The Maid and the Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  With the capture of Joan at Compiègne, the Burgundian masters saw their chance. They dispatched a letter to Philip the Good in the name of the Inquisitor of France entreating that the Maid be delivered to the university as soon as possible to stand trial for false doctrine. “Whereas all faithful Christian princes and all other true Catholics are required to extirpate all errors arising against the faith… and that it be now of common renown that by a certain woman named Joan whom the adversaries of this kingdom call the Maid, have been in several cities, good towns and other places of this kingdom, broadcast and published… diverse errors… we implore you of good affection, you, most puissant prince… that the soonest and most safely and conveniently it can be done, be sent and brought prisoner to us the said Joan, vehemently suspected of many crimes smacking of heresy, to appear before us and a procurator of the Holy Inquisitor, to answer and proceed as in reason bound,” they wrote. The extent of the university’s desire to repudiate their former colleagues’ arguments may be measured by the speed with which they proceeded. Word of the Maid’s apprehension reached Paris on May 25; the letter was dated May 26.

  The duke of Burgundy, having received this communication, went to interview Joan on June 6 and there met with his vassal, John of Luxembourg. Although there is no record of their conversation, it is likely they discussed what should be done with her. Apparently this did not include simply handing her over to the university, as no move was made in that direction. The theological faculty, failing to obtain a satisfactory response to its first salvo, recognized that stronger measures were called for and handed the responsibility for securing Joan to a man uniquely qualified to accomplish the task: Pierre Cauchon, the bishop of Beauvais.

  The career of Pierre Cauchon was a conspicuous example of the advantages to be drawn through the assiduous massaging of the shared ambitions of Church and state. A former rector—a position equivalent to head of school—and an impassioned mouthpiece for the Burgundian agenda, Cauchon had thrown the full weight of the university behind the duke of Burgundy and the English occupation. Under his supervision, the theological faculty had provided the intellectual and scholastic arguments, known as the “theory of the double monarchy,” which had justified the crowning of Henry V, and he himself had helped to negotiate the Treaty of Troyes, by which agreement the dauphin had been disinherited. For these services, Cauchon had been rewarded with the bishopric of Beauvais by the duke of Burgundy. Since then, he had so ingratiated himself with the duke of Bedford that he succeeded in having himself appointed as a counselor to Henry VI, a position for which he was compensated by a stipend of 1,000 livres, paid by the English treasury.

  Recently, however, Cauchon’s career had stalled. Despite his best efforts to prove his worth to his English employers over the previous decade, he was still only a bishop. Still, Cauchon had hope, for just at the time of Joan’s capture, the archbishopric of Rouen, a particularly valuable diocese, fell vacant. There would of course be strong competition for the posting, so the bishop of Beauvais knew that he would have to perform a meaningful service to the duke of Bedford to secure the appointment. The procurement of Joan for trial and punishment presented itself as a happy confluence of interests. It was no great secret that the English wanted the Maid delivered into their hands for execution.

  And Cauchon had his own grudge against Joan. He had been in Reims just prior to Charles’s coronation, and with the coming of Joan and her army had been forced to flee in a manner that he considered most unbecoming to his position. He had subsequently taken refuge in his home bishopric of Beauvais, only to be forced out a second time when, in the aftermath of the coronation, this city too had embraced Charles’s side in the war. Even more ominously for Joan, the fall of Beauvais to the opposition did worse than ruffle Cauchon’s vanity; it deprived him of the living associated with his bishopric, and Pierre Cauchon was not a man who took a loss of income lightly.

  Thus inspired, the bishop of Beauvais fell to work, opening a channel of communication between the duke of Bedford and the University of Paris. Although there was some feeling within the English camp that the best strategy with regard to the Maid was simply to force the duke of Burgundy to hand her over, tie her into a sack, and drown her in the river, Cauchon was soon able to make his allies see the political advantages of the Inquisition’s first publicly trying her and condemning her for heresy. By obtaining the imprimatur of the Holy Church—for Joan would certainly be found guilty—those among the opposition whom she had beguiled would be undeceived, and Charles and his Armagnac theological advisers discredited and humiliated. Moreover, as the punishment for heresy (which, as everyone knew, was to be burned at the stake) was always carried out by the secular authority within whose jurisdiction the trial was held, the En glish would ultimately have the satisfaction of executing Joan in the most painful way possible.

