The Maid and the Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  FINALLY, IN 1449, citing infringements of the truce, Charles VII, encouraged by the reacquisition of the duchy of Maine, sent three separate armies into Normandy in one last great push to rid the kingdom of the invader. Although the English still maintained an overall advantage in terms of superior numbers of soldiers and garrisons, their commanders were caught by surprise. The native French population was jubilant. The regency government had never been popular, and the local people welcomed Charles’s advancement, joined his units, and in many cases did not even wait for the king’s soldiers to arrive but rose up against the occupiers independently. From Beauvais in the north came forces commanded by the counts of Eu and Saint-Pol, which compelled the surrender of Lisieux on August 16; from Verneuil in the south swept the Bastard and the duke of Alençon and their soldiers, who, joining troops commanded by Charles himself at Louviers, fought their way east into the heart of Normandy, securing Argentan in October; and from the west out of Brittany came the constable, Arthur of Richemont, with enough men-at-arms to conquer every fortress between Coutances and Fougères, the last of which fell on November 5.

  At length, on October 9, French forces fought their way to within a few miles of the English capital of Rouen, which was defended by a garrison of twelve hundred men under the command of the duke of Somerset and Captain Talbot. A week later, on October 16, the Bastard led a frontal assault but was pushed back by the English soldiers, and after that the population took matters into its own hands. There was rioting in the streets, the garrison was forced to take cover in the royal castle, and the gates were thrown open to the Bastard and his army. The French immediately surrounded the castle and prepared for a siege, but the duke of Somerset preferred to cut a deal: promising to pay a substantial fine and leaving poor Talbot behind as a hostage to his good intentions, he and the rest of the English garrison slunk out of the fortress and retreated to Caen, leaving the former capital of the regency government in the possession of the French.

  A month later, on November 20, 1449, Charles VII ceremoniously entered the city of Rouen. And a mere three months after that, on February 15, 1450, one of his principal theological advisers, a man named Guillaume Bouillé, who was the dean of Noyon, received an assignment that came directly from the king:

  “As heretofore Joan the Maid was taken and seized by our ancient enemies and adversaries the English… against whom they caused to take place a certain trial by certain persons… in the process of which they made and committed many falsifications and abuses, so much so that, by means of this trial and the great hatred that our enemies have against her, they caused her death iniquitously and against reason, very cruelly indeed,” Charles VII wrote. “For this reason we wish to know the truth of the aforesaid trial, and the manner according to which it was conducted and carried out. We command you, instruct you, and expressly enjoin you to inquire and inform yourself well and diligently on what was said; and that you bring before us and the men of our council the information that you have gathered on this event under a closed seal… for we give you power, commission and special instruction by these presents to carry this out.”

  * There was such an outcry in England over this decision that the government tried to appease public opinion by delaying the actual transfer of Maine to René for several years. In the end, Charles VII sent troops into the duchy in June 1448 to besiege Le Mans, and the English soldiers stationed there surrendered their positions and fell back on Normandy.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Rehabilitation

  of

  Joan of Arc

  I know well that my King will win the kingdom of France and I know it as well as I know that you are before me as my judge.

  —Joan of Arc, in response to her inquisitors, 1431

  HE SPEED WITH WHICH the royal decree of Rouen was issued, and the vehemence of its language, would naturally seem to imply that the impetus for the inquiry had originated with the king himself; that Charles VII, overcome by emotion upon entering the city, or perhaps responding to eyewitness reports of the cruelty of Joan’s death, had at last remembered all the Maid had done for him, and had impulsively called for the seizure and subsequent reexamination of the records of her trial. But this explanation gives Charles far too much credit for self-reflection and gratitude. The driving force behind this investigation was not the king but the man charged with its prosecution: Guillaume Bouillé, Charles’s theological adviser. It was Bouillé who, over an unspecified period of time but certainly longer than three months, had finally convinced Charles to undertake this task, and his motive for doing so is not difficult to penetrate. So much of life is fleeting, ephemeral: seasons change; civilizations rise and fall; people are born, they live a little, they die.

