Joan of Arc

by Timothy Wilson-Smith

  Most of the chroniclers fall into obvious groups, pro-French, pro-Burgundian or pro-English, some with less immediate reasons of loyalty to one or other side yet take a strong line on Joan. Only one writes with something like a true historian’s detachment. Enea Silvio Piccolomini stressed his accomplishments as a man of letters by calling himself Aeneas Sylvius. He was a cleric not yet ordained as a priest, a diplomat who had for long been in the service of the anti-pope Felix V who yet ended his life as Pope Pius II, a chameleon at ease in his rakish youth before turning gracefully into an austere old man. His Commentaries reveal him as the most astute observer of the age. He never met Joan, but he took the trouble to learn much about her. He may have spoken to Cauchon and some of Joan’s other judges at the Council of Basel, but he shares none of their animosity towards her. He shows a special interest in the events surrounding the coronation and notes that the English had thought of removing the sacred oil from Reims before the French arrived, but failed to do so because ‘they are thought to be have been frustrated by God’s will’.1 He has an improbable tale that Joan was captured outside Compiègne after charging at Duke Philip himself. And yet he demonstrates his innate shrewdness as he concludes: ‘So died Joan, a wonderful, admirable virgin’, before adding, ‘whether her achievement was divine or human, I would find it hard to state.’ Other writers found it much easier to make up their minds.

  One of the most attractive of Joan’s supporters, Perceval de Cagny, served the house of Alençon for forty-six years. He may not have been so much a witness of what he describes as the spokesman of his master’s voice, but when he began to write in 1436 he was close to the events, and, since Alençon had known Joan better than any other member of the royal family and any other military leader, Cagny’s own voice has a ring of authenticity. ‘Before her arrival, neither the king nor the princes of the blood knew what advice to follow. And after by her aid and counsel things went from good to better to best.’ There is a tone of mounting excitement as she encourages the people of Orléans, gives heart to the soldiers, helps win back the city and watches the English depart. Cagny conveys a sense of her manner of speaking, how she swore ‘by my martin’, how she called his master ‘my fine Duke’ (mon beau duc), how she could override all objections, for example to the march on Reims. He tells how, after taking a notable part in capturing the fortified towns of the Loire and winning the battle of Patay, she turned to Alençon to announce: ‘Sound the trumpets, mount our horses! It’s the moment to go to our gentle King Charles to put him on the route from his consecration at Reims.’ Alençon stood in for the Duke of Burgundy at the ceremony, and Cagny does not mention what Joan did, for she played a unique, not a traditional part in the drama, before he and Joan resumed their military campaign. Her aim was simple: ‘The Maid intended to restore suzerainty to the king and the kingdom to its obedience.’ As the king seemed irresolute, while his mind sought out tortuous diplomatic paths, she eventually lost patience. ‘By my martin,’ she told Alençon, ‘I want to see Paris from closer up than I have ever seen it.’ The king’s behaviour frustrated them both. For Cagny the withdrawal from Paris had a disastrous effect on morale: ‘so the will of the Maid and the king’s army was broken’. He was sure that the dominant royal councillors did not want the Maid and Alençon to be together. Her venture in the upper Loire confirmed her disillusion and led to her resolution to save Compiègne. Cagny did not trust her judges at Rouen, as they had used every ruse, he thought, to condemn her and have her burnt for heresy; and yet what angered him was the behaviour of the king, for Charles was reluctant to fight.

  Charles VII himself was more inscrutable than his cousin; and the man charged with glorifying him had the harder task. Jean Chartier, a cantor from the royal abbey of St-Denis, was probably given the task of being royal chronicler just because it was traditional that a monk of St-Denis should hold that office. It is likely that he wrote about Joan in the 1440s, when the war had finally turned to French advantage. Again and again Chartier stresses the king’s benevolent role. He tells how the king gave Joan the forces she needed, how after the relief of Orléans he provided extra forces to take the nearby Loire towns, how he raised a grand army to take him on his route for the coronation, how, when Joan wished to take Auxerre by force, the king arranged for the town to surrender peacefully. Chartier does not mention Joan’s part in the coronation, and he kept the king firmly in the centre of the picture. The king decided to return to the Île de France, the heart of his dominions. At Senlis, just north of Paris, the English dared not confront him. Joan, not well informed about the moat protecting Paris, attacked it in vain. Chartier knows about St-Pierre-le-Moûtier – the king commanded her to go there – and does not admit that she was contravening the king’s intention to surrender Compiègne when she was captured. He was certain that at the end she died a good Catholic – it would let the king down if she were not – then he ends the story with a surprising final remark. Once the sword she had received from Ste-Catherine-de-Fierbois was broken, she was never again so successful in war. Chartier is thinking back to the wonderful stories of chivalry, with their insistence on miraculous God-given swords, as in French stories about Charlemagne and Roland or British stories about Arthur. At heart he was a modern servant of a very modern king.

