Surprise has sometimes been expressed that no record of the execution is to be found in the file of the proceedings; but this is to demonstrate a singular ignorance, for in fact, of course, all Inquisitorial trials closed at the very point where Joan’s was closed: at the point where the culprit is handed over by the court to the “secular arm”. It was always the secular arm, lay justice, which carried out conviction and sentence. Thus the record, if one existed, should be sought in the archives of the bailiwick; but custom varied in this respect from place to place, and it is by no means certain that any such record was ever written.
3. Finally, we have the evidence of a whole series of eye-witnesses bearing every sign of veracity and all agreeing in the main particular: Joan’s execution. The evidence in question is to be found in the depositions made at the Trial of Rehabilitation and given by a very varied set of people, for it includes not only some who were actively involved in the matter, such as the Bishop of Noyon, the notaries, the usher and the two Dominicans who supported Joan to the scaffold, but also people who were simply there as sight-seers like Jean Riquier, or who, like Pierre Cusquel, refused to be present because they could not have borne the sight.
But, curiously enough, the amateurs of fancy hypotheses, instead of taking note of eye-witness accounts, turn to the Chronicle of Perceval de Cagny—who could not have been present at the scene and for good reason!—from which they extract a single detail which they flourish as decisive.
We may, indeed, read in this Chronicle, which as we know was written by an esquire in the Duke of Alençon’s service and gives the most vivid details of other points in the story, notably on the Loire campaign—the following lines:
“The people of the King of England’s justice in the town of Rouen made ready fitting places and made preparations to execute justice in a place which could be seen by a great concourse of people; and the said 24th day of May . . .” (here he is confusing the date with that of the Saint-Ouen business) “. . . at about the hour of noon Joan was brought from the castle, her face veiled (embronché) to the place where the fire was ready, and after certain things (having been) read in that place, was bound to the stake and burned, by the report of those who say they saw it.” (Q. iv, 36)
The word embronché has given rise to innumerable arguments. In point of fact, in old French it signifies either veiled or penché . . . stooped, bent forward. It is probable, as Maurice Garçon has pointed out (in Ecclesia op. cit.), that all it meant in this context was that the mitre which was usually placed on the heads of condemned persons had, derisively, been put on crooked.
At all events it is clear enough that the real historian is bound to prefer direct evidence to this single, and second-hand, account by Perceval de Cagny, who was not present and clearly says so. Brother Isambart and the others quoted above were present; and they do not tell us that Joan’s face was veiled.*
There is another point: who is supposed to have been burned in Joan’s place? This causes our fancy theorists no trouble at all: the prisons, it seems, “were overflowing with witches for burning”. At this point their argument becomes merely ludicrous. As we have said, whereas heresy trials were fairly numerous in the fifteenth century, trials for witchcraft were extremely rare. Joan, herself, as we have seen, was not condemned as a witch, although in the Instruction phase of the trial attempts were made to convict her of having practised some witchcraft. And the supposition of our theorists become merely fantastic when they claim that in 1432 four hundred witches were burned in Rouen alone. In point of fact, a trial for witchcraft held in Lorraine in 1456, at which eight people were victimised, raised a great deal of strong feeling. Readers interested in this aspect of the question and wishing to know more about it cannot do better than refer to Maurice Garçon’s Les Proces en Sorcellerie and a little work by Jean Palou which was published in the Que-sais-je? collection, La sorcellerie.
We may perhaps conclude with a piece of free entertainment provided by the same amateurs of fancy theories. They declare that they have found details of the four hundred executions of witches in the Archives des domaines de la cité de Rouen, in which, they further declare with astonishment, they can find “no trace of the execution of Joan of Arc”
The Archives des domaines anterior to 1789 were removed to the Archives départementales de la Seine-Maritime, where they occupy the following series: C.632–641, C.2329, 2348–2349, 2353–2355, 2554 and 2602. And we have no hesitation in offering a large reward to anyone who can find therein any reference to witch-burning in the fifteenth century.
