“After these complaints came the aforesaid bishop to whom she immediately said: ‘Bishop, I die by you.’ He began to remonstrate with her, saying: ‘Ah! Joan, have patience herein, you die because you held not to what you had promised and are returned to your first evil-doing.’ And the poor Maid answered him, ‘Alas! if you had put me in the prisons of the court of the Church, and into the hands of competent and fitting ecclesiastical keepers, this would not have happened. That is why I appeal against you before God.’ That done, I went out and heard no more.” (R.234–235)
This deposition is completed by that of the usher Jean Massieu:
“The Wednesday morning, the day that Joan died, Brother Martin Ladvenu heard her confession, and Joan’s confession heard, he sent me to the Bishop of Beauvais to notify him that he had heard her in confession and asked that the sacrament of the Eucharist be given her. The bishop called together several persons on that matter. After their deliberation, he told me to tell Brother Martin that he was to give her the sacrament of the Eucharist and all that she asked for. . . . The Body of Jesus Christ was carried to her irreverently without stole or light, at which Brother Martin, who had confessed her, was ill-pleased. Wherefore I was sent back to fetch a stole and the light, and so Brother Martin administered it. And that done, she was taken to the Old Market, and at her side were Brother Martin and me, accompanied by more than eight hundred men of war with axes and swords, and she, being at the Old Market and after the preaching during which she showed great constancy and very peaceably listened to it, showing great sign and evidence and clear appearance of her contrition, penitence and fervour of faith, as much by her pious and devout lamentations and invocations of the blessed Trinity and of the blessed glorious Virgin Mary and of all the blessed saints of Paradise, naming expressly several of these saints in the which devotions, lamentations and true confessions of faith, as in requesting also of all manner of people of what condition and estate soever, whether of her own party or the other, pardon most humbly, requesting that they would pray for her, forgiving them the evil that they had done her, she persevered and continued a very long space of time, as about half an hour, and so to the end, at which the judges there present and even several Englishmen were provoked to tears and to weeping and indeed most bitterly wept at it.” (R.236–237)
The text of the Condemnation proceedings gives the official account of the scene, which took place in the Old Market Place of Rouen, near to the church of Saint-Sauveur. In this are particularly mentioned, as being with Cauchon and the vice-Inquisitor Jean Lemaitre, Louis of Luxembourg, Bishop of Thérouanne, Jean de Mailly, Bishop of Noyon, Jean de Chatillon, André Marguerie, Nicolas de Venderès, Raoul Roussel, Denis Gastinel, Guillaume Haiton—all of them men in whom there is no difficulty in discovering the most ardent partisans of the English cause. And there were some others, like Guillaume le Boucher, Jean Alepée, Pierre de Houdenc and, of course, the University Masters. Among these were Pierre Maurice; and above all Nicolas Midy whose task it was to preach a final sermon to Joan.
After his sermon, the definitive sentence was spoken by Pierre Cauchon himself:
“We declare that thou, Joan, commonly called the Maid, art fallen into diverse errors and diverse crimes of schism, idolatry, invocation of devils and numerous others. . . . And thereafter, after abjuration of thine errors, it is evident that thou hast returned to those same errors and to those crimes, your heart having been beguiled by the author of schism and heresy. . . . Wherefore we declare thee relapsed and heretic.” (C.411–412)
Joan should, at this point, have been conducted to the secular judges, who alone were qualified to decide the actual sentence and apply it. But Cauchon, in haste to have done with it, neglected that formality.
Martin Ladvenu: “It was evident, to the judges, that she had submitted herself to the determination of the Church and that she was a believer and Catholic and repentant, and it was by permission and on the order of the judges that I gave Joan the Body of Christ. She was handed over as relapsed to the secular judges, and I believe that had she gone over to the side of the English, she would not have been so treated. I am certain that after she had been abandoned by the Church, she was taken by the English soldiers who were there in great number, and without any sentence by the secular judges, although the sheriff of Rouen and the council of the lay court were there. I know it, for I was with Joan all the time from the castle until the moment when she yielded up the ghost and it was I who, on the order of the judges, administered to her the sacraments of penitence and of the Eucharist.”
His evidence was confirmed by the sheriff’s lieutenant, Laurent Guesdon: “I was at the last sermon delivered at the Old Market of Rouen; I was there with the sheriff for at the time I was lieutenant of the sheriff. The sentence was pronounced whereby Joan was abandoned to secular justice. As soon as possible after this sentence, immediately and without delay, she was delivered into the hands of the sheriff, and without the sheriff or myself, to whom it appertained to pronounce sentence, having pronounced one, the executioner, without further ado, seized Joan and took her to the place where the wood was ready and she was burned.” (R.233–234)
Jean Massieu also bears witness to this haste: “While she was making her devotions and pious lamentations, I was hard-pressed by the English, and even by one of their captains, to leave her in their hands the sooner to put her to death, saying to me, who according to my understanding comforted her at the scaffold: ‘What, priest, will you make us dine here?’ And incontinent, without other form or sign of judgment, sent her to the fire, saying to the Master of the Work (executioner), ‘Do thine office.’ And so was she taken and bound, still continuing praises and lamentations to God and the saints, and whose last word, in departing this life, cried in a loud voice: ‘Jesus’.” (R.237)
The apparitor of the archiepiscopal court, Maugier Leparmentier, who had, it will be recalled, been sent for two weeks before this event to put Joan to the torture, was present: “The day when Joan was burned, the wood was got ready to burn her before the sermon was finished or the sentence had been pronounced. And no sooner the sentence uttered by the bishop, without any delay, she was taken to the fire, and I did not see that there was any sentence pronounced by the lay judge. But was at once taken to the fire. And in the fire she cried more than six times ‘Jesus’, and above all with her last breath she cried in a loud voice ‘Jesus!’ so that all present could hear her. Almost all wept with pity, and I have heard say that the ashes, after her burning, were gathered up and cast into the Seine.”
