Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint

by Donald Spoto

  Was she aware that her mother and father were somewhere in the throng, surrounded by neighbors who had come with them from Domrémy? Isabelle and Jacques, broken and bitter, had been forbidden to see their daughter in prison; indeed, they had not seen her for more than two years. At their last meeting Joan had been a buoyant, optimistic, healthy seventeen-year-old, serious in matters of piety but often merry and always full of common sense, unassailable loyalty, and good cheer. If they were close enough to their daughter now, they saw a nineteen-year-old aged by time and chance, drawn and ill, defeated and rejected by all those to whom she had devoted her energy and her ideals.

  Death by burning was considered so dreadful that there was a so-called merciful gesture performed just as the fire was lit: the executioner climbed a ladder behind the stake and either cut the throat or strangled the victim to death. This was not done to Joan, who endured a protracted torture and death because the pyre was built unusually high, for all to see.

  An English guard, touched by her plight, took two sticks from the bundle at his feet, tied them together in the form of a cross, and handed it to Joan, who put it underneath her garment, close to her breast. She was then dragged up and chained to the stake, praying aloud constantly. “She never ceased to commend herself to God,” said Guillaume Manchon. Isambart de la Pierre ran to a nearby church and brought back a processional cross, which he held high before her eyes.

  The fire and smoke, lambent and smoldering, took their deadly time. According to the record, very many people in the crowd no longer cheered and whistled but instead began to protest, weeping and fainting at the sight and sound of such horrifying agony.

  With her last breath, Joan of Arc sang out the name of her Lord Jesus. Her head slowly bowed, and her shackled body slumped against the stake.

  The market square was suddenly subdued. For a long while that morning, there was the hiss and crackle of flame and wood, and then there was silence.

  Afterword

  “I was anxious and disturbed for a month after her death,” said Guillaume Manchon. “With some of the money I received for my work as notary, I bought a prayer book, and I kept her memory alive every day in my prayers for her.”

  Within hours of Joan’s death, one of her judges, Jean Alespée, a priest in Rouen, confided to a friend that he lamented his participation in her trial: “I wish that my soul could now be where that woman’s soul is.” Jean Tressart, secretary to the king of England in Rouen, tried to drown his sorrow by racing to a nearby tavern, where he spent many hours and a good deal of money: “We are lost, for we have burned a good and holy person,” he wept, stopping anyone who would listen. When his remark circulated around town, he had to flee for his safety’s sake; very soon those who held less prestigious positions than Tressart knew that it was in their best interest to keep quiet if they shared his feelings.

  The Earl of Warwick was not among the mourners. To prevent the collection of relics, he ordered Joan’s ashes to be tossed into the Seine. A week later the king of England wrote to all the princes of Christendom, a letter drafted or edited by the Duke of Bedford on behalf of nine-year-old Henry VI. The document celebrated “the just punishment suffered for her faults by a certain lying prophetess who appeared in our kingdom of France.”

  The usual specious charges against Joan were repeated, with the astonishing claim that England wished no vengeance against her but rather had insisted on a Church trial “for the honor of God.” The letter was remarkable for outright lies: “She spurned the judgment of Our Holy Father the Pope.” A similar epistle was sent four weeks later to the bishops and nobles of all occupied France, and by royal decree sermons and processions were held everywhere in joyful praise of Joan’s execution. Such observances were also aimed to suppress the actions of any potential supporters or imitators.

  Her death took a catastrophic toll on her father’s health: within months Jacques d’Arc fell ill and died of grief, according to a firmly maintained tradition. Joan’s mother, Isabelle, returned to Domrémy; she had lost her husband, both daughters and her oldest son, Jacques. Isabelle later settled in Orléans, where she was lovingly attended by neighbors and received a stipend from the crown for the rest of her life. According to some sources, Joan’s brother Pierre accompanied Isabelle; Jean, it seems, sought his own fortune elsewhere, later exploiting his sister’s fame in order to obtain dubious political favors.

