by Helen Castor
It was done. Charles le bien-servi, the well-served as well as the most victorious, received the news in the heartlands of his kingdom, south of the Loire, where he was passing the summer months. The Maid had not been a heretic, an apostate or an idolater. Now, she could rest in peace, and her unsullied name would be remembered whenever the glorious story of his victories was told. The most Christian king, meanwhile, faced challenges ahead. He had suffered some recent ill-health, and his son, the ungrateful dauphin, continued to flout his authority. Regrettably, it had also become necessary in the previous weeks to dispatch his loyal servant, the Bastard of Orléans, to arrest the malcontent duke of Alençon on a charge of treasonable conspiracy with the English enemy. Still, he could survey with pleasure the God-given realm which he ruled like his royal father before him. And he could gaze with satisfaction across the narrow sea to England, where his nephew, the fragile king Henry VI, looked on distractedly while the princes of the blood, heirs to the great houses of York and Lancaster, tore the kingdom to pieces between them.
Epilogue: ‘Saint Joan’
On 16 May 1920, as a hushed crowd of thousands waited outside St Peter’s Basilica, Joan of Arc was recognised as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. The declaration had been half a century in the making: it had been in 1869 that Félix Dupanloup, then bishop of Orléans, first petitioned the Holy See to examine her case. The town of Orléans had never forgotten her, but it was history, rather than memory, that animated Bishop Dupanloup’s campaign. He had read the transcripts of her trials when the manuscripts were published by the pioneering scholar Jules Quicherat in the 1840s, and his conclusion was clear. ‘She is a saint’, he declared. ‘God was in her.’
In fact, in several respects Joan made an unlikely candidate for canonisation. Not many saints had been put to death by the judgement of the same Church that was asked to recognise their sanctity. That, of course – said the promoter of the faith, or devil’s advocate, assigned to test her case in 1892 – was a reflection of the fact that she had not been martyred for her faith, but killed for political motives, through the enmity of those whom she had defeated in battle. She had been rightly admired for her military achievements, he conceded, but, like Christopher Columbus, for whose canonisation a vocal lobby had argued unsuccessfully in the 1870s, her outstanding spiritual virtue had not been proved. During her life she had shown anger, and arrogance, and a fondness for worldly luxury, and she had not embraced her suffering with patience and heroic fortitude, but abjured her visions out of fear, and met her death with lamentation and anguish.
In 1892, and again in 1901 and 1903, the many pages of the promoter’s arguments were met with hundreds more of rebuttal from the defender, who pressed Joan’s case on the basis of her divine revelations and advanced counter-proposals to demonstrate that she had indeed displayed all the virtues to a heroic degree. On 6 January 1904, it was the defender’s reasoning with which Pope Pius X concurred. Four years later he acknowledged three miracles that had taken place through her intercession: three nuns had been cured of grievous illness after invoking her aid in their prayers. The need for a fourth miracle, the Holy Father accepted, was obviated by her salvation of France in her own lifetime. ‘Joan of Arc’, he declared, ‘has shone like a new star destined to be the glory not only of France but of the universal Church as well.’ On 18 April 1909 she was beatified, and in 1920 – after the agonising intervention of the Great War – came her canonisation, as a virgin who had lived a life of saintly virtue. The feast day of St Joan, the Maid of Orléans, was inscribed in the Church’s calendar on 30 May, the anniversary of her execution almost five hundred years before.
Over the span of half a millennium, from the trials of 1431 and 1456 to the canonisation hearings in twentieth-century Rome, the events of Joan’s brief and extraordinary life have been the subject of legal processes designed to assign her to a category: heretic or saint. In each case, evidence has been sifted, seized and discarded, a winnowing dictated by theological principles which, for the expert assessors, are paramount and all-pervasive. And yet, in theology as in history, answers reached are shaped by questions posed and facts admitted. For all the commissioners’ warnings to the Maid’s mother about the unpredictability of the outcome, there was no possibility that the hearings of 1456 would uphold the sentence of 1431: the information they sought and the purpose for which they sought it would not allow that conclusion, just as there had been no chance that the trial of 1431 would exonerate Joan from the charges of heresy that defined every moment of that earlier investigation. Both sides were sure that God’s purpose was at work in the world, but their shared certainty underwrote diametrically opposed understandings of right and wrong, truth and falsehood. And therein lies the essence of faith: did Joan’s king win the war because she came from God, or did she come from God because he won the war?