  The merits of this plan to both sides were so obvious that it took very little time to work out the details. On July 14, 1430, at a private audience, Pierre Cauchon was able to personally hand John of Luxembourg an official summons. “It is by this that it is required by the Bishop of Beauvais of my lord the Duke of Burgundy and of my lord John of Luxembourg… in the name on behalf of the King our sire [Henry VI] and on his own behalf as Bishop of Beauvais: that the woman who is commonly called Joan the Maid, prisoner, be sent to the King to be delivered over to the Church to hold her trial because she is suspected and defamed to have committed many crimes, sortileges, idolatry, invocations of enemies and other several cases touching our faith and against that faith.” The document was strongly worded, but it was not upon language that the bishop of Beauvais relied to ensure the success of his mission. With these papers came the offer of a ransom of 10,000 livres tournois drawn on the English treasury.

  To have a ransom paid by the enemy was definitely not what the chivalric process had intended. As word of the offer leaked out, Charles was provoked to a semblance of action. He sent an embassy to the Burgundians in which he informed them sharply that “they should not for anything in the world lend themselves to such a transaction or, if they did, he would inflict similar treatment on those of their party whom he had in his hands.” This was largely a hollow threat—it is unlikely that the king of Scotland, for example, would pay much for a Burgundian prisoner of war—but it demonstrates that this course of action was unusual enough that it had not been anticipated by the French side. The king also responded by sending military aid to Compiègne, which was being besieged by the Burgundians. It is true that Charles did not offer a competing ransom (not that he had the money), but to do so would have been pointless; the English would never have allowed the duke of Burgundy to return Joan to the French. They feared her effect on the civilian population and the war too much. The best result Charles could hope for was that she be allowed to remain where she was.

  Ten thousand livres tournois was not a tremendous sum, but it was still a good deal of money, and gives a sense of just how badly the English wanted Joan delivered into their hands. And yet John of Luxembourg hesitated. He was surrounded by women who were sympathetic to Joan and who had no love of the English. He had married Joan of Béthune, whose first husband, Robert, duke of Bar, had been killed fighting against Henry V at Agincourt. Robert had been Yolande of Aragon’s uncle, so Joan of Béthune was her aunt by marriage.* The Maid had an even stronger advocate in the person of John’s elderly aunt, the lady of Luxembourg, who had stood as godmother to Charles VII at his christening, and appears to have promised her nephew that she would make him her heir if he would refuse the English offer. Joan herself reported, “The lady of Luxembourg asked my lord of Luxembourg that I not be delivered to the English.”

  Despite this promise of protection, Joan, who was under no illusions as to what Cauchon’s offer meant, spent the summer and early fall in terror of being sold to her enemies and begged her voices to help her. “I would rather die than be put in the hands of the English,” she told Saint Catherine, whom Joan claimed respon
ded that “God would aid me and also the people of Compiègne.” So overpowering was Joan’s dread that despite her angel’s reassurance and against her explicit instructions, the prisoner eventually despaired and threw herself from the window of the high tower in which she was being held. The injuries Joan sustained in this fall were so severe that at first her Burgundian jailers believed her to be dead, and it was several days before she recovered sufficiently to be able even to eat or drink. Asked later by her inquisitors, “What was the reason you jumped from the tower of Beaurevoir?” Joan replied, “I had heard that all the people of Compiègne beyond the age of seven would be subjected to fire and sword, and I preferred to die rather than to live after such a destruction of good people, and that was one of the reasons why I jumped; and the other was that I knew that I had been sold to the English, and I would have preferred to die rather than to be in the hands of the English, my enemies.”