As for the des Armoises lady, her history is well established (see Grosdidier de Mattons’ Le Mystère de Jeanne d’Arc). As we have seen, her assimilation to the real Joan of Arc is founded solely on misconceived interpretation of facts, e.g., the term absentement; or upon more glaring mistakes, e.g., the “proof” which is found in the fact that she was received by “la dame de Luxembourg”, who is confused with the one who had received Joan herself but who had died before Joan was executed.
Furthermore, all who have tried to maintain her cause in the face of history, show clear evidence of serious gaps in their historical education and information. To begin with the all too famous Father Jerome Vignier, from whom Dom Calmet borrowed most of the material which he published about Claude des Armoises. This Oratoire priest was a forger of remarkable nerve, who applied himself to the fabrication of letters supposed to have been written by popes of the fourth and fifth centuries, and who composed, with a talent which cannot be denied, a so-called “colloquy between Christians and Arians” supposed to have taken place at Lyon in 499, and which for a long time fooled historians. (See the article on this subject by Julien Havet in the Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes, 1885.)
As for those “recently discovered portraits” of the Maid and her husband, Robert des Armoises, which were published in a work advocating that well-worn theory, they are, alas, quite incapable of convincing the reader: the only photograph of them shows that they are in a manner somewhere between the troubadour style and that of the illustrator “Bibliophile Jacob”; one does not have to be an expert to refuse to accept them as fifteenth-century portraits. The only people who are likely to be taken in are those with a penchant for mystification!
* It is a fact that both Henry V and his brother, the Regent Bedford, had a particular fear of witchcraft.—E.H.
* A play on words: the French is Vous soyez la tres bien revenue. Bienvenu, welcome; bien revenu, well-come-again; but also a revenant is one who returns from the dead, a ghost.—E.H.
* The word “absentment” which I have used for the French absentement, in any case archaic, does not exist in good English, but I made it up for obvious reasons. It may be noted that in the translation, above, the misleading commentary has no foundation, for in English we make the pronoun, in this case son, agree with the sex of the subject (his, her); whereas in French, since it agrees with the word qualified by it, there is no indication of the sex of the subject. But as Mlle Pernoud says, the commentator had only to parse the sentence in question to see that there was no foundation for his argument.—E.H.
* First published by Vallet de Viriville, who was one of those who refuted the errors of Caze touching the alleged bastardy (see Bib. de l’Ecole des Chartes, 2nd S., Vol. 11), they were republished by Quicherat himself.
* Embroncher in current French is a building term, meaning to lay tiles with an overlap. De Cagny’s words may mean that her face was overlapped, i.e., shadowed by, as M. Garçon suggests, the mitre of the condemned. But is it not possible that the word was used, by extension, to describe facial expression? Her face was darkened, overshadowed—i.e., by fear or grief?—E.H.
9
REHABILITATION
On October 24, 1430, while Joan was still a prisoner at Beaurevoir, the Duke of Burgundy had been forced to raise the siege of Compiègne, that town having been relieved by a French army commanded by the Comte de Vendome and the Marshal de Boussac. The offensive operat
ions which the duke had been able to prepare, thanks to the imprudent truces signed by Charles VII, had not been as profitable as he had hoped. In 1431 there were more French successes, chiefly owing to the energy of La Hire, who had been appointed captain-general in Normandy immediately after the taking of Louviers in December 1429, and of the sire de Barbazan in Champagne. The Bastard of Orleans was sent to Louviers in March 1431. But this military effort was not maintained: on October 28th Louviers was forced to capitulate to the English, a fresh body of English troops having disembarked at Calais in June. And on July 2nd the sire de Barbazan—“heart of fine silver, flower of chivalry” says his epitaph—was killed at the battle of Bulgneville during which René of Anjou was taken prisoner. By a curious coincidence, on May 30, 1431, the day of Joan’s death, news of which cannot therefore have reached the king, Charles sent a letter to the inhabitants of Rheims asking them to make the sire de Barbazan welcome.