For those in search of Joan herself, the surviving documents produced by these tribunals present a double challenge. Though their purpose may be clear, their rules of engagement – articles of inquiry, for example, glimpsed only through the responses they elicit – can be disconcertingly elusive. And the difficulty of interpreting the information they contain is compounded by the shockingly vivid presence of a girl who, through the unforeseeable effect of her own unyielding conviction, had achieved what should, for someone of her sex and class, have been impossible. Her forceful charisma is palpable in the transcript of the trial that condemned her to a heretic’s death. When dazzlingly displayed through the differently partisan judgement which annulled that verdict, it transformed the Maid into a legend, an icon and a saint.
In gaining a saint, however, we have lost a human being. This ferocious champion of one side in a complex and bloody war has been robbed of her context and her roaring voice. By 2011, Pope Benedict XVI could say, of what he called ‘her mission among the French military forces’, that ‘she sought to negotiate a just Christian peace between the English and French’. It is hard not to believe that Joan herself – who told the English king that ‘wherever I find your men in France, I will make them leave, whether they want to or not, and if they will not obey, I will have them all killed’ – might have put it in markedly different terms. One of the most eminent of the Maid’s historians suggests that ‘Joan is above all the saint of reconciliation – the one whom, whatever be our personal convictions, we admire and love because, overriding all partisan points of view, each one of us can find in himself a reason to love her’. But, in becoming all things to all people, the woman herself risks disappearing altogether.
She is still there to be found. If we read the remarkable records of a wholly exceptional life in the knowledge of how those documents came to be made, if we immerse ourselves in her cultured, brutal and terrifyingly uncertain world, assured of nothing but the supreme force of God’s will, then perhaps we can begin to understand Joan herself: what she thought she was doing; why those around her responded as they did; how she took her chance, to miraculous effect; and what happened, in the end, when the miracles stopped.
And, still, in the well-worn pages of her trials there are unexpected moments that catch the humanity, the violence and the transcendence of her story. On 7 May 1456, a nobleman named Aimon de Macy gave evidence in Paris in the presence of the archbishop of Reims. De Macy was now in his fifties, but he had encountered the Maid when he was a young man, a friend of her captor Jean de Luxembourg. His testimony was an ugly thing: he told of visiting Joan in her cell at Rouen with de Luxembourg and the English lords Warwick and Stafford, to mock her with feigned offers of ransom, and he could confirm that she was virtuous, he said, because of the force with which she fought him off every time he grabbed at her breasts or put his hands into her clothes. Then he had been at Saint-Ouen to witness her abjuration, with the clerk holding the pen in her hand to put her mark on the paper. The last sentence of his statement appears an afterthought, almost as if he turned back to speak once he had risen to leave. ‘And he believes she is in paradise.
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Notes
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES
Beaucourt, Charles VII G. du Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 6 vols (Paris, 1881–91)
Duparc, Nullité P. Duparc (trans. and ed.), Procès en nullité de la condamnation de Jeanne d’Arc, 5 vols (Paris, 1977–88)
Hobbins, Trial D. Hobbins (trans. and ed.), The Trial of Joan of Arc (Cambridge and London, 2005)
Journal Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, 1405–1449, ed. A. Tuetey (Paris, 1881)
Monstrelet, Chronique La Chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet, ed. L. Douët-d’Arcq, 6 vols (Paris, 1857–62)
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison (Oxford, 2004), online edn, ed. L. Goldman (2010)
Parisian Journal A Parisian Journal, 1405–1449, trans. and ed. J. Shirley (Oxford, 1968)
Quicherat, Procès J. Quicherat (ed.), Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc, 5 vols (Paris, 1841–9)
Taylor, Joan of Arc C. Taylor (ed. and trans.), Joan of Arc: La Pucelle (Manchester, 2006)
Tisset, Condamnation P. Tisset and Y. Lanhers (trans. and ed.), Procès de condamnation de Jeanne d’Arc, 3 vols (Paris, 1960–71)
INTRODUCTION
For Joan as a protean icon, see M. Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (London, 1981).