  Her worst fears were realized when in autumn two events occurred that sealed her fate. On September 18, the aged lady of Luxembourg succumbed to overexertion and died while undertaking a fatiguing journey to Avignon, depriving Joan of her most formidable champion; and on October 24 the siege of Compiègne was lifted with the aid of an army sent by Charles under the leadership of the count of Vendôme and the lord of Boussac, who had fought beside Joan at Orléans. John of Luxembourg, who was in command of the siege for the duke of Burgundy, was obliged to retreat ignominiously from the field, leaving behind his heavy artillery. He returned to the castle of Beaurevoir in what might be expected to be none too fine a humor, and under pressure from Philip the Good and the regency government he at last accepted the English offer. The ransom payment was hurriedly forwarded on December 6 and Pierre Cauchon, gleeful at his success and anxious to claim his prize, arrived soon afterward to arrange for Joan’s removal by an armed escort. “The Bishop of Beauvais whom I saw return after he had been to fetch her [Joan]…[gave] an account of his embassy… with joy and exultation,” reported an eyewitness. By Christmas Joan had been transferred to Rouen, deep in the heart of English territory, there to await interrogation by the Inquisition on matters pertaining to the true faith in preparation for her trial on charges of heresy and witchcraft.

  THE JUDICIAL ACTION against Joan of Arc began on January 9, 1431, and lasted nearly five months. During this period, both her jailers and the vindictive men who set themselves up as her examiners made every attempt to break her spirit by subjecting her to a continual stream of mental, verbal, and physical abuse. Although as a defendant in an Inquisition trial Joan had the right to be held in a Church prison and given access to the protection of nuns, she was instead consigned to the civil authorities, who placed her under a male guard in a tower cell of the castle of Rouen, owned by the English earl of Warwick. Under pretense of preventing her escape, she was kept shackled throughout the entire ordeal. “And I know for certain that at night she slept with two pairs of irons on her legs, attached by a chain very tightly to another chain that was connected to the foot of her bed, itself anchored by a large piece of wood five or six feet long. The contraption was fastened by a key,” Jean Massieu, a member of the French escort responsible for conveying Joan back and forth from her cell to the courtroom, later testified. Joan was also kept fettered in irons during the day while at trial, and she was further threatened with imprisonment in an iron cage, specially built to hold her, in which she would be kept standing “fastened by the neck, the hands, and the feet,” if she misbehaved or attempted flight. Of the five soldiers who guarded her, three were stationed inside her cell and two just outside the door; all were “Englishmen of the lowest rank, those who are called in French houssepaillers [abusers],” reported another eyewitness. When she first arrived, Joan had been required to expose herself to yet another intimate physical examination to confirm her virginity, this one conducted under the auspices of the duchess of Bedford (the duke of Bedford concealing himself “in a secret place” and peeping at her to satisfy his curiosity). The prisoner’s maidenhood being established, the duchess “had the warders and others forbidden to offer her any violence.” However, while this may have prevented Joan from actually being raped by her guard, it did not stop the soldiers from abusing her in other ways just short of that, or of attempting to humiliate her through lewdness, and they evidently were encouraged to give free vent to their contempt, as Joan was to complain of their behavior toward her throughout her captivity.

  Again contrary to established procedure, she was given no counsel, and when both a leading Church lawyer and a local cleric objected to this irregularity, the one was ostracized and the other jailed. Pierre Cauchon dispatched a spy to Domrémy to obtain incriminating evidence about Joan’s past that could be used against her in court; when the man reported back that he had found “nothing concerning Joan which he would not have liked to find about his own sister,” the bishop flew into a rage and refused to pay him for his time and expenses, complaining that “he was a traitor and a bad man and that he had not done what he should have done and was ordered to do.” Even more odiously, in a flagrant violation of canon law that stated clearly that only ecclesiastics from the diocese of Rouen had the authority to adjudicate the case, the bishop of Beauvais contrived to have himself named as the second of Joan’s two judges. His appointment, condoned by the duke of Bedford, drew strong protest from the other principal magistrate in the case, the vice-inquisitor, that “as much for the serenity of his conscience as for a more certain conduct of the trial, he did not wish to be involved in this affair.” Cauchon was forced to appeal to the chief inquisitor of France in order to compel his fellow judge to undertake his duty; the vice-inquisitor eventually appeared in court but continued to sulk throughout the trial, and his reluctance to officiate was obvious to all who participated in the inquest.

