The Maid and the Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  Throughout, she never flagged. The inquiry emerged as a test of wills between Joan and her examiners as the assessors tried, often with a conspicuous lack of success, to break her down. The first session, for example, was almost entirely devoted to Cauchon’s getting Joan to swear an oath “to speak the truth… in all matters on which you will be questioned,” and to demonstrate her religious training by having her recite the Pater Noster. Joan countered that she could not take such an oath as “it may happen that you will ask me a thing which I shall not tell you,” and declined to recite either the Pater Noster or Ave Maria unless Cauchon first agreed to hear her in confession and render absolution, an act that would have precluded the bishop of Beauvais from further participation in her prosecution. After persistent haranguing, the best Cauchon could do was to elicit a compromise from Joan: “About my father and mother, and everything that I have done since I took the road to come to France, I shall willingly swear; but never have I said or revealed anything about the revelations made to me by God except to Charles, my king. And even if you wish to cut my head off, I will not reveal them, because I know from my visions that I must keep them secret.” Joan was equally unmovable when it came to Cauchon’s second demand; as the bishop ultimately refused her request to hear her confession, she never declaimed the Lord’s Prayer.

  By the second day and for many of the sessions following, the inquiry shifted to Joan’s childhood, the emergence of her voices, her journey to the royal court at Chinon, and her mission in France. This interrogation was handled by Master Jean Beaupère, another former rector of the University of Paris who, like Cauchon, was in the employ of the English king. It was Beaupère’s job, as a man of superior theological learning, to trick Joan into a heretical statement. This he was unable to do despite repeated attempts. “This voice which you say appears to you, is it an angel or does it come immediately from God, or is it the voice of a saint?” he asked, and then, “Do you believe that it displeases God that the truth be told?” and, finally, “Do you know if you are in God’s grace?” to which Joan famously replied, “If I am not, may God bring me to it; if I am, may God keep me in it,” a statement of such obvious and forceful piety that Beaupère subsequently gave up on that line of questioning altogether.

  Despite this setback, the following day Beaupère continued as Joan’s principal interrogator. Under his direction, the inquiry now took an extremely curious turn. In a discussion of her childhood in Domrémy, the assessor suddenly asked Joan about the Fairy Tree and the spring.

  “Asked about the tree: [Joan] replied, that quite near to Domrémy there was a tree that was called the Ladies’ Tree, and which others called the Fairies’ Tree, and nearby was a spring (fontaine) and that she had heard tell that people with fevers drank of it and that they visited this spring in this way seeking a cure. But she did not know whether or not they were cured….

  “That she had gone sometimes with other girls in summer time and made garlands for our Lady of Domrémy there… that she had heard from many old people, not of her own generation, that the fairies frequented the place; and that she had heard tell of one named Jhenne, wife of the mayor of the town of Domrémy, her godmother, that she had seen them there. Whether or not it was true she did not know… that she had never seen a fairy, as far as she knew, there or anywhere else.”

  By the fifteenth century, the language of witchcraft (for the English demanded that Joan be tried as a witch) was very specific. Evil sorcery was connoted by the Latin term maleficium, which referred in general to demons, necromancers, witches, and diabolism. From 1400 to 1430 there were at least seventy recorded cases of witchcraft that came to trial in Europe. The records of these proceedings invoked the devil, evil invocations, black magic, witches’ sabbaths, sodomy, demon worship, attempted murder through sorcery, ritualized spells, bewitchment, incantations, conjuring, apostasy, cults, desecration, infanticide, phantasms, cannibalism, divinations, and secret compacts with Satan. However, the word “fairy” does not appear in any of them. “It has long been clear that most of the charges leveled against Joan were deliberate falsifications,” wrote medieval witchcraft specialist Jeffrey Burton Russell. “But the irrelevance of witchcraft in her case is even more fundamental…. These charges… were quite removed from the usual witch tradition. Dancing with fairies or adoring them was an accusation drawn from old folklore, not from the thoroughly developed witch traditions from the mid-fifteenth century.”

