On the following day six more witnesses were heard, four of whom belonged to the convent of Saint-Jacques in Rouen in which Joan’s execution had caused a stir of anger, since it was there, on the day after the burning, that Pierre Bosquier was arrested. The two Brothers who had supported Joan to the stake were there, Isambart de la Pierre and Martin Ladvenu: their interrogation took a long time. Two others, whose role had been more obscure, were also examined, Guillaume Duval and Jean Toutmouillé. The usher, Jean Massieu, was called. And by a lucky chance a man who had played one of the leading parts, Master Jean Beaupère himself, was in Rouen, having come to take possession of a canon’s prebend to add to the large number of others he had accumulated: as a rule he lived in retirement in the diocese of Besançon.
The evidence given by these seven men was amply sufficient to establish what Joan’s trial had really been: a political trial in which, by convicting Joan of heresy, the English had successfully sought to destroy the woman in whom they saw, not without reason, the instrument of Charles VII’s victories and coronation.
This interrogation of seven witnesses was staged against a dramatic backcloth. Normandy was seething with excitement, town after town was opening its gates to the King of France—Lisieux, Coutances, Saint-Lo—and meanwhile, on the other side of the Channel, Henry VI was making a supreme effort, going even to the length of pledging the Crown Jewels, in order to raise another army for service in France.
That army landed at Cherbourg on March 15th under the command of Thomas Kyriel, who was to make a junction with Somerset’s forces entrenched at Caen. But Richemont’s army, arriving unexpectedly, was too quick for him, and on April 15, 1450, Formigny avenged the shame of Agincourt. Normandy was virtually recovered; and completely so after Caen had been taken on June 24th and Cherbourg on August 12th. All northern France was in the King’s hands.
Now in the following year Pope Nicholas V, who had succeeded Eugenius IV after the latter’s victory over the fathers at the Council of Constance and the resignation of the anti-Pope Felix V, sent a legate to France, Guillaume d’Estouteville by name, whose primary mission was to restore peace between all Christian princes. Not without anxiety did the Pope see the Turks threatening Constantinople, and his object was to bring about a closing of ranks in Christendom so that some new enterprise might be attempted in the East.
Guillaume d’Estouteville was the brother of that Louis d’Estouteville who had successfully defended Mont Saint-Michel from 1425 until the liberation of Normandy. There can be no doubt as to what his personal feelings were. He was the first legate sent to France after the long series of disturbances and quarrels which had enfeebled the papacy, and he was coming into a realm which was itself in the process of being re-established. Shortly after his arrival (August 13, 1451) Dunois, conducting operations in Guyenne, the last English bastion in France, entered Bordeaux on June 30th and by August 25th had taken Bayonne. Not the least important for him of the matters which were pending between France and the papacy was that of Joan of Arc’s trial.
For the business stood thus: the enquiry initiated by the King the year before had established, indeed, that she had been destroyed by the hatred of her political enemies. But since they had been clever enough to make the Church try her, her cause remained a matter for the Church and, officially, she was still a heretic condemned as such. Her trial had been conducted by an Inquisition Court; only the Inquisition could annul it.
Guillaume d’Estouteville had an interview with the King at Tours in February 1452. Two months later he made his way to Rouen, and it is probable that he was already in possession of the facts which had emerged from Guillaume Bouillé’s enquiry.
In Rouen, struggling to rise out of the decline in which the horrors it had had to endure had left it (the population had fallen during the Occupation from 14,992 to 5,976), he must himself have heard memories of la bonne Lorraine as they called Joan, recalled by eyewitnesses of her trials and death. He put himself in touch with the Inquisitor-General of France, the recently appointed Dominican Jean Bréhal, a Norman like himself. And Bréhal took Joan’s cause in hand and carried it through to a satisfactory conclusion.
The impetus given to the business by d’Estouteville and Bréhal resulted in the opening of the first official enquiry into the matter of Joan the Maid on May 2nd. The earlier enquiry, although it was carried out under the orders of the King of France, had no official standing in the eyes of the Church and the Inquisition courts; but its results were studied and they were embodied in the file of the Rehabilitation proceedings. The record of the Trial of Condemnation was carefully studied by the two prelates, who called to their aid two jurists who were members of the legate’s suite, Paul Pontanus and Theodore de Leliis. On the foundation of that study they drew up an interrogatory designed to be used in examining the witnesses who would appear before the commissioners in charge of the official enquiry.