Anyone who studies Joan of Arc has reason to be grateful to Jules Quicherat, the remarkable scholar who, in the 1840s, edited the transcripts of the trials of 1431 and 1456 and gathered them together in five volumes with a vast range of other materials relating to Joan’s life, including chronicles, poems, letters and administrative documents. Since then, the trials have been edited and translated many times. The minutes of the trial of 1431 were taken by the notaries in French, but those original documents do not survive. Instead, we have two partial copies, one from the later fifteenth and one from the sixteenth century. Shortly after the trial had finished, the French minutes were translated into Latin and collated with other relevant documents into an official transcript, of which three of the five copies made and signed by the notaries still exist. I have used the edition of the trial produced by Pierre Tisset and Yvonne Lanhers between 1960 and 1971, which gives the Latin transcript and the French minute in parallel in its first volume, and a modern French translation in its second. Since then, the main substance of the hearings has been translated into English by Daniel Hobbins, and extracts translated by Craig Taylor in his edition of selected sources for Joan’s life. The records of the nullification trial of 1456 are entirely in Latin, apart from a single witness statement in French, that of Joan’s squire, Jean d’Aulon. I have used Pierre Duparc’s edition, published in the 1970s and 1980s, which gives the complete Latin text of the trial in its first two volumes, and a modern French translation in the following two. There is no complete English translation of the nullification trial, but once again Craig Taylor offers translated extracts. I have relied on all these texts (of which full details can be found in the list of Abbreviations, p. 247), and I owe a great debt to their editors and translators; I have sought in these endnotes to cross-reference between the various volumes, so that anyone wishing to investigate further can more easily find their way to the relevant text in the appropriate language. Translation is at the heart of Joan’s historical presence, given the multiple layers of text through which her life has been transmitted, and I could not have hoped to calibrate my own readings of the texts I have quoted here without the linguistic wisdom and scholarship of my parents, Grahame and Gwyneth Castor.
‘Joan of Arc’: surnames were not yet firmly established in fifteenth-century Europe. Joan’s father’s name – which was variously given in contemporary documents as Darc, Tarc, Day, Dars – seems to have been based on a place-name. Joan’s mother Isabelle was sometimes known as Vouthon – the name of the place near Domrémy where her family lived – and sometimes as Rommée, perhaps because she had made a pilgrimage to Rome. At her trial in 1431, Joan initially said that she did not know her surname; later she mentioned her parents’ names, and said that girls of her region usually took their mother’s name. See R. Pernoud and M.-V. Clin, Joan of Arc: Her Story, trans. and revised J. DuQuesnay Adams (New York, 1998), pp. 220–1; Tisset, Condamnation, II, pp. 39–40nn.
PROLOGUE
Rather than give a blow-by-blow account of a military engagement over which debate still rages, I have sought to evoke the experience of the battle of Agincourt from the French perspective. For the details of the campaign and battle, and the complexities of the evidence, see A. Curry, Agincourt: A New History (Stroud, 2005, repr. 2010). An invaluable edition of extracts from primary sources is A. Curry, The Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations (Woodbridge, 2000). For a narrative of the battle, see J. Barker, Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle (London, 2005); and for discussion of the difficulties in understanding the experience of the soldiers, J. Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (London, 1976), pp. 87–107.
For popular beliefs in France placing the (probably Roman) saints Crispin and Crispian in Soissons – although in England it was believed they had lived at Faversham in Kent – see D. H. Farmer (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (Oxford, 2003), pp. 124–5.
For France as the ‘eldest daughter of the Church’, and the king as le roi très-chrétien, see C. Beaune, Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France (Berkeley, 1991), pp. 172–80.
For the life and military career of Henry V, see C. T. Allmand, ‘Henry V (1386–1422)’, ODNB, and Henry V (London, 1992); G. L. Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England, 1360–1461 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 588–94; and, with particular emphasis on his religiosity, I. Mortimer, 1415: Henry V’s Year of Glory (London, 2009).
For Henry’s facial injury, sustained at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403: S. J. Lang, ‘Bradmore, John (d. 1412)’, in ODNB; Barker, Agincourt, pp. 29–30.