However, after a compaign which had been fruitless from his point of view, the Duke of Burgundy seems to have decided to seek peace with the King of France. He kept away from Henry VI’s coronation ceremony in Paris in December 1431, and this alone was a gesture of independence of the English: and in the course of the same month he signed another truce with Charles VII’s ambassadors, at Lille. Much more advantageous for the French King than its predecessors, the truce in question was for a period of six years and has the appearance of being preliminary to a definitive peace treaty. In Rouen itself the French sentiments of the population must have been roused by Joan’s death: on February 3, 1432, a free-lance called Ricarville, with one hundred and three followers, succeeded by a coup de main of astonishing boldness, in making himself master of the castle. Unfortunately the reinforcement which was necessary if he was to hold the place was not forthcoming, and a few days later the one hundred and four soldiers were decapitated in the same Old Market Place which had witnessed the conflagration of that sinister pyre in the previous year, at the order of Bedford and the Earl of Arundel, captain of Rouen.
Meanwhile the King’s attention was more than ever absorbed by his unworthy favourite, Georges de la Trémoille who, as always opposed to military action, fostered the King’s natural apathy. One fine day he received a sword-stroke through the stomach; this attempt at assassination had been organised by the Constable Arthur de Richemont and the Angevin family, Queen Marie of Anjou, Charles du Maine and their mother Yolande of Sicily, who had made up their minds that the King of France should prosper even despite himself. His life saved by the thickness of his own fat, La Trémoille left the court never to return, and from that moment French military activity was more energetic and better sustained. On January 16, 1435, there began, between France and Burgundy, the conferences of Nevers in which René of Anjou played the part of honest broker. They concluded with an adjournment to Arras where, despite protests from England, peace was concluded between France and Burgundy on September 20, 1435. The Regent Bedford had seen the beginning of the negotiations, but was not to see the end of them, for he died on September 14th in the castle of Rouen where he had held Joan prisoner. One of the principal French negotiators had been Cauchon’s successor in the see of Beauvais, appointed by the King of France after the town had been retaken in 1429, Jean Jouvenel des Ursins.
At the same time and throughout the country the people were quivering with impatience: there were uprisings in Lower Normandy in 1434; at the time of the treaty of Arras the English were virtually helpless in that region, and the town of Dieppe went over to the King of France. At last, on April 13, 1436, Arthur de Richemont, taking advantage of the insurrection which had been seething in Paris for four months, made his way into the city by the Saint-Jacques gate, while the “foresworn Frenchmen”, among them Pierre Cauchon himself, fled hastily, pursued by the shouts of the mob, “After the fox! Have his tail!” (There was a curious popular superstition that all Englishmen had tails.) “Before seven years,” Joan had said in 1431, “the English will lose a greater gage than they have ever lost in France.”
But the Parisians had to wait a year before the King came to their town: he did not make his entry until November 12, 1437. Even the Bourgeois de Paris was obliged to admit that “he was fêted like God himself”. (P.136) The King was accompanied by the Dauphin Louis, heir to the throne.
Several years passed thereafter during which neither England nor France seemed to be in a state to continue the strife. In both countries finances were in a parlous state, as we may judge from the monetary measures of the time: the coming and going of free-lance bands paralysed agriculture by terrorising the peasantry; disorder reigned throughout France and, as a last straw, plague broke out in the kingdom, and in Paris raged throughout 1438 and 1439, killing fifty thousand people in that city alone; among the victims was Marie de Poissy, the King’s sister and prioress of the convent of Poissy.