The most detailed accounts of Joan’s last moments are provided, as we might expect, by those who accompanied and supported her to the scaffold itself. There was, in the first place, the usher, Jean Massieu: “When she was abandoned by the Church I was still with her and with great devoutness she asked to have the cross. Hearing that, an Englishman who was present made a little cross of wood from the end of a stick, which he gave her and devoutly she received and kissed it, making pious lamentations to God our Redeemer who had suffered on the Cross, for our redemption, of which Cross she had sign and representation. And she put this cross into her bosom, between her flesh and her clothes, and furthermore asked humbly that I enable her to have the cross from the church so that she could have it continually before her eyes until death. And I so contrived that the parish clerk of Saint-Sauveur brought it to her. Which being brought, she embraced it long and closely and retained it until she was bound to the stake. Brother Isambart had gone with the parish clerk to fetch the cross. The pious woman asked, requested and begged me, as I was near her at her end, that I would go to the near-by church and fetch the cross to hold it raised right before her eyes until the threshold of death, that the cross which God hung upon be continually before her eyes in her lifetime. Being in the flames she ceased not until the end to proclaim and confess aloud the holy name of Jesus, imploring and invoking without cease the help of the saints in paradise. And what is more, in giving up the ghost and bowing
her head, uttered the name of Jesus as a sign that she was fervent in the faith of God.” (R.270)
Martin Ladvenu: “As to her great and admirable contrition, repentance and continual confession, she called still upon the name of Jesus and devoutly invoked the help of the saints in paradise, as Brother Isambart, who had supported her to her passing and addressed her on the way of salvation, has already deposed.” (R.207)
Among other depositions touching her end, and they were numerous since that end was public, there is that of Jean Riquier, parish priest of Heudicourt at the time of the Rehabilitation. At the time of the Condemnation he was a boy of about fifteen who, as a chorister in the church of Rouen, moved much in that town’s ecclesiastical circles: “Master Peter Maurice visited her in the morning, before she was brought to the sermon in the Old Market. And Joan said to him: ‘Master Peter, where shall I be this evening?’ And Master Peter answered her: ‘Have you not good hope in God?’ She said that she had and that with God’s help she would be in paradise. That I had from Master Peter himself. When Joan saw the fire kindled she began to cry out in a loud voice ‘Jesus, Jesus’, and still until her death she cried ‘Jesus’. And when she was dead, as the English feared lest it be said that she had escaped, they told the executioner to push back the fire a little so that those present could see her dead, that it be not said she had escaped. . . . I heard Master Jean Alepée, then canon of Rouen, present at Joan’s execution, weeping copiously, say in my presence and the presence of those about me: ‘I would that my soul were where I believe this woman’s soul to be.’ ”
And here is what was being said among the people, passed down to us by the voice of the stone-mason Pierre Cusquel: “I was not present at the last preaching, and the condemnation and execution of Joan,” he said, “because my heart would not have been able to bear and suffer it, out of pity for Joan, but I did hear say that she received the Body of the Lord before her condemnation. . . . I heard say that Master Jean Tressard, secretary to the King of England, returning from Joan’s execution afflicted and groaning, wept lamentably over what he had seen in that place and said indeed: ‘We are all lost, for we have burnt a good and holy person,’ and that he believed that her soul was in God’s hands and that, when she was in the midst of the flames, she had still declaimed the name of the Lord Jesus. That was common repute and more or less all the people murmured that a great wrong and injustice had been done to Joan. . . . After Joan’s death the English had the ashes gathered up and thrown into the Seine because they feared lest she escape or lest some say she had escaped.” (R.240–241)
And there is the contrition of an Englishman, notably of the executioner Geoffroy Therage, as recounted by Brother Isambart de la Pierre: “One of the English, a soldier who detested her extraordinarily, and who had sworn that with his own hand he would bear a faggot to Joan’s pyre, in the moment when he was doing so and heard Joan calling upon the name of Jesus in her last moment, stood stupefied and as if in ecstasy, and was taken thence to a tavern near the Old Market so that, drink helping, he might regain his senses. And after having eaten a meal with a Brother of the Order of Preaching Friars, this Englishman confessed, by the mouth of this Brother who was himself English, that he had sinned gravely and that he repented of what he had done against Joan whom he held to be a saintly woman for, as it seemed to him, this Englishman had himself seen, at the moment when Joan gave up the ghost, a white dove coming out on the side towards France. And the executioner, on the same day after the mid-day meal, came to the convent of the preaching friars and said to me, as to Brother Martin Ladvenu, that he greatly feared to be damned for he had burned a holy woman.”