  Yet the inquisitors hammered away on this point: the tree (standing in for the wood where Raymondin had wandered despondently after killing his uncle) and the spring (representing the fountain where he first met the fairy Melusine), and, later, whether Joan had interacted with anyone in addition to her godmother who had “erred with fairies.” It is clear that the assessors, too, knew the story of Melusine, and were trying to taint Joan with it. Again and again she denied it. “She said that she had heard it said to her brother that they said in the countryside that she got her revelations from the tree and the fairies, but she did not and she had told him clearly to the contrary,” the official record reported.

  Beaupère’s pointed probing of the Melusine mythology, so out of place in a late medieval witchcraft trial, remains one of the strongest pieces of evidence to date that the decision to introduce Joan to the royal court at Chinon had its genesis in this classic romance. Too many people, both on the king’s side and within the French Inquisition, saw the parallels between the Maid’s mission and Jean of Arras’s well-known work for this to have been a coincidence. Only the Maid herself, illiterate and ignorant of the novel, did not make this connection. Joan’s voices sprang from her deep spiritualism and unshakable belief in God; even if she had heard something of the tale of Melusine, she would not have associated the story with herself. Joan knew that she was not a fairy.

  THE TRIAL DRAGGED ON. The assessors plumbed every incident of Joan’s life in an attempt to elicit responses that could later be used against her in an indictment. She, in turn, demonstrated the quick tongue and passionate defiance that had so impressed Charles’s religious advisers at Poitiers. Asked by her interrogators if Saint Michael appeared to her naked, she retorted, “Do you think that God cannot afford to clothe him?” When further probed as to whether or not the saint had hair, she asked, “Why should it have been cut off?” Time and again Pierre Cauchon tried to find out what sign she had given Charles to make the king believe her to be a messenger of God; time and again she refused to say until at last she snapped, “I have always told you that you will not drag that out of my mouth. Go and ask him!”

  As might be expected given the Armagnac masters’ defense of Joan’s male attire, the Burgundian University of Paris assessors made sure to introduce this issue. Beaupère, the theorist, was again responsible for Joan’s interrogation on this point. Responding to one of Joan’s statements that she was forbidden by God from answering a certain question, he asked, “How do you know how to make the distinction when you answer on certain points and others not?”

  “On certain points I asked permission [of her voices] and received it,” she replied. “I would rather be torn apart by four horses than to have gone to France without God’s permission.”

  “Did he command you to wear man’s clothes?” Beaupère, seeing his chance, continued.

  “The clothes are a trifle, the very least of things,” Joan replied. “I did not put on man’s clothes by the counsel of any man in the world and I did not put on the clothes and I did not do anything excepting by the commandment of God and the angels.”

  “Do you believe that you did right to put on man’s clothes?” Beaupère pressed.

  “All that I have done, I have done by God’s commandment and I believe that I did right, and I expect from it good warrant and good succour.”

  “In the particular case of taking on man’s clothes, do you think that you did right?” Beaupère insisted.

  “Of what I have done in the world I have done nothing but by God’s commandm
ent,” Joan replied, demonstrating her ability to answer honestly without straying into the heretical.

  Much later, Beaupère would recall the Maid’s dexterity in this regard. “She was right subtle, with a subtlety pertaining to woman,” he observed with annoyance.

  Sustained by her faith and her belief that her voices would save her, Joan maintained her self-possession and strength of character throughout the long weeks of relentless interrogation. The humble yet joyous piety that permeated many of her responses still resonates today. “Since your voices have told you that in the end you would go to Paradise, do you hold yourself assured of being saved and of not being damned in hell?” demanded one of her inquisitors. “After that revelation, do you believe that you cannot commit mortal sin?” “I know nothing about that, but in all things I trust in God,” replied Joan. “That answer is of great weight,” warned the inquisitor. “Wherefore I hold it to be a great treasure,” Joan countered.

