Joan of Arc

by Helen Castor

  Step by step, Inquisitor Bréhal found himself mirroring the meticulous stages through which Bishop Cauchon had moved a quarter of a century before. A distinguished gathering of theologians and civil and canon lawyers considered the grounds on which the verdict of Joan’s trial had been called into question. The infamy of those proceedings and the public perception of her innocence, they agreed, could hardly have been greater; it was therefore the commissioners’ duty to proceed with the inquiry. A promoter and notaries were appointed. Guillaume Manchon produced his original French notes of the trial, to be compared with the official Latin transcript, and the records of Cardinal d’Estouteville’s investigation of 1452 were scrutinised by the court. The learned counsel appointed for Joan’s mother and brothers made exhaustive representations detailing the Maid’s manifest virtues and the patent injustices of the process against her, which were drafted into a total of 101 articles for the commissioners – or judges, as they now were – to consider. And at the beginning of 1456, the judges dispatched officers to collect the testimony upon which they would form their conclusions. Twenty-five years earlier, there had been a single witness, interrogated on many subjects. Now, the witnesses were many, and the subjects few: in the region of Joan’s birth, the court’s questions concerned her childhood, her character and the beginning of her mission; in Orléans and Paris, her deeds in the war; and in Paris and Rouen, her trial and death.

  In Domrémy, the villagers who had known Joan told the officers what they could, but there was no sign, in this little place far away from the scenes of her extraordinary exploits, that memories had been heightened by the passage of time. At home she had been ‘Jeannette’ rather than ‘Jeanne’, it seemed. The older villagers, her godparents among them, recalled a respectable family and a dutiful child, well-behaved, pious and modest, who worked hard – she span with her mother, they said, and guided the plough and tended animals for her father – and liked to go to church. She was as well instructed in the faith, noted one of her godfathers, as the other girls of Domrémy. This was reassuring, if a little non-specific. The reminiscences of the younger generation, who had grown up with the Maid, were scarcely more particular. A woman named Hauviette said she had wept when Joan left the village, because she was good and kind and had been her friend. Sometimes, the local boys had teased her about her displays of devotion to God: when Joan heard the church bells, one of them explained, she would fall to her knees in the fields and pray. And it was the bells that prompted one of the few memories in which the living, breathing Joan could suddenly be felt. Perrin Drappier had been the churchwarden in the village, and when in the evenings he forgot to sound the call to compline, she used to scold him, he said, and promise to bring him cakes if he would be more diligent.

  Even if the Maid was a strangely insubstantial presence in their testimony, the villagers had done their work in demonstrating to the court the blamelessness of her early life. But Joan herself came into vivid focus as soon as the inquiry moved to Vaucouleurs, the town where she had persuaded the captain Robert de Baudricourt to send her to Chinon and the king. It was Durand Laxart, the husband of one of her cousins, who had been inveigled into taking her there; several of the younger inhabitants of Domrémy remembered him explaining that, at Joan’s insistence, he had told her father that she was coming to stay at his house in the nearby village of Burey-le-Petit to help his wife in her confinement with a new baby.

  Laxart himself did not mention this subterfuge. Instead, his focus was the crystalline clarity of Joan’s purpose and the irresistible force of her will. She had announced, he said, that she must go to the dauphin and lead him to his coronation. And she knew a prophecy that spoke of her mission: ‘Was it not once foretold that France would be devastated by a woman and then restored by a virgin?’ Who this first woman might have been was not clear, unless it was the mad king’s much maligned wife, Queen Isabeau, but the echoes of the biblical roles of Eve and Mary, and the part Joan believed she was destined to play in the story of the most Christian kingdom, were unmistakable. The couple with whom she had stayed at Vaucouleurs remembered similarly bold and resolute pronouncements. She was sent by the king of heaven to the dauphin, she told Henri le Royer, and, if she had to, she would go there on her knees. She did not fear the journey, because God would open the way before her; she had been born to do this, she said. And she had been full of impatience, Henri’s wife Catherine remembered, time weighing on her as it did on a pregnant woman waiting to give birth.

  It was this certainty that had overwhelmed the men who accompanied her when she left, at last, for Chinon. Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy were the soldiers who, with their servants Julien and Jean, the royal messenger Colet de Vienne and another man named Richard l’Archier, had guided Joan for eleven days through enemy country on her way to the court. Jean de Metz was now a nobleman, rewarded by the king for his loyal service, and Bertrand de Poulengy an esquire of the royal household, but still, twenty-five years later, they were struck with awe at the memory of the Maid. It was because they believed she was sent by God to save France, they said, that they had offered themselves as her escort. Despite the hazards of their route, she had assured them calmly that there was nothing to fear. She was young and so were they, but when they snatched what sleep they could, lying side by side with Joan fully clothed in the doublet and hose she had swapped for her rough red dress, neither of them, they said, had felt any stirrings of desire for one so holy.