Military action was resumed in 1441 with the taking of Pontoise and, in the following year, with a raid into Guyenne: the King recovered Saint-Sever and Dax, but failed to take La Réole. Discouraged by this failure he hurried back to the banks of the Loire and was again overtaken by inertia, the more so in that his mistress, Agnes Sorel, who first appeared at the court in 1444, roused in him a belated appetite for pleasure: banquets and tournaments followed one upon another, in which the taste for luxury, which had distinguished the Valois line since the first of them became King, reappeared. The Archbishop of Rheims, Jean Jouvenel des Ursins, raised an indignant voice in an effort to recall the King to a sense of his duty and to the misery of the people confronted with this extravagance of luxury paid for with “aids (taxes) raised for the war”. But, also in 1444, a truce was signed with England and reinforced by the marriage of Henry VI to Margaret of Anjou, King René’s daughter: this truce was renewed periodically until 1449.
In that year an English raid against Fougères caused the resumption of military operations, centred in Normandy where the population rose. In the month of May the French took three’ small towns in succession, Pont-de-l’Arche, Conches and Gerberoy; next, Dunois seized Verneuil, and at last, on August 6th, Charles VII set siege to Louviers. Towns rose in his support on all sides. In Rouen an insurrection forced the governor, Somerset, to quit the castle in haste and take refuge in Caen on October 29th: a few days later Charles made his entry into the capital of Normandy, reconquered after thirty years of occupation.
Then, and not till then, did it become possible to determine in what manner the trial and execution of Joan of Arc had taken place. All the documents in the case had been preserved at the archbishopric; and it was also in Rouen that eye-witnesses of her last moments were to be found. It had, therefore, been impossible until then to undertake any kind of action with a view to her rehabilitation. It is, of course, self-evident, but historians have not always made the point clearly enough. For a long time, indeed, the rehabilitation proceedings were misunderstood because they were so little known. The rehabilitation was seen as an act of mere opportunism: Joan is condemned by the Church when the English are victorious, rehabilitated as soon as they are vanquished. This is to forget the actual circumstances in which the events took place. So long as the English were masters of Rouen, the mere fact that they held the papers in the case, a case which they had managed themselves, maintained their version of what the trial had been—a trial by the Church carried on in the ordinary and regular manner, by which it had been established that Joan was a heretic. In the event, to reproach the King or the Church with having done nothing until that time is tantamount to reproaching the French government with having done nothing to bring the Oradour war criminals to justice before 1945.
Perhaps the only deed which can be placed on the credit side of Charles VII’s account is this: that he did, shortly after his entry into Rouen, undertake to find out what had really happened in the matter of Joan. On February 15, 1450, a letter in the following terms was sent to one of his councillors, Master Guillaume Bouillé, canon of Noyon cathedral:
“Wherea
s formerly Joan the Maid was taken and apprehended by our ancient enemies and adversaries the English, and brought to this town of Rouen, against whom they caused to be brought proceedings by certain persons to that end committed and deputed by them, in which proceedings they did and committed many faults and abuses, to such point that, by means of that trial and the great hatred which our enemies had against her, they brought about her death iniquitously and against right reason, very cruelly; therefore we would know the truth of the said trial proceedings and the manner according to which it was carried on and proceeded with. We authorise, command and expressly enjoin that you enquire into and inform yourself diligently on that which is said about it; and the information (gathered) by you on this matter, bring it close and sealed before us and people of our council. . . .” (R.11–12)
The terms of this letter are significant: we would know the truth of the said trial; until then, in fact, they knew nothing, excepting what their enemies had been willing to tell them. But now, and only now, might the truth be discovered.
Guillaume Bouillé was to bring to this business a punctuality and energy which clearly reveal his own feelings; having always been loyal to the royal cause, he was designated Rector of the purged University of Paris in 1439. Less then three weeks after the date of the above letter, the first witness called by him appeared before him: Guillaume Manchon, the notary in the other trial. As we know, he had been present throughout that trial from beginning to end; he had signed every page of the proceedings and set his seal on the completed document and kept his notes in French, where Joan’s own words were set down together with a translation into Latin. The whole of March 4th was necessary for hearing his evidence.
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