Jean Massieu: “I heard it said by Jean Fleury, clerk and writer to the sheriff, that the executioner had reported to him that once the body was burned by the fire and reduced to ashes, her heart remained intact and full of blood, and he told him to gather up the ashes and all that remained of her and to throw them into the Seine, which he did.”
Isambart: “Immediately after the execution, the executioner came to me and my companion Martin Ladvenu, struck and moved to a marvellous repentance and terrible contrition, all in despair, fearing never to obtain pardon and indulgence from God for what he had done to that saintly woman; and said and affirmed this executioner that despite the oil, the sulphur and the charcoal which he had applied against Joan’s entrails and heart, nevertheless he had not by any means been able to consume nor reduce to ashes the entrails nor the heart, at which was he as greatly astonished as by a manifest miracle.” (R.270)
As for the feelings of the man who had managed the whole business, Pierre Cauchon, we know nothing unless we judge by the steps he took during the days following the execution and which seem to reveal in him at least a certain nervous irritability. There was first the imprisonment of the preaching friar Pierre Bosquier, condemned to prison on bread and water until the following Easter for having said, on the afternoon of the day of the execution, that they who had judged Joan had done ill. Then on June 7th Cauchon assembled some of the assessors and made them say what he would have liked Joan herself to say: that she had been misled and deceived by her voices. We need not doubt that Nicolas de Venderès, Thomas de Courcelles, Nicolas Loiseleur, Pierre Maurice, readily and abundantly said what was required of them: Joan said that her voice had told her that she would be liberated from prison and she had seen clearly and knew that she had been misled by them. . . . She had been deceived and would not have faith in her voices. . . . She referred the matter to the ecclesiastics to know whether they were good or bad spirits. . . . She said: “Truly, I see well that they have deceived me. . . .” It is unpleasant to find, among those who thus answered the judge’s questions, Brother Martin Ladvenu and that same Brother Jean Toutmouillé who, obviously, had been overcome by Joan’s lamentations when he went to announce to her that she was about to die by burning. At all events, Cauchon tried to get these Posthumous Informations inserted into the official record, but came up against an unexpected resistance, that of the notary Guillaume Manchon, who subsequently declared: “I was at the continuation of the trial until the end, saving at some examinations of people who spoke to him aside, like private persons. Nevertheless, my lord of Beauvais tried to constrain me to sign them, which thing I would not do.” (R.243)
And in effect the MS. book of the proceedings, as it has come down to us in the three surviving copies already referred to, are significant in their arrangement: after the record of the definitive sentence, the three notaries Guillaume Colles, called Boisguillaume, Guillaume Manchon and Nicolas Taquel, in that order, appended, as was customary, each a note of the registration, followed by signature and sign manual. On the master MS., written on parchment, are thereafter appended the red wax seals of the notary, the bishop and the vice-Inquisitor. Then, on the following pages, are transcribed, but this time without the notaries’ signatures at the bottom of the pages and without any note of registration, the Posthumous Informations. Thus we have proof of the illegality of a proceeding which the notary, recovering some of his courage, refused to sanction: it was really altogether too easy to put words into Joan’s mouth after she was dead.
Then again, on June 12th following, Cauchon obtained for himself and the principal assessors “letters of warranty” from the King of England. By these letters the King promises that: “On the word of a King, if it come about that any one of the persons who worked in the trial be brought to trial (summoned, sued) for that trial or its dependences. . . . we will aid and defend, have aided and defended in court of law and without, such persons at our own cost and expense. . . .” One of the prelates who had taken an active part in the trial, the Bishop of Noyon, Jean de Mailly, was greatly embarrassed when, at the Trial of Rehabilitation, he was reminded of these letters of warranty: of the three prelates mentioned at the time of the promulgation of the definitive sentence, he was the sole survivor, since Cauchon and Louis of Luxembourg were both dead.
The text of the Rehabilitation proceeding
s runs: “The witness was questioned on the letters of warranty which the King of England gave to the Bishop of Beauvais and to the others who were involved in that trial. From those letters it emerges that the bishop of Noyon was included in the safeguard given.
“I do believe, he answered, that there were some. I do not remember it very well. I know, however, that it was not at his own expense that the Bishop of Beauvais held that trial, but at the expense of the King of England, and that the expenses which were incurred in it were on the account of the English.” (R.253)
For the English, Joan’s death was followed by an immediate resumption of military operations. On June 2nd that same Laurent Calot who had guided Joan’s hand in making her sign the abjuration with a cross, signed an indent on the English crown treasurer, Thomas Blount, for money to finance the construction of war machines for the siege of Louviers. (The original document is in the National Archives, AF II, 448.) This was a vindication of the rumours which were circulating among the people of Rouen.
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