  “Her brief appearance on the political scene had extraordinary repercussions,” wrote the French historian Georges Duby, who had little regard for Joan as a mystic or a saint. “Although she had died, with her intervention the tide had suddenly and miraculously turned. Despair was banished, and even her death could not check the movement she had initiated. It was to lead to the liberation of France from English occupation.”

  The Hundred Years’ War rumbled along for another twenty-two years, but despite all the English bluster during the summer of Joan’s death, fortune favored the French. The coronation of the ten-year-old Henry VI as king of France, held at Notre-Dame Cathedral on December 16, 1431, did not gain him the allegiance of more French people or solidify his position in France. Indeed, English soldiers began to desert their armies, resistance forces against the occupiers arose throughout France, and peasants who had been armed by the English turned against them. On one side, Joan’s insistence on frontal assaults was retained, and it improved France’s ongoing military tactics; on the other, the reign of Henry VI was severely weakened by military blunders and, inevitably, by the death of the Duke of Bedford in September 1435.

  Three months later, the Treaty of Arras established a lasting peace between Charles VII and Philip of Burgundy. In 1437 Charles triumphantly took Paris and in 1449 Rouen. This effectively ended the English occupation, and by the end of 1453 no French city was in their hands. Joan’s goal was finally realized: always regretting that foreign troops had been brought over to die in France, she would have heartily rejoiced when the last English soldiers returned home.

  As for her king, Charles VII succeeded in mastering both English and papal influence and became a leader who left his country in far better condition than when he was crowned. A complex man, difficult to comprehend and not always sympathetic, he genuinely preferred peace to war; he freely pardoned towns that had collaborated with the English; and he was a major architect of the movement toward a united France. When he died in 1461 at the age of fifty-eight, Charles VII was widely mourned—not least because of his successful efforts to reverse the judgment against Joan the Maid.

  Pierre Cauchon, who had his eye on ever more powerful positions in Church and state, was bitterly disappointed when he was denied the bishopric of Rouen and given instead the relatively insignificant see of Lisieux. Still, he was not without influence at the English court as long as it resided in France. Cauchon accumulated incalculable wealth as a partisan of Henry VI in the years to come, but he became a bitter, anxious man. In 1442, when he was about seventy-two, the man who without irony styled himself “the humble bishop of Beauvais” was being shaved by his barber when he felt something like a tight fist in his chest; a moment later, wide-eyed and breathless, he slid from the chair.

  Other major clerics from the trial suffered more than a swift demise. Jean d’Estivet, one of Joan’s cruelest and most implacable judges, was murdered under strange and doubtful circumstances in 1438; his body was discovered in a Rouen sewer. Nicholas Midi, author of the twelve articles of condemnation and preacher of the last sermon against Joan, died of leprosy the same year as Cauchon.

  Joan’s great friend, Jean d’Alençon, led an unhappy life after the king sabotaged their friendship. For years the duke continued in battle for the Valois, but he made an unfortunate decision in arranging his daughter’s marriage to an English nobleman. Charles VII was extremely displeased, and then Alençon seems to have undergone a complete and inexplicable change of personality. He supported a revolt against Charles; he began to drink heavily; and he led an altogether louche life, dabbling
in black magic and consorting with notorious companions. All this was so out of character for this once good and decent man that mental illness should not be discounted as an explanation.

  Alençon testified generously and warmly on Joan’s behalf at her nullification trial in 1456, but immediately thereafter the king had him arrested for treason. He was twice condemned to death and twice had his sentence overturned, but he spent many years in prison. Joan’s beau duc, Jean d’Alençon, died not in chains but nevertheless bitter, lonely and unwell in 1476, at the age of sixty-nine. He had not seen his friend Joan since he was twenty-two.

