warwick, governor to the young King Henry and commander of the English garrison at Rouen, had threatened to throw de la Pierre into the Seine if he sought to offer the prisoner any help. Cauchon had been in the pocket of the English throughout the trial, all the witnesses agreed. It was English pressure that had prevented any appeal to the pope, or any possibility that Joan might be kept in ecclesiastical custody rather than guarded by soldiers in a castle cell. The bishop had even sent a spy to extract information from her covertly, Guillaume Manchon explained: a canon of Rouen Cathedral named Nicolas Loiseleur had visited her to offer himself as a confessor and counsellor, gaining her confidence and drawing her out while Manchon and others took notes as they listened through a secret hole from a neighbouring room. And Martin Lavenu remembered that on the day of Joan’s relapse into heresy, when Cauchon had emerged from her cell, Warwick and his attendants had greeted him outside the door with applause and celebrations. ‘Farewell! It is done,’ the bishop had declared.

  For several of the witnesses, the visible manifestation of that relapse – Joan’s decision to dress once again in men’s clothes – was a source of particular anxiety. After all, once she had submitted to the judgement of the court and put on the modest dress of a woman, why and how had she come to change her mind? De la Pierre and Jean Toutmouillé (a friar who, as a young man, had accompanied Brother Martin to attend Joan on her last day) described the intense distress in which they found her; she told them, they said, that, once she wore skirts rather than hose tied with laces to her doublet, she had been violently assaulted by her guards. Martin Lavenu believed that it was an English lord who had tried to rape her. The executor, Jean Massieu, meanwhile, was not convinced that her resumption of men’s clothes had been her own choice, even one forced upon her by such brutality. She slept each night, he explained, with her feet bound in irons chained to a great piece of wood, while three English soldiers kept watch in her cell and two more outside. He remembered Joan saying that, when she woke on the third morning after her submission, her guards had taken away the women’s clothes she now wore, and instead emptied out the bag in which her old tunic and hose had been left in a corner of the room. For hours she remonstrated with them, insisting that these were clothes she was forbidden to wear, but they would not relent, until by midday she was so desperate to relieve herself outside that she was left with no option but to put on the prohibited garments.

  It had always been clear how physically vulnerable she was, a lone female prisoner in a castle full of men. The broader truth of that vulnerability, and the anguish that was its consequence, rang through these diverging stories, just as it had through Joan’s own scattered incoherence in the trial record for that fateful day. Equally apparent, through equally shifting narratives, was the overwhelming experience of watching the Maid die. De la Pierre, Manchon and Massieu all agreed that, in the midst of the flames, she had called constantly upon Christ and His saints with such pious devotion that almost everyone there, French or English – even, said de la Pierre, Cardinal Beaufort himself – was moved to tears. Someone (was it de la Pierre or Massieu? Both claimed the honour) had hurried at her request to a nearby church to fetch a crucifix, and held it before her eyes until they were rendered sightless by the fire. Martin Lavenu told of the misery of the executioner, who had been unable to hasten the end of Joan’s agony because the platform on which she burned was so high. De la Pierre – whose entire testimony was inflected with drama – described the man’s unbearable remorse at having participated in the death of such a holy woman. Though he had heaped up the pyre time and again, the Maid’s heart had remained whole and unconsumed, by which he had been dumbfounded (de la Pierre reported), as though it were clearly a miracle.

  Only one witness – the veteran theologian Jean Beaupère, who had taken a leading role in interrogating Joan during the early days of the trial – was less than reverent in speaking of her memory. She had had the wiles of a woman, he said, and he believed that her visions derived from human invention rather than a supernatural cause. No one else had yet mentioned the thorny issue of her voices, but Bouillé had the matter in hand, drafting a lengthy treatise in which he painstakingly assembled details from the trial transcript with which he might rebut her judges’ conclusions, while reanimating what had once, long ago, been the Armagnac defence of her claims.