  That claim was echoed, when testimony was received from the witnesses at Orléans and Paris, by the men who had fought beside her when she went to war. When he was with her, said the Bastard of Orléans, he had no carnal impulses of any kind, towards her or any other woman. Privacy was hard to come by in the field, and when she dressed and armed herself on campaign the duke of Alençon had seen her breasts – which were beautiful, he said – while her squire Jean d’Aulon had caught glimpses of her breasts and her bare legs, but neither of them had been aroused. If there was the faintest air of protesting just a little too much, none of these noble knights was prepared to admit it. But Marguerite La Touroulde, widow of the king’s counsellor René de Bouligny, in whose house Joan had stayed at Bourges – a witness who was equally convinced of the Maid’s holiness, if less perturbed by her physical presence – remembered Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy saying that they had lusted after her in the beginning, but were so abashed by her purity that they never dared speak a word of it to Joan herself. This sense of her bodily integrity was so strong that it went beyond her evident chastity. D’Aulon believed that she did not menstruate: he had been told, he said, that she never experienced ‘the secret malady of women’. And, according to the euphemistic observation of a royal servant named Simon Charles, her soldiers marvelled at the length of time she could stay on her horse without answering the call of nature.

  Of course, the Maid’s physical virtue was the outward expression of her moral and spiritual merit. Every witness agreed that she was good and devout, simple and humble. She was all innocence, said the courtly sophisticate Marguerite La Touroulde, and knew nothing about anything except for waging war. On the field of battle, she conducted herself with remarkable confidence, as if she had been a captain for twenty or thirty years, the duke of Alençon declared. But there too she required godly behaviour. She could not abide oaths and blasphemy: La Hire and Alençon in particular, who were in the habit of swearing a great deal, had to curb their tongues in her presence. Nor would she tolerate the presence of whores among her men; if she came across a woman in the camp, she would chase her away angrily with the flat of her sword, unless a soldier came forward to marry her. She ate sparingly, and refused food that had been stolen rather than bought; she forbade pillage and plunder, and gave churches her special protection. She required her troops to confess their sins, and wept for the men who died without absolution, whether they were French or the enemy English. There could be no doubt that, as Simon Charles was moved to conclude, ‘she did God’
s work’.

  But what of her mission: how could the witnesses be sure that she had been sent by God to save the king and the kingdom? The answer, all agreed, was her victories, which she had known would be won, and which could only be explained by divine intervention. There was no need, now, to speak of Paris, La Charité or Compiègne. It was Patay, Jargeau, Meung and, above all, Orléans that demonstrated the truth of the Maid’s claims. The Bastard remembered that, when Joan first arrived with supplies for the besieged town, the wind was blowing in the wrong direction for the boats to carry the provisions across the river. She told him that she brought help from the king of heaven, at the request of the royal saints Louis and Charlemagne, and in an instant the wind changed and the sails filled. The recollection of Joan’s chaplain, Jean Pasquerel, was a little different: the river, he said, had been too low for the boats to float, but suddenly, at the Maid’s approach, the waters rose and the flotilla began to move. For the duke of Alençon, meanwhile, who had not been at Orléans, the miraculous memories were more personal. The duke’s father had died at Azincourt, and he had been captured in bloody battle at Verneuil when he was just seventeen; it seemed that, by the time he fought at Joan’s side at Jargeau, fear had become his enemy as much as the English. But she was there to urge him on. ‘Noble duke, are you afraid? Don’t you know that I promised your wife to bring you back safe and sound?’ And she had pointed out a cannon on the town walls, and told him to move before it killed him; a few moments later, he said, he watched another man die on the spot where he had stood.

  Alençon was now fifty, in constant pain from chronic disease in his kidneys, and bitterly resentful that he had never been restored to the wealth and power that should have been his birthright. But it was clear that, half a lifetime ago, he had been taken by surprise by the Maid, their brief partnership a gift from God in a golden moment when anything had seemed possible. And in that moment, others had seen her as the fulfilment of a heavenly promise made long before. Jean Barbin, a lawyer then living in Poitiers, remembered Jean Érault, one of the Armagnac theologians who had examined Joan there, speaking of a prophecy that referred to the Maid. Marie Robine, the peasant woman who had received divinely inspired visions at Avignon in the last years of the fourteenth century, had had many revelations concerning the calamities that would afflict the kingdom of France, Érault said. She had been terrified by a vision of great quantities of armour, fearing that she would be required to put it on and fight, but she had been told that it was not for her. Instead, a Maid would come after her, who would bear these arms and deliver France from its enemies. That Maid, Érault had been certain, was Joan.

  If the coming of the Maid had been foretold in visions, then what of her own? The Bastard remembered how often she prayed; every day, he said, she would go to church at dusk and ask for the bells to be rung for half an hour. And he had been with the king at Loches when the royal confessor enquired if she wished to explain how her heavenly counsel spoke to her. She had blushed, and said that, when she was unhappy because people did not believe her messages from God, she took herself away to pray; then she heard a voice saying, ‘Daughter of God, go, go, go, I will help you, go!’ And then she was filled with a wonderful joy, and longed to remain in that state forever. Her squire Jean d’Aulon recalled that, when he had asked about her revelations, she told him she had three counsellors – one who was with her always, another who came and went, and a third whom the other two consulted. But when he begged to be allowed to see them, she said he was not worthy or virtuous enough. He did not ask again.