  The two longest chronicles favourable to Joan have neither the fluency of Cagny nor the official air of Chartier; and they also date from later in the century. The longest of all, the so-called Journal du siège d’Orléans et du voyage de Reims, probably took much of its material from documents in Orléans that date from 1429, but it was not written down until some forty years afterwards. For the military historian it has a special value as it gives a blow-by-blow, shot-by-shot account of events; and for the general reader that is its greatest defect, since the facts are too much to absorb. The Chronique de la Pucelle derives from both Chartier and the Journal du siège and its author also knows what was said in the nullification trial of Joan, for instance by her page Louis de Coutes and by the Bastard of Orléans, now the Comte de Dunois. It starts with the accession of Charles VII in 1422 and goes down to the moment in 1429 when the king, having failed to take Paris, returned to his original base at Bourges. Like the Journal du siège it says nothing about Joan’s capture, trial and death. Both these accounts are of local interest and they make no attempt to understand Joan’s psychology.

  Psychologically, some Burgundian courtiers were more sophisticated. The ‘grand duke of the West’, as Philip the Good of Burgundy was called, had his own pet advocate in his court chronicler Georges Chastellain, whose works in a nineteenth-century edition run to some eight volumes. Chastellain shared the duke’s taste for flamboyant rhetoric and aims to be entertaining rather than accurate. On Joan, alas, he has little new to say.

  Another Burgundian chronicler is especially important, because he became well known. Enguerrand or Enguerran de Monstrelet claimed he never bore arms, but documentary evidence suggests that he had once, in 1424. For Joan’s story he had an advantage. Throughout his adult life he was a client of the house of Luxembourg, and so probably owed to Luxembourgeois favour the distinction of being awarded in about 1440 the post that marked the summit of his career, the provostship of Cambrai. The post gave him the leisure to write down what he remembered and so to repay his debt to the family. As a trusted follower of Jean de Luxembourg, comte de Ligny, he had had many opportunities to witness or hear of important events. The most famous example came in 1430, when he was with the Burgundian army outside Compiègne. He says he was present at the interview Duke Philip had with Joan after her capture, but adds, sadly for historians, ‘I cannot recall his words.’ He also knew that she was his master’s prisoner for some time before being taken to Rouen to be tried and burnt, and he was able to quote part of the letter sent afterwards in the name of the King of England to the duke, but he does not mention anything about the process of the trial; nor does he say anything about the deal by which Jean de Luxembourg had sold Joan to the En
glish. Monstrelet’s forgetfulness begins to look a little too convenient.

  His assertions are also not always sound. He states that Joan was a servant in an inn for a long time and that it was there she had learnt to ride and ‘other things that young girls are not accustomed to do’. This fairy story had a long life and recurs in the eighteenth century. Monstrelet is perhaps ironic when he said Joan was divinely inspired and those who saw and heard her came to believe it too, but he does not grudge her a central role in the run of successes the French enjoyed in the summer of 1429. Writing in the 1440s, when the Burgundians were at least passive allies of the French, he has to approve the consecration of Charles VII at Reims, although he notices that many who should have been there, such as the Duke of Burgundy and the Bishop of Beauvais, were not. He does not indicate why they were absent, but is much clearer when citing the long letter Bedford sent in the name of his master, Henry, by the grace of God true, natural and legal King of France and England to the newly consecrated king – here called the Dauphin of Viennois. Joan is mentioned again when he tells the story of the siege of Paris, perhaps because she failed there and because Charles ordered a withdrawal, being greatly concerned about his own wounded soldiers. He also draws attention to Joan’s willingness to have a captured Burgundian leader, Franquet d’Arras, executed. He thus subtly undermines her reputation.