  There was plenty here to encourage those who, like Bouillé, wished to clear Joan of the calumnies that Bishop Cauchon had heaped upon her – or, as the king’s letter had originally in
structed, simply to demonstrate that the trial had been filled with error and driven by hatred. For the moment, however, all was in vain. After only two days of testimony, the inquiry was called to a sudden halt, whether because of the pressing demands of the fight to drive the English from the rest of Normandy, or because the rattling of skeletons had proved disturbing to powerful men. The archbishop of Rouen – the man who had succeeded the English royal chancellor Louis de Luxembourg after his death in 1443 – was a canon lawyer named Raoul Roussel. He had led the august deputations who welcomed King Charles to the city in November 1449. He had also been one of Joan’s most assiduous judges. After more than thirty years of English rule, wounds were raw in Normandy in 1450, and nerves on a knife edge. Silence, it was clear, still had its virtues.

  That was not, however, the opinion of a new player in the complex world of the French Church. Guillaume d’Estouteville was a Norman nobleman of irreproachably Armagnac credentials, a second cousin of the king and now a cardinal, sent by the pope in the spring of 1452 as a legate to the kingdom of France. His principal tasks were to make peace between the English and French – whose soldiers were still fighting, now that Normandy had fallen, in what remained of the English duchy of Gascony in the south-west of the kingdom – in the hope that the military efforts of both realms might be directed instead against the threat of the Ottoman Turks, and to press for the restitution of full papal powers within France after they had been limited by royal edict fourteen years earlier. But it soon transpired that d’Estouteville had another aim in mind. Whether because it was a subject dear to his own heart, or because he thought he detected a chance to accrue valuable political capital, the cardinal reopened the question of Joan’s trial, a matter which, he told the king, ‘greatly concerns your honour and estate’.

  It was far from clear that King Charles was happy to receive instruction, however well intentioned, concerning his honour and estate, still less to see the pope’s representative reviving a process it had seemed politic to drop only two years before. But, technically, it could not be denied that a verdict delivered by the Church was the Church’s to rescind, should it so wish. In May 1452, d’Estouteville enlisted the newly appointed inquisitor of France, a friar named Jean Bréhal, to preside over a fresh inquiry at Rouen. Twenty-one years earlier, the Maid had stood trial in the city; now, the accused was the trial itself.

  Together, d’Estouteville and Bréhal studied the transcript of Bishop Cauchon’s hearings and drafted a list of articles by which the proceedings might be condemned. Was it not true that the English had sought Joan’s death by every means they could, because of their mortal hatred of her? Had not the judges, assessors and notaries been intimidated by English threats, so that the trial and its record were neither free nor fair? Could it be denied that Joan, a simple and ignorant girl, had been left without advice or help, and confounded with interrogations of such length and difficulty that she could not defend herself? Had she not often said that she submitted to the judgement of the Church and her Holy Father the pope – and, if she had ever said that she would not submit to the Church, had she not meant only the churchmen before her, who had embraced the English cause? Had not Joan died in such a holy and devout manner that all those who saw it wept? And were all these things not commonly noised and known to be true?

  During the following weeks, these questions were put to some of the clerics who had participated in the trial, including, once again, Guillaume Manchon, Martin Lavenu, Jean Massieu and Isambard de la Pierre, whose testimony had acquired yet more startling colour in the intervening years. (An English soldier who hated Joan with a passion, de la Pierre said, had been utterly overcome by witnessing her death. After a restorative drink at a nearby tavern, the man declared that he had seen a white dove fluttering from the flames as the Maid’s last breath left her body.) Of the thirteen others to whom d’Estouteville and Bréhal now spoke, some enthusiastically agreed with the articles, and some strongly resisted. Many, of both persuasions, were keen to defend the accuracy of the trial record, and to note that Joan had answered questions well, even if she were a simple girl among learned doctors. Some were adamant that Bishop Cauchon had been a lackey of the English; others recalled that, when he was reproved by an English cleric for having accepted Joan’s abjuration at the cemetery of Saint-Ouen, he had become angry, and said it was his duty to seek the prisoner’s salvation, not her death. And it seemed that some – such as the civil lawyer Nicolas Caval, who had attended many sessions of the trial – could remember very little. ‘The English had no great love for the Maid,’ was his laconic observation, and he knew, he said, that she had been burned. But whether that was just or unjust he could not say, since it was a matter for the court.