  Questions she had been required to answer, however, were those of the theologians at Poitiers, one of whom, a friar named Seguin Seguin, now offered his testimony to the court. The Maid told them, he said, that she had been watching the animals in the fields when a voice came to her, saying that God had great pity for the people of France and that she must go to the king. Then, she added, she had begun to cry, and the voice had told her that she must not doubt her mission. But if God wanted to save the people of France, one of the learned doctors objected, surely He had no need of soldiers. ‘In the name of God’, Joan replied, ‘the soldiers will fight and God will give victory.’ It was a good answer, they thought. Then the friar himself asked in what language the voice spoke. A better language than yours, she fired back. (Seguin’s own tongue, he explained, was the dialect of the Limousin.) Did she believe in God? Yes, she said, and better than you. Why should they believe her, Seguin asked, without a sign to support her claims? ‘In the name of God,’ came the impatient response, ‘I have not come to Poitiers to give signs; but take me to Orléans, and I will show you signs of the purpose for which I am sent.’

  Impatience and quickfire confidence were qualities that had helped to press her case with the theologians at Poitiers, for whom the idea that God might wish to help the Armagnacs required no further justification. But they had been no use when she faced theologians at Rouen for whom that most fundamental proposition was self-evidently false. Twenty-five years on, however, their roles were reversed: in the most uncomfortable and challenging sessions of the inquiry, those scholars – or the survivors among their number – had to decide how far they would go in attempting to defend what was now, in the France of Charles le très-victorieux, indefensible.

  Some elements of the Maid’s story were established beyond debate. The piteousness and piety of her death were described in heart-rending detail by those who were there, weeping, they said, in the old market square as she burned – and also, as a matter of common fame, by those who were not. She had been a simple girl, that much was clear, and the judges had tried to confuse, harass and exhaust her, but still she had answered their questions with wisdom beyond her years. And it was the English, out of hatred and fear and with the enthusiastic support of Bishop Cauchon, who had controlled the trial, paid for it, and pressed it to its tragic conclusion.

  But other parts of the tale proved harder to tell. Some witnesses found themselves simply unable to remember what they themselves had done during the proceedings. Remarkably, the statement of the laconic Nicolas Caval was even shorter than before, and the bishop of Noyon, an influential diplomat named Jean de Mailly, could recall almost nothing, apart from Joan declaring that, if she had done anything wrong, it was her own fault and not the king’s. Thomas de Courcelles – an eloquent scholar who had been present throughout the trial before translating the notaries’ French minutes into the official Latin transcript – wove his testimony from weasel words as he attempted to explain his involvement. He had not argued that Joan was a heretic, he said, except in the case that she might obstinately refuse to accept her duty to submit to the Church. When it came to the judges’ final deliberations, he believed he had said that Joan was as she had been before – that is, if she had been a heretic before, she was so still, but he himself had never positively declared that she was a heretic.

  No wonder, given the weight of scrutiny the trial record was now being required to bear, that the notary Guillaume Manchon seemed ill at ease in his own contorted statement. He had served in the trial only under compulsion, he said, because he did not dare resist an order from the royal council, and he complained bitterly of the pressure under which he had been placed by Bishop Cauchon and the English. Yet at the same time he insisted on his own integrity and that of the transcript he had produced. He was particularly exercised by the role of the spy in Joan’s cell, Nicolas Loiseleur, who had gained her trust, he said, by pretending to be her fellow countryman from the duchy of Lorraine, and to share her Armagnac loyalties. This was a yarn that, over the years, had evidently stretched in the spinning: another witness testified – though he could not remember who had told him – that Loiseleur had disguised himself as St Catherine in order to bend Joan to his will.

  But even in Manchon’s own account of this treacherous deception, Loiseleur had tried to save Joan’s life by urging her to submit to her judges at Saint-Ouen. Here was the heart of the difficulty for witnesses who now c
laimed, queasily, that they had only been following orders. What had been right in 1431 in English Rouen – to secure the girl’s salvation by persuading her to abjure her heresy and embrace the loving counsel of the Church – was wrong twenty-five years later, in a kingdom from which God had driven the English with their tails between their legs. It all came down to the gift of vision: not revelations like Joan’s – since, as Inquisitor Bréhal and his colleagues now sagely noted, ‘it is very difficult to reach a settled judgement in such matters’ – but the ability to see which facts conformed with God’s plan for the world.

  That, of course, was where Bishop Cauchon and his fellow judges had allowed their prejudice to lead them so deeply into error. And so, sitting in state on 7 July 1456 in the great hall of the episcopal palace in Rouen, the judges appointed to review Cauchon’s work declared that the twelve articles through which the Maid had been condemned had been drawn up ‘corruptly, deceitfully, slanderously, fraudulently and maliciously’. The truth, they said, had been passed over in silence, and fabrication put in its place. Information that aggravated the charges against her had been introduced without reason, and circumstances ignored that would have served to justify what she had said and done. As a result, the trial record and the sentence against her were utterly null, invalid and void. Joan had been innocent, and she was justified; and the judges decreed that a cross should be built in the old market square where she had died so cruelly, to preserve her memory forever.