  Of course, in the end, it didn’t matter how well she answered or how pure her spirit or how innocent she was of the crimes for which she was being investigated. Joan was in the hands of the English, and the English wanted her condemned as a witch and burned at the stake. On March 26, the interrogatory phase of the proceedings ended and the next day a document officially charging Joan with heresy and witchcraft in seventy instances, of which three articles specifically referred to the defendant’s interaction with fairies and six condemned her assumption of male attire “which the laws of God and man do forbid her to wear,” was drawn up and read aloud by the clerk of the court.* The second phase of Joan’s ordeal, in which the bishop of Beauvais and the vice-inquisitor would hand down their judgment on her, had begun.

  THIS NEW STAGE in the legislative process focused not on the question of Joan’s guilt or innocence but rather on trying to force Joan to recognize her errors and the authority of the Church to punish her. This Joan had so far steadfastly refused to do. “If the Church Militant [the Church of the living] tells you that your revelations are illusions or somehow diabolic, would you defer to the church?” she was asked. “In that case, I would defer as always to God, whose command I have always obeyed,” she answered, “and should the Church Militant command me to do otherwise, I would not defer to any man of the world, other than our Lord, whose good command I have always done.” “Have you received the command from your voices not to submit to the Church Militant, which is on earth, nor her judgment?” the inquisitors persisted. “They do not command me not to obey the church, God being first served,” Joan replied.

  This position—that through her voices Joan had received divine instruction that superseded the teachings of the established Church—infuriated her inquisitors, and they made the issue of bringing Joan to obedience the focal point of their efforts over the next months. Cauchon tried to force her into submission by forbidding her to attend mass or receive confession while she remained obdurate, and eventually threatened her with torture, to which Joan bravely replied, “Truly, if you pull my members apart and make the soul leave the body, I will not tell you anything else, and if I should tell you something, afterward I shall always say that you made me say it by force.” The proceedings were delayed somewhat when Joan fell seriously ill in April from eating spoiled carp, but even in this extremity the bishop of Beauvais pursued his case. When Joan, apparently near death from food poisoning, begged to be allowed to receive the last rites, Cauchon saw his opening. “If you have the sacraments of the Church you must declare yourself a good Catholic and submit to the Church,” he admonished sternly. “I am not able to say anything else to you at present,” Joan replied. “The more you fear for your life because of the sickness which you have, the more should you amend your ways,” Cauchon wheedled. “Since you ask that the Church give you the sacrament of the Eucharist, will you submit yourself to the Church Militant and a promise to give you that sacrament will be given you?” “I shall not do otherwise about that submission,” she refused him again. Joan recovered soon afterward with the help of a number of prominent physicians who were hurriedly called in to attend her. “The earl of Warwick told us that Joan was sick,… and that he had summoned us to take care of her, because more than anything in the world the king [of England] did not wish her to die a natural death,” one of these doctors later reported. “The king considered her very precious and had bought her dearly, and he did not wish her to die except at the hands of justice and he wished that she should be burned.”

  It was at this juncture, after almost losing her to illness, that the En glish government began to grow restive. The trial was costing the treasury a great deal of money and they had yet to see a conviction. The earl of Warwick invited Cauchon to a large banquet on Sunday, May 13, and told him to speed things up. On May 19, Cauchon, who had by this time also received the official sanction of the University of Paris to condemn Joan for heresy and witchcraft, brought all of the assessors together to conclude the proceedings.

  But the Church had still failed in its primary objective, to break the heretic’s spirit and bring her into obedience “for her own good,” as one of the assessors observed, and this omission rankled. In a last effort to get her to admit her errors, on Thursday, May 24, Joan was subjected to what amounted to a dress rehearsal of her own execution. She was brought under guard to the cemetery of a nearby abbey where, against the backdrop of all the gravestones—a chilling reminder of the reality of these proceedings—her judges and assessors solemnly awaited her on a series of platforms specially erected for the occasion. In sight of the executioner, who was waiting to take her away in a cart, one of the masters from the University of Paris delivered a long, vengeful sermon against Joan and the Armagnacs. “O Royal House of France!” he thundered. “You have never known a monster until now! But now behold yourself dishonored in placing your trust in this woman, this magician, heretical and superstitious,” impelling Joan to cry out, “Do not speak of my king, he is a good Christian.”