  There were others, of course, who did not appear before the cardinal and inquisitor at all, the influential and compromised figure of Archbishop Roussel chief among them. Still, when the examination of witnesses drew to a close, Jean Bréhal found that he had ample material to submit to scholars of theology and canon law for their expert assessment. Over the following months, many hours of intellectual endeavour were expended on the task of elaborating all the ways in which other scholars – those who had advised Bishop Cauchon’s trial two decades earlier – were wrong. Meanwhile, Cardinal d’Estouteville returned to Rome. He had failed to make peace between England and France: instead, in July 1453, the aged English commander Talbot and thousands of his troops were slaughtered by King Charles’s forces at Castillon, twenty-five miles east of Bordeaux. By the end of the year Gascony, as well as Normandy, was French, and – with the lone exception of the garrison grimly holding on within the fortified pale of Calais in the far north – the English had been driven out of the whole of France, just as the Maid had once told Talbot and his fellow commanders they would be.

  This was final vindication for the king, and for the girl who had fleetingly been his champion. And it was good news, it seemed, for those who sought to revoke Bishop Cauchon’s sentence against her. So too was the fact that, when Raoul Roussel died on the last day of 1452, Cardinal d’Estouteville was appointed to succeed him as archbishop of Rouen. Still, the wheels turned slowly. Charles himself – now le roi très-victorieux, the most victorious as well as the most Christian king – showed no greater inclination to revisit this troublesome moment in his past than he had since the abandonment of Bouillé’s inquiry in 1450, while Pope Nicholas V had more pressing matters on his mind, given that the Turks had sacked and conquered the mighty city of Constantinople, the bulwark of Christendom in the east, in the spring of 1453. In 1454 Inquisitor Bréhal made the long journey to Rome to pursue his case, but it was not until June 1455 that he succeeded in securing from Nicholas’s successor, Calixtus III, a letter of authorisation for a new trial, in which – following the suggestion of one of the canon lawyers Bréhal had consulted – Joan’s surviving family, her mother and two brothers, were to act as plaintiffs. Three papal commissioners would oversee the process in the name of the Holy Father, all of them loyal servants of France: the bishop of Coutances, the bishop of Paris and the archbishop of Reims, Jean Juvénal des Ursins, a talented writer and historian who had been Pierre Cauchon’s Armagnac successor as bishop of Beauvais.

  And so, on 7 November 1455, an extraordinary ceremony unfolded in the hallowed grandeur of Notre-Dame in the heart of Paris. Had Joan lived, she would by now have reached her forties. As it was, her bereaved mother Isabelle had quietly tended her grief for almost twenty-five years; and now she appeared in the cathedral before the archbishop of Reims, the bishop of Paris and Inquisitor Bréhal. Beside her stood one of her sons, Pierre, and supporters from Orléans, a town which had demonstrated its unwavering devotion to the Maid by providing her mother, who had found herself impoverished in her widowhood, with a comfortable home. While she knelt before the commissioners to proffer the papal mandate, her petition was explained on the old lady’s behalf: her devout and virtuous daughter, whom she had brought up in the true faith, had been falsely
accused of heresy, a charge which was prompted not by any fault in her, but by hatred and enmity. Despite her innocence, Joan had been iniquitously condemned and cruelly burned, because her trial was riven with injustice and error. Her family had been unable to right this wrong while the kingdom was ravaged by war, but now that, by God’s grace, Rouen and Normandy had been restored to France – and the task thereby accomplished that had been started, in Joan’s time, at Orléans and Reims – they turned for help, as Joan herself had done, to the Holy See. Beyond these elliptical phrases, there was no mention of the Maid’s mission, her voices or her victories. Instead, the commissioners’ assignment was delineated with lawyerly precision: to demonstrate that the process by which the girl had been declared a heretic was flawed, and to expunge that verdict from the public record.

  An inquisitive crowd began to gather in the cathedral as others among Isabelle’s supporters stepped forward to speak, anxious to detail all the many ways in which Joan had been oppressed by the partiality and prejudice of her judges and guards. Her simplicity, her devotion and her actions for the good of the realm, all these, they said, were merits, not crimes, piety, not wickedness – that is, if they were interpreted correctly. The press of people became so great that the commissioners were forced to draw Isabelle and her companions aside into the quiet of the sacristy. There they explained, with care and concern, that they would receive her petition and undertake the inquiry, but that the process would be long and complex, and its outcome uncertain. The solemn judgement of the Church, they warned, could not be lightly overturned. The Maid’s mother and her friends should therefore seek learned counsel for themselves, and return to the commissioners’ presence in the episcopal court of Paris ten days later. There was much work ahead, but, at last, the case had begun.