  As Monstrelet’s style is clear and his tone placid, he has been regarded as impartial, but a close examination of what he says shows that, in the case of Joan, his version of events is often unfair. Another Burgundian sympathiser is much more unreliable.

  The man known as the ‘Bourgeois de Paris’ was not in fact a burgess of that city; rather, he was a member of its university and his hatred of the Maid was all the more virulent. An intellectual with a bilious temperament, he scoffs at the likely tale that, at the time she was a child-shepherdess, birds came whenever she called them to feed from her hands. He becomes eloquent only when he comes to events with which he was familiar, those involving Paris, both Paris under siege and Paris as a place where people like himself approved of Joan’s trial and condemnation.

  The attackers, he says, were fighting ‘for a creature like a woman among them, whom people called the Maid. What she was, God knows.’ Naturally he mocks her assertions that she would take Paris. He was not impressed that the French had chosen the Nativity of Notre-Dame as the day for an attack. On 23 May 1430 ‘dame Joan, Maid of the Armagnacs’ was eventually captured at Compiègne. Two women, the oldest of whom was Pierronne, from Bretagne bretonnante (that is, south Brittany, where people spoke Breton), testified in Paris that Joan, who was armed with the Armagnacs, was a good woman: Pierronne ‘affirmed and swore that God often appeared to her in His humanity’. She went on to state that He also appeared to her in a white robe and she uttered other similar blasphemies; and that is why she came to be burnt.

  The Journal’s entry for 30 May 1431 is lengthy, learned and venomous. Dame Joan, clad in male attire, had to listen to a long sermon, in which she was told

  about the great unhappy evils that through her had been brought to Christendom, especially in the kingdom of France, as everyone knows; and how on the feast of Our Lady’s birthday she had come to bring fire and blood to Paris . . . and how at Senlis and elsewhere she had made simple folk idolise her, as, by her false hypocrisy they followed her as a holy Maid; as she had given them to understand that the glorious archangel Michael, saint Catherine and saint Margaret and several other saints appeared to her often, and spoke to her as one friend to another; and not as God has done sometimes to his friends by revelations, but physically and mouth to mouth, as one lover to another.

  The mention of physical contact, which does not appear anywhere in the trial records, shows how strongly this ‘journalist’ felt. He is then ready to itemise her iniquities, paragraph by paragraph, remorselessly cataloguing her terrible errors, blasphemies, lies and heresies until it comes as a relief to the pious reader to know that such an appalling woman, who had worn the clothes of a man when she was as young as fourteen, who had left home in company with the devil, who was full of blood and fire until she was burnt – that when she called on her spirits to help her, none appeared. She was but one of the four women directed by the Dominican friar, Brother Richard (this was the man she had met at Troyes). The Bourgeois was glad that Pierronne and one other had been burnt in Paris and Joan in Rouen; and the fourth, who appeared in 1440, pretending to be Joan, was shown to be a fraud. The real Joan had not survived the stake and her ashes had been thrown into the river, so that no part of her body could be used for the purposes of sorcery. It was a thought from which one observer took comfort: the women had been seen as they were, as deceivers of mankind, and they were gone.

  During the middle and late years of the fifteenth century there were no worthy successors to the English monastic chroniclers of the past, but then since the Black Death there were few men of wide experience in English cloisters; and lay writers to take their place had not yet been born. The first English printer, William Caxton, briefly records how the French revived under ‘the Dolphin’ (the English word for the Dauphin) and how one of their leaders was ‘a mayde whiche they named la pucelle de Dieu’. Caxton knows a little about Joan’s success and that with the help of ‘syr John Luxemburgh’ and many others ‘the forsayd Pucelle was taken in the field, and there she was put in pryson, and there she was judged by the lawe to be brent’. One detail Caxton adds suggests what was to become an English obsession: ‘And then she sayd that she was with childe; wher by she was respited a whyle; but in conclusyon, it was founde that she was not with chylde, and then she was brent in Roen.’ English chroniclers liked to think that she was no maid. Joan was never ‘the harlot of the Armagnacs’. Aristocratic women on the Anglo-Burgundian side were as sure as aristocratic women on the Armagnac side that Joan was a virgin. That was one reason why she could not be a witch. The ‘English’ view of Joan was simply wrong.