  When Charles VII recaptured Rouen in 1449, he learned the details of Joan’s execution and probably read a copy of the trial record, which was kept at the bishop’s residence. In February 1450 he set up a formal inquiry into the legality of the proceedings against her. Investigations and numerous interviews in Rouen soon made it clear that the trial had been markedly discriminatory, biased and partisan (not to say illegal). Charles was not motivated so much by gratitude to Joan or a desire for justice as he was driven by the need to validate his own status: vindicating Joan and proclaiming her innocent of any heresy, the king would effectively ratify his legitimate position on the throne of France. But her condemnation had come from a Church trial, and only the Church could retract, overturn or nullify the original verdict. Still, the groundwork could be laid.

  Seven witnesses were heard on March 4 and 5, among them the notary Guillaume Manchon; Isambart de la Pierre and Martin Ladvenu, who were with Joan at her execution; and the trial usher, Jean Massieu. But there the matter stopped. Two years later Cardinal Guillaume d’Estouteville, French representative for Pope Nicholas V, heard a petition sent by Isabelle d’Arc. Another formal inquiry was undertaken, but like that of 1450 it was short-lived—and for the same reason: fear of opposing both the English (still in France) and the Church authorities.

  In 1452 the new Inquisitor of France, Jean Bréhal, agreed to join d’Estouteville at a further inquiry in Rouen.

  More witnesses gave evidence from May 2 to 22 that year, and the result was astonishing to the new commission. The corruption of the trial became clear, as did the lack of freedom of the judges and notaries to act. Joan’s lack of counsel went against the custom of Inquisitorial trials. The details of her imprisonment were horrifying, as was the basic cause of the entire trial—the English desire to get rid of Joan and thus to discount the legitimacy of Charles’s kingship.

  In 1455 Pope Nicholas V died. His successor, Calixtus III, ordered the matter to be pursued that June, after Joan’s mother and brothers appealed to him for justice. On November 7 the elderly, frail Isabelle Romée, accompanied by friends, traveled to Paris from her home in Orléans. In evident physical pain and emotional distress but with an impressively strong voice, she appeared before a tribunal of clergy and bishops in the grandeur of Notre-Dame Cathedral and asked that her daughter’s good name be cleared of the heinous charges that condemned her to death.

  Isabelle’s formal statement has been preserved; in the mother’s strength we hear something of the daughter:

  I had a daughter born in lawful wedlock, who grew up amid the fields and pastures. I had her baptized and confirmed and brought her up in the fear of God. I taught her respect for the traditions of the Church, and I succeeded so well that she spent much of her time in church, and after going to confession, she received the Eucharist frequently. Because the people suffered so much, she had a great compassion for them in her heart, and despite her youth she would fast and pray for them with great devotion and fervor. She never thought, spoke or did anything against the faith. But certain enemies had her arraigned in a religious trial. Despite her disclaimers and appeals, both tacit and expressed, and without any help given to her defense, she was put through a perfidious, violent, iniquitous and sinful trial. The judges condemned her falsely, damnably and criminally and put her to death in a cruel manner by fire. I demand that her name be restored.

  Ten days later, on November 17, 1455, a new commission met, headed by Inquisitor Jean Bréhal and the bishops of Reims and Paris as Judges of the Appeal. They were careful to set forth the independent nature of the court and would brook no interference from king or prelate, foreign or domestic. On December 12 the trial opened, but only the d’Arc family was represented by counsel; no one came forward to speak for the accused assessors or on behalf of the late Jean d’Estivet. The case was further helped when the nephews of Pierre Cauchon announced publicly that they wanted nothing to do with the present or previous trial, for they were either not born or were very young when it occurred. But apparently they knew more than they said, for the Cauchon family asked the court that, whatever the outcome of the new inquiry, they be treated under the terms of the amnesty granted by Charles after the reconquest of Normandy.