  At the end of his harangue, the master turned to Joan and demanded that she publicly repent. Joan pleaded that her case be submitted to the pope. This was denied. The master ordered her again to admit her errors. “I appeal to God and to our holy father the pope,” Joan reiterated.

  A piece of parchment was suddenly thrust into her hand. On it were written some eight lines in Latin. As the master exhorted her to abjure a third time, Joan was instructed to sign the document. “Do it now, otherwise you will end your days by fire,” the master threatened. Not knowing what the writing said, she at first drew a circle on the paper. As this was deemed insufficient, her hand was guided by one of the clerics to form a cross. As she made the mark “a great murmur arose among those who were present.” She had signed a letter of retraction.

  I, Joan, called the Maid, a miserable sinner, having now realized the sink of error into which I had come and having by the grace of God returned to the holy church our mother, in order that it may be seen I have returned to her not half-heartedly but with a good heart and will, do confess that I have grievously sinned, by claiming lyingly that I had revelations from God and his angels St. Catherine and St. Margaret, and all those my words and acts which are against the church I do repudiate, wishing to remain in union with the church, never leaving it.

  By the testimony of my sign: X

  The document was subsequently read to her, and the person who did so remembered much later that it said also that “in future she would neither carry arms, nor wear men’s clothes, nor cut her hair short.” Although Joan was reported to have laughed when the letter was first read to her, she did not repudiate it and that day let her hair down and exchanged her male attire for women’s clothing.

  The English were furious. Having recanted, Joan could not now be condemned and burned at the stake. In their view, the entire trial had been a waste of time, money, and prestige. Cauchon lost his archbishopric in that moment. “The king has spent his money very badly on you,” a member of the earl of Warwick’s entourage was said to have
hissed at him afterward.

  But the bishop of Beauvais recovered quickly. He had spent months interrogating Joan; he knew her character. She may have broken down in the pressure of the moment, but he knew her admission would gnaw at her. The Church’s purpose had been served by publicly forcing Joan to recant; Charles’s “prophetess” had admitted that she had basely lied and deceived her supporters, and had violated the laws of the true religion by assuming male attire; the Armagnac masters who had condoned such behavior were refuted and humiliated. Now the bishop could satisfy the English appetite for vengeance. To the earl of Warwick, who complained bitterly that “it would go badly for the king because Joan would escape them,” Cauchon and the other masters had a ready answer. “My Lord, do not worry; we will catch her again.”

  THE PROBLEM was how to do it quickly, for the English were in no humor to wait. Again, Cauchon was forced to circumvent established procedure. Once Joan had renounced her former errors and returned in full obedience to the Church, canon law required that she now be delivered from the civil authority. She seems to have understood this as, after the ceremony, she asked that “some of you men of the church take me into your prison so that I be no longer in the hands of these Englishmen.” But Cauchon made a point of restoring her to her English jailers. “Take her back to where you found her,” he ordered.

  And so Joan, still chained but now wearing a woman’s gown supplied by a seamstress who worked for the duchess of Bedford, was returned to her cell at the castle of Rouen. There she remained under the same male guard, the only difference being that she had lost whatever spiritual comfort or symbolic protection she had formerly acquired from her male garb.

  The English waited two days for her to relapse into heresy on her own. When she did not, they forced the issue. The knight’s clothing that Joan had worn had not been removed from her cell but instead had been stuffed into a sack and kept at hand. On Sunday morning, May 27, Joan awoke and as usual asked for her clothes so that she could rise to go to the bathroom. The guard, who had hidden her gown the night before, instead shook the male attire out of the bag and threw it at her. Joan resisted at first—“Gentlemen, you know that it is forbidden me, without fail I will not wear it”—but they continued to withhold her approved apparel, and it became a question of rising naked to urinate or accepting men’s garb. Modesty won the struggle, and the second she put on the proscribed clothing, Cauchon was informed that she had relapsed into heresy.