  Although only Cauchon and the vice-inquisitor had the power to judge and pass sentence on Joan, dozens of other clerics, some sixty-three in all representing both England and France, including a prestigious contingent of masters from the University of Paris, took part in her examination and trial in an advisory capacity. Known as “assessors,” many of these prelates were as anxious as Cauchon to play a visible role in Joan’s conviction and so advance their careers. They made for such a noisy crowd on the first day of her interrogation that the notary responsible for recording the questions and answers couldn’t hear to do his job properly. “The assessors with the judges put questions to her, and sometimes at the moment when one was questioning her and she was answering his question, another interrupted her answer so much so that she several times said to those who were interrogating her: ‘Fine lords, ask one at a time,’” reported Jean Massieu.

  Every deception and ruse that could be used to undermine her testimony was employed so shamelessly that even the administrative staff of the court protested. To ensure that the official record portrayed Joan’s responses as being sufficiently heretical, two concealed priests, one of them a canon of Rouen, kept a separate, edited account of the proceedings. “At the beginning of the trial, during five or six days, while I set down in writing the Maid’s answers and excuses, sometimes the judges tried to constrain me, by translating into Latin, to put into other terms, changing the meaning of the words or, in some other manner, my understanding,” Guillaume Manchon, the official court notary, later complained. “And were placed two men, at the command of my lord of Beauvais, in a window near to the place where the judges were. And there was a serge curtain drawn in front of the window so that they should not be seen. These men wrote and reported what was charged against Joan, and suppressed her excuses…. And after the session, while collating what they had written, the two others reported in another manner and did not put down Joan’s excuses.” Manchon protested this surreptitious note-taking by insisting on highlighting the differences between the clandestine register and his own official record. “On this subject my lord of Beauvais was greatly enraged against me,” he observed. This same canon of Rouen, a crony of Caucho
n’s, ingratiated himself with Joan, the better to betray her. “[He] pretended to be of the Maid’s own country and, by that means, contrived to have dealings, interviews and familiar talk with her, by giving her news from home which were pleasing to her, and he asked to be her confessor,” Manchon continued. “And what she told him in secret he found means to bring to the ears of the notaries.” Again, the bishop of Beauvais made use of subterfuge and concealment in order to entrap Joan in the act of committing heresy. “In fact, at the beginning of the trial, myself and Boisguillaume, with witnesses, were put secretly into a room near to where there was a hole through which one could listen, so that we could report what she said or confessed to the said [canon],” complained the notary.

  To these as well as all other attempts to confuse, deceive, intimidate, or degrade her, Joan responded with a degree of courage that surpassed any feat she had achieved on the battlefield. During the investigatory phase of the trial, which lasted from her first court appearance on February 21, 1431, until March 26, she would frequently spend up to seven hours a day—from eight o’clock in the morning until noon, with a second session following the midday meal—patiently answering the inquisitors’ questions and often sparring with them verbally when the line of interrogation became too repetitive or inane. Fettered in irons throughout, she endured the assessors’ unending, none-too-subtle probing into her early life and religious beliefs, after which she would be marched back to her cell in the evening, dragging her chains, to face the insults and depravity of her English guard. Still wearing the leg irons, she would then be clamped into a second set of iron restraints. In these she would snatch what sleep she could, conscious always of the presence of the soldiers by her bed and the need to fend them off if necessary, only to be dragged from her quarters early the next morning to face her accusers for another long day of interrogation.