  But faculty disagreements endure.

  The renewal of the theological argument surrounding Joan had its genesis a full fourteen years earlier when Charles’s forces, under the leadership of Arthur of Richemont, the constable, had retaken Paris in 1436. Not simply the ordinary citizenry but all of the capital’s governmental and quasi-governmental institutions had abruptly transferred their allegiance from Henry VI to Charles, and this included the faculty of the University of Paris. Suddenly, the theory of the double monarchy and all of its proponents were out, and a new generation of doctors of theology who supported the rule of the French king and adhered to the old Armagnac views were in. The year after Charles made his grand entrance into Paris, the university had obligingly appointed a new rector to reflect the altered political climate, and this new rector was none other than Guillaume Bouillé.

  Almost immediately, the scholastic discussion over the propriety of Joan’s assuming male dress had resumed with all its former intensity as if the long years of war, and even the victim’s own martyrdom, had not intervened. Bouillé, as rector, was in the thick of it. He could not let Pierre Cauchon’s logic stand; it was as important to him to clear Joan’s name so that his English and Burgundian colleagues’ theories would be refuted as it had once been for Cauchon to convict Joan in order to demonstrate the superiority of his own thinking versus that of the old Armagnac scholars. Bouillé would eventually pen a treatise in which he returned to the arguments first promulgated by the revered Armagnac theologian Jean Gerson, justifying a woman’s use of male dress if it was undertaken from the perspective of modesty when forced to live among soldiers. Bouillé’s defense of Joan went even further, however. Highlighting the reality of Charles VII’s now assured sovereignty, Bouillé contended that Joan had license to don male apparel if instructed to do so by divine revelation, and compared her to a number of similarly garbed female saints.

  And therein lay Bouillé’s dilemma. So long as the Inquisition’s condemnation of Joan stood—so long as her voices were officially deemed heretical rather than divine by the Church, and she herself had acknowledged them to be so, as had been proclaimed by Cauchon and the English after her death—he could not win his argument. The only way to eclipse the old theologians was to have the decision against Joan reversed, and for this he needed first the king, and then the pope.

  And so Bouillé went to work on Charles VII just as Cauchon had once wheedled the duke of Bedford. Their arguments were mirror images of each other. Where Cauchon had pointed out how much more effective politically it would be for the English to demonstrate that Charles VII and the French populace had been taken in by a heretic before killing her, Bouillé stressed how important it was to reverse what was obviously a tainted decision—“an iniquitous, scandalous sentence which threatens his [the king’s] crown,” he called it—as a means of undermining the enemy’s position. Everything Joan had predicted had come true, Bouillé asserted: the English had been forced out of the kingdom, and by the grace of God, Charles VII was king. Hindsight demonstrated that the Maid had been telling the truth about her voices. How then could the sentence of heresy be allowed to stand? That would imply that Charles was king (heaven forbid!) by the work of Satan. No, no, it had been the English who had been deceived in
to doing the devil’s work, and their errors must now be acknowledged and corrected.

  By the time Rouen fell to the French, Charles had enough distance from the events of his early reign to no longer worry about his dignity or feel embarrassment over his relationship with the Maid, and Bouillé’s arguments held a definite appeal. Despite the French king’s recent military successes, the war was not yet over completely. The English still occupied some (albeit much-reduced) territory on the continent, and anything that could be done to further decrease their influence or demoralize their troops should be attempted. That it would also be personally satisfying to turn the tables on his enemies by pointing out that they had behaved atrociously and against the word of God was just an added incentive.

  And who better to conduct the royal inquiry than the man who had urged it in the first place? By putting Bouillé himself in charge, Charles was as assured that the commission would find in favor of Joan as the duke of Bedford had once been certain, by appointing Pierre Cauchon to a position of authority, that the Inquisition would find against her.