The first witnesses were called for May 2nd: but within two days their answers had raised such a host of new questions, that a second questionnaire, much more thorough than the first and comprising twenty-seven questions, was drawn up. This was used as the basis for the whole of the rehabilitation proceedings, which were resumed on May 8th. (The text of both lists of questions is to be found in R.277–282.) On the whole, the questions asked bore chiefly on the fundamental flaws of the first trial: the partiality of the judges; the hatred which the English seemed to have had for Joan; the want of liberty which this entailed on the judges and assessors; what pressures had been applied. Also examined were errors of form: the fact that Joan had been held in a lay prison while under trial by an ecclesiastical court; the want of an advocate, which was contrary to the law; the methods employed to embarrass her in the capital matter of rebellion against the Church; the way in which the interrogations were conducted. Finally, the proceedings tried to throw light on the question of Joan’s innocence and piety or otherwise, on the causes of her relapse, her attitude in her last moments, and so forth.
Some of the witnesses who appeared in this new ecclesiastical enquiry had already been questioned by order of the King, such as Manchon, Ladvenu and Isambart de la Pierre; others were being questioned for the first time, such as Pierre Miget, one of the assessors in her first trial, and Pierre Cusquel who, as a mason in the public works department of Rouen Castle, had the entrée to Joan’s prison. After May 8th most of the old assessors who were still alive were examined, among them being Nicolas Caval, who had been the executor of Pierre Cauchon’s last will and testament, Andre Marguerie, Richard du Grouchet, Jean Fabri, Guillaume du Desert, and some others who had expressed a wish to testify although they had taken no effective part in the trial, such as Jean Fave, Jean Riquier, Thomas Marie and above all the famous “resistance leader” Nicholas de Houppeville. Most of the other participants in the Trial of Condemnation were dead; both Couchon and Loiseleur had died suddenly in 1442, the latter in Basle. The promoter, Jean d’Estivet, had been found drowned in a drain. As for the vice-Inquisitor, Jean Lemaitre, was he dead or alive? We have no means of knowing, but there exists no further trace of his existence after 1452. Nicolas Midy, who had preached the last sermon to Joan in the Old Market, had died of leprosy ten years ago.
On May 22nd Guillaume d’Estouteville officially notified the King that the enquiry was finished. A few days later, acting in his capacity as legate of the Holy See, he granted indulgences to all who should walk in the procession and be present at the ceremonies of May 8th; which can only mean that already, in June 1452, he was fully convinced of Joan’s innocence and the injustice of her condemnation.
At about the same time Jean Bréhal and Guillaume Bouillé were passing through Orleans. They were received with eager respect by the municipality and entertained to a vin d’honneur. Finally, during the first days of July, d’Estouteville was received by the King at his castle of Mehun-sur-Yevre, and communicated to him the conclusions he had reached during the ecclesiastical enquiry. The rehabilitation cause thereaft
er entered upon a new phase, juridical and theological in character; it was a question of collecting opinions from specialists in canon law on the whole business. For their convenience Jean Bréhal drew up a résumé, known as the Summarium, which, taking each principal charge in turn, grouped the answers from the trial record each under its appropriate head. Each doctor then had to answer the following question: given these answers, would you have reached the same conclusion as did the judges at Rouen? These consultations alone compose a stout volume, which bears witness to the fact that every canonist and theologian of importance in the realm, and one or two outside the kingdom (e.g., Leonard von Brixenthal of Vienna University), had been asked to give an opinion. Among them, and apart from the two Roman jurisconsults already mentioned, were Robert Ciboule, former rector of the University and chancellor of Notre-Dame of Paris; Elie de Bourdelles, Bishop of Périgueux; Thomas Basin, the famous Bishop of Lisieux who was later to write the life of Charles VII; Martin Berruyer, Bishop of Le Mans, and Jean Bochard, Bishop of Avranches.
D’Estouteville returned to Rome at the end of 1452; in April of the following year he was made Archbishop of Rouen, an appointment which seemed likely to quicken the rehabilitation proceedings again.