  Thus began an intensive and extensive inquiry, during which thousands of pages of documents were assembled and sworn testimony was taken from over one hundred twenty-five witnesses in Domrémy, Vaucouleurs, Orléans, Paris and Rouen—among them nobles, farmers, soldiers, neighbors of Joan and her family, ordinary citizens from each region, bishops and priests. They were all protected by the amnesty Charles VII had guaranteed to former or perceived enemies who had once taken sides against him.

  At the outset Guillaume Manchon contributed not only his recollections but also his original French notes of the trial. He testified under oath that at Cauchon’s order, Joan’s comments were recast unfavorably (as she herself once said); furthermore, Manchon insisted that the trial was from the first a fraud and that the judges would not have treated Joan the same way if she had been English. Jean Tiphaine, one of the doctors who attended the imprisoned Joan when she fell ill in April 1431, quoted “an important Englishman” who said of Joan, “She is truly a fine woman. If only she were English!” Dunois and Alençon too were heard speaking at length of their friend and comrade-in-arms. Almost everything we know of Joan’s origins, her childhood and her journey to Vaucouleurs is contained in those interviews, which (among others from the nullification trial) have been liberally cited in this book.

  In addition, the judges admitted into evidence the alterations, additions and omissions in the minutes of the original trial as well as the comments made by University of Paris scholars who took exception to the twelve articles as presented to them. The incompetence of the Rouen judges, their weaknesses and prejudices and the threats of Cauchon against them, also came to light, as did the details of the dreadful treatment Joan received during the last year of her life—culminating with the illegal sentence and unlawful execution.

  The trial of nullification, as it is properly called, proceeded during the winter and spring of 1456. Finally, on July 7 of that year, the trial of 1431—the trial of condemnation—was itself condemned by the pope’s own appellate court in, of all places, the bishop’s residence at Rouen. This was a solemn and memorable event, as the presiding bishops dramatically symbolized the corruption and malfeasance of the 1431 trial by tearing to shreds a copy of the original trial document. Isabelle attended a similar ritual at Orléans; she died two years later, on November 28, 1458.

  It is important to note, however, that the nullification trial condemned no one by name, nor was there any identification of the prelates who were themselves guilty; reference is made only to “certain men.” In addition, nothing was done to glorify Joan, although for many people that was implicit in her exoneration. The concluding statements of the new trial emphasized the illegality and injustice of the original, but care was taken not to exalt or venerate a young woman whose attitude to the institutional Church was far less docile than what prelates demanded and expected.

  For the rest of the fifteenth century Joan was for the most part a local heroine, honored mostly in Orléans by festivals in celebration of their liberation in 1429. By the time of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, she was a figure of embarrassment to cool-headed French atheists and agnostics. Voltaire ridiculed Joan’s virginity
, and his era generally regarded her as a curiosity from a dim, superstitious past. The accounts of the Hundred Years’ War had not yet been widely circulated, and the trial documents and other contemporaneous accounts were left to collect dust until serious research was undertaken in the nineteenth century.

  Later, left-wing politicians and an impressive list of socialists transformed Joan into a daughter of the people, a social activist with no interest in the spiritual life. Equally out of balance are those on the extreme right, sustained by prejudice and xenophobia, who claim that her piety validates a kind of French preeminence.

  Joan objected to the possibility of a vanished France, absorbed into the English empire. She took no stand against including a variety of peoples speaking many languages and representing a colorful palette of historical antecedents, from Anglophilic Normandy to Celtic Brittany, from the Spanish Pyrenees to Italianate Provence, from the Germanic eastern borders to the Flemish northern regions—all of them part of what eventually became a unified France. Indeed, she knew people from all these regions.

  As we have seen, it was precisely this developing sense of nationhood, quite against empire building, to which Joan responded and which her actions reinforced. As the historian Siobhan Nash-Marshall has succinctly stated, “There was no real kingdom of France” when Joan came on the scene. Instead France was “a series of counties, duchies, and baronies, and the people of France were loyal to their counts, dukes and barons…. The lack of a real sense of nationhood also explains why the people of France did not constantly rebel at the prospect of falling under English rule.”