  Bouillé threw himself into his work and within three weeks of receiving the king’s decree had already begun to query Joan’s former assessors as to her treatment during captivity and the protocol associated with her condemnation. Since it had been almost twenty years since her trial, many of these people were no longer living. Cauchon, her chief tormentor, had died eight years before, from being bled by an overly enthusiastic physician. Her other judge, the vice-inquisitor, was nowhere to be found and presumed dead. A number of their collaborators had also succumbed in the intervening years, including the priest who had delivered the haranguing sermon just prior to Joan’s execution, and who had subsequently expired, fittingly, from leprosy.

  Bouillé’s investigation was therefore limited to interviews with just seven people over a period of two days. Of these seven, all but one distanced themselves from the proceedings, laying the blame for Joan’s execution squarely on her judges, who, as one of the witnesses testified, “[acted] more through love of the English and the favor they had from them… than through zeal for justice of the Faith.” The only holdout was the elderly theologian Jean Beaupère, whose question “Do you know if you are in God’s grace?” had elicited perhaps the most eloquent of Joan’s responses during her trial: “If I am not, may God bring me to it; if I am, may God keep me in it.” In his seventies, Beaupère was apparently too old and crotchety to change his opinion for the sake of political expediency and insisted that Joan had gotten what she deserved.

  On the basis of these seven interviews, Bouillé found enough improprieties as regards Joan’s treatment and sentencing to strongly recommend to Charles that a more thorough inquiry be conducted with the goal of having her condemnation revoked. The secular authority had now done all it could to redeem Joan. Because the verdict had been delivered by the Inquisition, the question of Joan’s heresy was, as it had always been, in the hands of the Church. Somebody was going to have to approach the pope.

  THE POPE IN 1450 was an Italian scholar who took the name Nicholas V. Nicholas, who loved books and art and whose principal achievement would be the establishment of the Vatican Library, had inherited a host of world problems from his predecessors. As a result of decades of internal conflict, the papacy’s reputation had been seriously weakened. A council in Basel had elected an antipope; the emperor was trying to assume powers regarding the dispensing of benefices and other Church offices that had traditionally resided solely with the pontiff; the Turks were threatening to overrun the ancient city of Constantinople. On a more mundane level, 1450 was a Jubilee year, which meant that thousands of pilgrims and other tourists would be descending on Rome in anticipation of spending their hard-earned savings and visiting the more important religious sites, and it was the pope’s responsibility to see to it that the city and its monuments were spruced up and sufficient accommodations made available to capitalize fully on the moneymaking potential of this event. Obviously, with so much to do, the question of whether some obscure French peasant woman had been unfairly accused of heresy two decades earlier did not occupy a position of prominence on Nicholas’s agenda.

  However, the pope did need the English and French to stop fighting each other so that the attention of Christendom could be turned toward addressing what Nicholas considered to be the real threat: the aggressive military posturing of the Turks and the vulnerability of Constantinople. So he sent a legate, Cardinal Guillaume d’Estouteville, to France to negotiate a peace treaty. Cardinal Estouteville did not exactly qualify as an impartial arbiter. He was a native Frenchman, originally from Normandy. A number of the members of his family had fought against the occupation and lost their property to England, and the whole clan was consequently staunchly loyal to Charles VII. Moreover, Estouteville was an old University of Paris man himself (during his visit from Rome he took time off from his official duties to reform the teaching schedule there) and understood Bouillé’s point perfectly. Before any peace could be concluded, the king must be absolved of the charge of having gained his throne through the interference of a condemned heretic, and the only way to do this was to have the sentence against Joan officially overturned. “I know that the matter greatly concerns your honor and estate [and] I am working on it with all my power… just as a good and loyal servant should do for his lord,” the cardinal hastened to assure Charles in a letter of 1452.

  On his own initiative, Estouteville secured the services of the then Inquisitor of France, a man named Jean Bréhal, who was also by coincidence originally from Normandy, and who similarly loathed the English and was a loyal partisan of the king. The two churchmen established themselves in Rouen at the end of April 1452, where they studied the transcript of Joan’s trial and listened to the testimony of witnesses. This pair was even more efficient than Bouillé. By May 4 they had produced an official document noting the existence of some twenty-seven instances of irregularities associated with Joan’s trial. As a result, they concluded that “the preceding and other points being weighed, the case and the sentence are both null and most unjust,” and recommended that the question of Joan’s heresy be reexamined in the light of these errors.