The year 1453 was to be rich in military events; for much amazement was caused when, in October 1452, Talbot, the aged Talbot whom Joan had once taken prisoner at Patay, disembarked in Guyenne—he was then 81 years of age—and was received with eager respect by the inhabitants of Bordeaux while the French seneschal, Olivier de Coetivy, was seized and imprisoned by them. This was the outcome of a plot hatched by the burgesses of Bordeaux and its neighbourhood whose income was chiefly derived from the large sale of wines of Guyenne in England; the restoration of French government had impoverished them. And during the first months of 1453 it looked very much as if Guyenne and Gascony, detaching themselves from France, were returning under the aegis of England. However on July 17th the battle of Castillon decided matters otherwise: Talbot was killed and Bordeaux forced to submit.
Meanwhile things were happening in the East; on the morning of May 29, 1453, Constantinople fell to the Turks. The last of the Byzantine emperors, Constantine Paleologus, was found among the dead and his embalmed head was to be sent to all the principal towns of the Ottoman empire as a sign of the victory of their sultan, Mahomet II who, standing on the altar in Saint Sophia, himself transformed that venerable Christian basilica into a mosque. The pope was more than ever anxious to urge upon the Christian princes the necessity of uniting to take some action in the East. The answers he received were evasive, or even fantastic, like the promise made by Philippe the Good in the middle of a luxurious banquet—to go on a Crusade. In the event the advance of the Turks was not to be checked until they were at the walls of Vienna, and after they had committed appalling ravages in Hungary.
Was it because of these events that the rehabilitation proceedings seemed to be suspended? At all events, it does not appear that Charles VII’s victory in Guyenne did anything to hurry things up; on the contrary, a whole year passed without providing us with anything new in the matter.
In 1454 we note that Jean Bréhal made a journey to Rome “to go to our Holy Father the Pope touching the trial of the late Joan the Maid”. It was doubtless on this occasion that there was delivered to the pope a supplication from Joan’s family that a Trial of Rehabilitation be initiated. Only the pope could authorise the opening of such a trial, since there was no appeal from decisions of the Inquisition. One of the canonists consulted, Jean de Montigny of the University of Paris, had given it as his opinion that Joan’s family were best qualified to act as plaintiffs or appellants (se porter partie civile):
“Although many persons could be the plaintiffs, as all those whom the thing concerns could be so considered (or ‘must be included’), 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 admitted to this trial (ought to be granted the right to proceed) as prosecuting (bring suit) for the injury done to one of their family in the murder (killing) and lamentable smothering (stifling) of the said Maid.”
Of Joan’s family the only survivors were her mother, Isabelle Romée, who lived as a pensioner of the city of Orleans; and her two brothers, Pierre and Jean. It was therefore in their name that the proceedings were to be initiated. Meanwhile the pope, Nicolas V, died. His successor, Calixtus III, had not been two months on the papal throne when he delivered a rescript which, dated June 11, 1455, authorised Isabelle Romée and her sons to demand the rehabilitation of Joan the Maid. This rescript designated three commissioners who were to “cause to be delivered a just sentence without appeal” (lit. “in last resort”). They were Jean Jouvenel des Ursins, Archbishop of Rheims; Guillaume Chartier, Bishop of Paris, and Richard Olivier, Bishop of Coutances.