For the capture of the French king Jean II at the battle of Poitiers in 1356, and the decision of his son, Charles V, to avoid the battlefield, see R. Vaughan, Philip the Bold: The Formation of the Burgundian State (London, 1962, repr. Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 2, 7.
For Charles VI’s illness, see F. Autrand, Charles VI (Paris, 1986), pp. 290–5, 304–17; R. C. Gibbons, ‘The Active Queenship of Isabeau of Bavaria, 1392–1417’, PhD dissertation, University of Reading (1997), pp. 24–40.
For contemporary comment on Charles VI’s appearance (including his concern about his baldness), see E. Taburet-Delahaye (ed.), Paris 1400: Les Arts sous Charles VI (Paris, 2004), p. 29.
Charles VI as le bien-aimé: Beaucourt, Charles VII, I, p. 55.
For the description of the dauphin, Louis of Guienne, see Journal de Nicolas de Baye, greffier du parlement de Paris, 1400–1417, 2 vols (Paris, 1885–8), II, p. 231, and R. Vaughan, John the Fearless: The Growth of Burgundian Power (London, 1966, repr. Woodbridge, 2002), p. 209.
Duke John of Burgundy was known as ‘John the Fearless’ because of his bravery and audacity in securing Burgundian victory against the Liègeois at the battle of Othée in 1408: Vaughan, John the Fearless, p. 63; Monstrelet, Chronique, I, pp. 371, 389.
For the role of the dukes of Burgundy in French government, and conflict between John of Burgundy and Louis of Orléans, see Vaughan, Philip the Bold, pp. 40–5, 56–8, and John the Fearless, pp. 30–44.
Badges of plane and club: Vaughan, John the Fearless, pp. 234–5; Taburet-Delahaye (ed.), Paris 1400, p. 140.
For contemporary accounts of the murder of Louis of Orléans (including eyewitness testimony), see Vaughan, John the Fearless, pp. 45–6, and for the conflict of the years thereafter, pp. 67–102.
For the duke’s tower at his home in Paris, the Hôtel d’Artois, see Vaughan, John the Fearless, p. 85; Taburet-Delahaye, Paris 1400, p. 138.
‘the great all hated each other’: Journal, p. 43 (translated in Parisian Journal, p. 80).
For the absence from the b
attle of the duke of Burgundy and the late arrival of the duke of Orléans, and the likelihood that this was the royal council’s decision, see Curry, Agincourt: A New History, pp. 150–1, 218–20.
Making peace within the French lines: see the accounts of Waurin and Le Févre in Curry, Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations, p. 157.
For the idea of the humble (rather than Shakespeare’s ‘happy’) English few, see Henry V’s speech before the battle in Gesta Henrici Quinti, trans. and ed. F. Taylor and J. S. Roskell (Oxford, 1975), pp. 78–9: ‘“… by the God in Heaven upon Whose grace I have relied and in Whom is my firm hope of victory, I would not, even if I could, have a single man more than I do. For these I have here with me are God’s people, whom He deigns to let me have at this time. Do you not believe”, he asked, “that the Almighty, with these His humble few, is able to overcome the opposing arrogance of the French who boast of their great number and their own strength?”’
For the duke of Brabant, see Curry, Agincourt: A New History, pp. 221, 276–7.
The wretched day – la mauvaise journée or la malheureuse journée – was what French contemporaries soon called the battle: Curry, Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations, pp. 279, 345.
The field of blood (agrum sanguinis) is from Gesta Henrici Quinti, pp. 92–3.
1: THIS WAR, ACCURSED OF GOD
For the English interpretation of the battle, see Gesta Henrici Quinti: David and Goliath, pp. 110–11; the few against the many, and the disparity in casualties, pp. 94–7; the ‘clerical militia’, pp. 88–9; ‘that mound of pity and blood’ and ‘far be it …’, pp. 98–9; fighting a just war, pp. 14–15; Harfleur’s obstinate refusal to let Henry in, pp. 34–7; the ‘true elect of God’, pp. 2–3; ‘our gracious king, His own soldier’, pp. 88–9; severity of Henry’s restrictions on the behaviour of his troops, pp. 60–1, 68–9. Another cleric with royal connections, Thomas Elmham, wrote that St George himself had been spotted on the battlefield, fighting on the English side: Curry, Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations, p. 48, and for Elmham’s career, pp. 40–2.