  By the next year, Estouteville had given up all pretense of negotiating a peace between England and France (there never was an official treaty marking the end of the Hundred Years War) and had returned to Rome. But neither he nor the inquisitor, Bréhal, ceased in his efforts to have Joan’s sentence reversed. Seeking to authenticate his findings, Bréhal spent the next two years soliciting opinions from theologians from as far away as the University of Vienna, while Estouteville tried to get Nicholas to authorize a retrial. But by this time Constantinople had fallen to the Turks and the pope had far more serious matters to attend to; also, it was likely he did not wish to offend the English, whose help he still hoped to gain against the Eastern threat.

  It wasn’t until after Nicholas’s death in 1455, and the election of a new pope, Calixtus III, that Estouteville was able to make progress. By this time, he and Bréhal had revised their approach. In the process of seeking opinions from other theologians, Bréhal had received this piece of valuable advice from a sympathetic faculty member at the University of Paris: “Although many persons could be plaintiffs, as all those whom the thing concerns could be so considered… and the thing concerns many persons in general and in particular… it seems to us that the near relatives of the deceased Maid must have an advantage over the others and ought to be… prosecuting [bringing suit] for the injury done to one of their family.” Joan’s mother and two of her brothers were still alive, so Bréhal approached them to inquire whether they would be willing to petition the pope for a retrial. The result was a new application to Rome in the name of Joan’s family, seeking redress for the injuries done to the Maid and her lineage and demanding that her case be retried before “a tribunal of rehabilitation.”

  Calixtus was already seventy-seven years old when he was elected pope in 1455. He would live
only another three years, and during that time he would devote himself almost single-mindedly to organizing a crusade against the Turks for the purpose of recovering Constantinople. For this, he knew he would need the support of the French king and was probably persuaded by Estouteville (erroneously, as it turned out) that reopening the case against Joan would please Charles VII sufficiently so as to cause that monarch to consider aiding the new pope in his military venture. Also, Calixtus “loved to converse upon legal matters, and was as familiar with laws and canons as if he had but just left the University,” observed distinguished papal scholar Dr. Ludwig Pastor. The lawful petition from Joan’s family and the massive supporting scholarship from Bréhal impressed him. On June 11, 1455, Calixtus replied favorably to Joan’s family’s request and called upon three prominent members of the Church in France to work with the inquisitor to reopen proceedings in order to determine the validity of the Maid’s former sentence of condemnation.

  By 1455, Joan’s mother, Isabelle, was in her sixties and widowed. She had been left in poverty by the death of her husband and was subsequently invited by the citizens of Orléans, who to their great credit never forgot what Joan had done for them, to take up residence in their town. The municipal government even provided Isabelle with a monthly stipend to help her meet her expenses and paid for a doctor to visit her when she became ill. Her son Pierre, who had fought with Joan, lived with her. Upon his return to France, the duke of Orléans, in recognition of the role Joan and her family had played in saving his birthright from the English, had awarded Pierre a small island in the Loire near Rouen.

  In the fall of 1455, aware that a new tribunal had been commissioned to take up the question of her daughter’s trial and execution, the aging Isabelle, in the company of Pierre and a group of supporters from Orléans, made her way to Paris in order to plead personally for justice on her daughter’s behalf. On November 7, she and her entourage appeared at the cathedral of Notre Dame. They were ushered into the presence of Inquisitor Bréhal and the three ecclesiastics appointed to aid him in his inquiry, and Isabelle was allowed to present her case for rehabilitation. Because hers was the name on the papal petition, and it was she who was bringing suit against the former findings, the old woman’s passionate appeal for redemption for her child was recorded as part of the official proceedings. It remains today as perhaps the most searing and poignant expression of the indefensible atrocity of the case. Joan is in every word.