On November 7th Isabelle Romée, assisted by her sons (but the final record mentions only Pierre), went in person to present the papal rescript to the commissioners, in the nave of Notre-Dame of Paris, Jean Bréhal, the Inquisitor, being also present. It was a very moving audience, for the old countrywoman was escorted by a whole group of people from Orleans who joined their plaint to hers, and soon the nave of the cathedral was so crammed with people, and there was such a tumult, that the commissioners were obliged to take refuge in the sacristy, taking Isabelle and her immediate escort with them. And we may share the feeling of the crowd at the reading of the old woman’s request, as it is set down in the record:
“I had a daughter born in lawful wedlock, whom I had furnished worthily with the sacraments of baptism and confirmation and had reared in the fear of God and respect for the tradition of the Church, as far as her age and the simplicity of her condition allowed, in such sort that having grown up amid fields and pastures she was much in the church and received every month, after due confession, the sacrament of the Eucharist, despite her youth, and gave herself up to fasts and orisons with great devotion and fervour, for the wants at that time were so great which the people suffered and which she compassionated with all her heart; yet although she did never think, conceive or do anything whatever which set her out of the path of the faith, or spoke against it, certain enemies . . . had her arraigned in religious trial . . . and . . . despite her disclaimers and appeals, both tacit and expressed, and without any succour given to her innocence, in a trial perfidious, violent, iniquitous and without shadow of right . . . did they condemn her in a fashion damnable and criminal, and put her to death very cruelly by fire . . . for the damnation of their souls and in notorious, infamous and irreparable damage done to me, Isabelle, and mine. . . .” (Q. ii, 82)
It was the real trial of Joan of Arc which was beginning there in the sanctuary of Notre-Dame, more charged with history than any other on the soil of France. In it were to appear the majority of those who had known her, peasants of Domremy, comrades in arms, princes of the blood royal, prelates of the Church, each with his own particular emphasis and personal memories. It is true that, after a lapse of twenty-five years, those memories must often be faded or defaced; certain, too, that failures of the memory would be numerous among the former assessors at the Trial of Condemnation who, obviously, while they were being questioned at the Trial of Rehabilitation must wish themselves elsewhere. Such, for example, was to be the case of André Marguerie, Nicolas Caval, Thomas de Courcelles, declaring that they could not remember and besides had taken but a very minor part in the proceedings, and so forth. It remains nevertheless true that, from the whole body of the evidence, emerges a portrait of Joan which bears comparison with the Joan we know from her own words, words which the Trial of Condemnation at least has the merit of having handed down to us. And the rehabilitation was carried on in an atmosphere of peace restored; of unquestionable freedom, too—Charles VII had granted “letters of abolition” thereby deserving credit for showing himself clement in victory. Thus we may almost feel surprise when, in the course
of the preliminary royal enquiry, we see certain witnesses, and among them the most thoroughly compromised, for example Jean Beaupère, persisting in their original attitude, and being thereafter permitted to withdraw with impunity. No doubt there were, especially among the witnesses from Rouen, a certain number of opportunists—men like Jean Marcel, a merchant of that town and a notorious “collaborator”, whose sole purpose in volunteering to bear witness seems to have been to whitewash himself. But overall there is, in the depositions, both a general agreement in essentials and enough individual differences due to age, condition and personal character, to carry conviction.
To represent them at the trial Joan’s family chose as advocate Pierre Maugier, and various procurators, the chief of these being Guillaume Prevosteau, councillor of the Exchequer. One reason for this was that the court was to move from place to place, so as to carry on its work in every place where important information about Joan was to be had; and obviously the family could not follow it about everywhere. The first session was held in Paris, at the bishopric, on November 17th, a solemn session attended by the three pontifical commissioners, the Inquisitor, and numerous prelates. The two clerks designated to keep the record, Denis Lecomte and François Ferrebouc, began their duties on this occasion.
From Paris the court moved to Rouen where everybody involved was required to appear between December 12th and 20th. As was usual in the case of Inquisition or Officiality causes, proclamations were made by means of publicly displayed notices, and by their being “cried” in the streets. It was during the most important of these sessions, December 12th, held in the great hall of the archiepiscopal palace, that Guillaume Manchon delivered over to the court all the documents which he still retained, including the famous notula, the French Minute, of which it is possible that the MS. now preserved at Orleans may be a copy, as likewise the so-called “Urfé” MS. in the Biblioèthque Nationale. It was also in the course of this session that a promoter* was appointed—Master Simon Chapitault. Most of the witnesses who had already appeared in the preliminary enquiries were called, and in the course of these sessions, notably that of December 17th, which was almost wholly devoted to the examination of Guillaume Manchon, it was the Trial of Condemnation which was on trial and the flaws in it revealed. The fact that the twelve articles of accusation, the effective indictment, were never read to Joan, and the substitution of the cédule of abjuration for another, were what particularly impressed the court. And at the conclusion of this session Simon Chapitault was able to deliver an indictment (réquisitoire) in which he declared that the Trial of Condemnation had been “vitiated” in both substance and form.
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