  What is more surprising is that in France, at a time when the Valois were in firm control, people were still confused by the different ways in which Joan was viewed. The anonymous author of the first biography of Joan of Arc, who claimed to be writing at the command of Louis XII (1498–1515) and of Louis de Graville, Admiral of France, pointed out that ‘the chronicles dispute and differ’ and yet he himself did not marshal his sources to give a convincing account of Joan from the Orleanist point of view that Louis XII, who had been Duke of Orléans before he became King of France, must have expected. He had read his Monstrelet and he was determined to vindicate Joan against the old enemies of France, the English. But he does give a clear version of the secret she revealed to privately to Charles VII. According to the anonymous biographer, this involved three requests the king had prayed for in the oratory of his chapel at Loches, and it was after Joan told him what the requests were that Charles had believed her. The biographer then summarises the triumphs of 1429, omits the failures and skips to Joan’s capture at Compiègne and her transference to Rouen. He cites ‘Anglo-Burgundian’ letters, sent to and from Cauchon, involving the University of Paris, Jean de Luxembourg, Chancellor Nicolas Rolin, the child-king Henry VI and others, to justify Joan’s condemnation.2

  This careful citing of some important sources has a curious result. The author wishes to show how wonderful his heroine was and how cruel her death, but most of the evidence he provides is hostile to her. The reason seems to be that as Graville was a Norman, the most accessible documents for his author came from Rouen, and they all dated from the time when the English held that city and master-minded the trial. The author therefore does not even discuss how the verdict of the Rouen trial was nullified in 1452–6, which means that he cannot have had access to the nullification records. Those records were kept by the people who had an interest in them: the king, the house of Orléans and the cathedral of Notre-Dame. The story of Joan’s life and death was public knowledge. The grounds for thinking the initial verdict on Joan unjust remai
ned private.

  Joan’s first biographer suffered from a fault shared by most historians down to 1850: he did not know the whole story. This is one of the reasons why by the start of the sixteenth century there were differing accounts of Joan that could not all be true; and yet there was little chance that anyone could have found out what was the truth. Contradictory chronicles were at the origins of differing traditions about Joan. One, that of Perceval de Cagny, fitted in with what was said at the nullification trial, but Cagny wrote for his master Alençon, a star witness at that trial. For a long time Monstrelet, who met Joan only once and who says he forgot what was said on that occasion, was much better known. English writers did not have the Burgundian problem of having to accept that the king their duke had repudiated in 1429 was indeed their king; they had no reason to wonder whether the Duke of Bedford, who demanded Joan’s condemnation, and the Earl of Warwick, who supervised it, might have been mistaken. The way was open for many ideas about Joan that confused fiction with fact; and it was not until the mid-nineteenth century, when all the chronicles, all the records of Joan’s life, above all the trial documents, were available that any sense could be made of that life. In the meantime, most people were guided by what they wanted to believe.

  In the fifteenth century, history was largely an exercise in rhetoric, an attempt to persuade the reader to look at events from a particular angle. De Cagny put Alençon’s view, Chartier that of Charles VII’s court, Monstrelet that of the house of Luxembourg, the Bourgeois of Paris represented only himself but he wrote as an Anglo-Burgundian. Only in the 1840s did Quicherat make possible a careful comparison of the different texts. That process continues today. Two parts of Joan’s life can be traced almost day by day: the period from 12 February 1429, when she told Robert de Baudricourt that the French had been defeated at the battle of the Herrings, to 21 September 1429, when her army was disbanded after the order to withdraw from Paris; and the period from Thursday 9 January 1431, when her trial began, to Wednesday 30 May, when she died. Some portions of her early life can be inferred: it is possible to sketch in her activities from her dismissal in September 1429 to her capture on Tuesday 23 May 1430; and there is some knowledge of where she was imprisoned until the end of the year, including about four months at Beaurevoir, a stay over which historians have to be silent. By quarrying in the rich seams of Quicherat’s documents, an ingenious modern historian, Kelly DeVries, has been able to write a detailed study, Joan of Arc: a Military Leader. Without knowledge of Quicherat’s documents, Shakespeare and Voltaire, in a recent scholar’s phrase, ‘set fire to history’,3 in other words they had recourse to legend. At the same time, other writers, also with an uncertain grasp of her whole story, prepared the way for the development of her myth.