Joan of Arc

by Timothy Wilson-Smith

  Jean Toutmouillé was cautious in judging the trial, which he had not attended, but he related the common view ‘that they persecuted her from a desire of perverse revenge’. He says her enemies would put off besieging Louviers until she had been dealt with. Jean himself had been in the prison when Martin Ladvenu had to tell Joan she was to be burnt, which Ladvenu did ‘most considerately and charitably’, and he recalled how Joan had cried out in distress, saying that she would rather have her head cut off ‘seven times than be burnt in this way’. Had she been kept in a Church prison instead of in the custody of her enemies, she was sure that she would not have been so miserably treated. ‘I appeal to God, the Great Judge, over the great wrongs and injustices done me!’ When Cauchon came, she told him, ‘Bishop, I die through you.’ Cauchon retorted that she had not kept to her promise, meaning her promise to wear women’s clothes, and Joan reiterated her point about Church prisons and competent Church guards; and at this Toutmouillé left.

  Brother Ysambard de La Pierre had been more intimately involved. At one stage he had urged Joan to submit to the Church, to which she replied she would submit to the Holy Father, and he had told her to submit to the Council of Basel. Joan had never heard of a general council, but when he explained that some people there were on her side and others on the English side – in fact most were pro-English – she cried out, ‘If there are any of our side in that place, I am quite willing to give myself up and to submit to the Council of Basel.’ This reply infuriated Cauchon. ‘Shut up,’ he said and told the notary to cut out any reference to her submission to the council. Brother Ysambard was also threatened by the English, who intimated that if he did not stay silent they would throw him into the Seine.

  When Joan recanted and abjured and put on men’s clothes again, ‘I and many others were present when Joan excused herself for doing this.’ She had told him ‘that the English had tried violence on her, when she was wearing a woman’s dress’; and he ‘saw her weeping, her face covered with tears . . . so that he was full of pity’. She said publicly, after being declared an obstinate and relapsed heretic: ‘If you, my Lords of the Church, had placed and kept me in your prisons, perhaps I should not have been in this state.’

  After the end of this session and trial, Cauchon said to the English ‘Farewell, be cheerful, it’s done.’ Brother Ysambard added that Joan had been asked ‘such difficult, subtle, and crafty questions . . . that the great clerics and learned men present would have found it hard to reply’. He had been with the Bishop of Avranches, ‘an aged and good cleric’, who had been asked for his opinion of the case. The bishop said: ‘He summoned me before him, and asked me what St Thomas [Thomas Aquinas] said about submitting to the Church. I sent him in writing the verdict of St Thomas: “In doubtful things, touching the Faith, recourse should always be had to the Pope or to a General Council.”’ The bishop agreed with this and seemed to be unhappy with the arguments put forward on this subject. His thoughts were written down but ‘left out, maliciously’.

  Even at the end of the whole process, the correct forms were not followed. When Joan had confessed and taken communion, she was declared a relapsed heretic, but the secular judge did not condemn her; instead, she was given immediately to the executioner, who was simply told to do his duty and burn her.

  In her last moments, Joan was so contrite and so beautifully penitent that ‘it was a thing to be admired, saying such pitiful, devout, and Catholic words, so that those who saw her in great numbers wept and . . . the Cardinal of England and many other English were forced to weep’:

  As I was near her at the end, the poor woman asked and humbly begged me to go to the Church nearby and bring her the Cross, to hold it up in front of her eyes until death came, so that the Cross on which God hung might be in life continually before her eyes. While in the flames, she did not stop calling out the Holy Name of Jesus in a loud voice, imploring and invoking continually the help of the Saints in Paradise; further, what is more, as she was dying and bending her head, she uttered the Name of Jesus as a sign that she fervently believed in God, exactly what we read of St Ignatius (of Antioch) and of several other Martyrs.

  Brother Ysambard concludes: ‘Immediately after the execution, the executioner came to me and to my companion, Brother Martin Ladvenu.’ Overwhelmed by what he had just experienced and moved to feel sorrow for sin, he was ‘quite desperate and afraid he would never receive God’s pardon’ for what he had done to this holy woman. ‘And the executioner said and affirmed that, in spite of the oil, the sulphur, and the charcoal which he had applied to the entrails and heart of the said Joan, in no way could he burn them up, nor reduce to ashes either the entrails or the heart, which he found amazing, like an obvious miracle.’

  Brother Martin agreed: ‘Many of those who appeared in the court did so more from love of the English and the favourable feelings they had for them than because of their commitment to justice and to the Catholic Faith.’ Cauchon, he thought, was an example of ‘extreme prejudice’, for which he suggested two proofs: his refusal to put her in a Church prison instead of an English prison; and, his delight at seeing that she had reverted to men’s clothes, which he joked about with the Earl of Warwick, ‘“Farewell! Farewell! It is done; be of good cheer!”, or such-like words’ (much the same words as those mentioned by Brother Ysambard). Cauchon was proud of his fluency in English.

  Joan also told Brother Martin that in prison Joan had been abused by an English lord. He repeated the accounts relating that she had blamed Cauchon for her death and that before her execution she had not been condemned by the secular judges – a Dominican would have an eye for legal niceties – but had been handed over straightaway to the executioner. That this was all wrong was admitted in a later heresy case, when the judges pointedly said that this time, as had not happened in Joan’s case, correct procedures must be followed. And the executioner himself said he had never been so afraid of carrying out a sentence, both because she was famous and because she had been so cruelly tied up that he could not hasten her death. Brother Martin also witnessed the way she called on the name of Jesus and on the saints while she was dying.

  Guillaume Duval had been present at one session of the trial beside Ysambard de La Pierre. Alhough the two could find no room for themselves in the consistory, they sat at the middle of the table, near Joan. ‘When she was questioned or examined, Brother Ysambard advised her what she should say, nudging her or making some other sign.’ After the session was over, he and Brother Ysambard, with Maître Jean Delafontaine, were given the job of visiting her in prison that day after dinner and giving her advice, so they went together to Rouen Castle to do so. There they came across the Earl of Warwick, who was furious with Brother Ysambard and demanded to know why that morning he had nudged ‘that wicked person’ and made signs to her. ‘If I see you again taking trouble to save her . . . I will have you thrown into the Seine.’ He so terrified brothers Guillaume and Ysambard that they fled back to the priory. Brother Guillaume had no more to add, as he took no part in the trial.

  As expert theologians and confessors, Dominicans may have been the clerical witnesses most sympathetic to Joan – in the 1450s they tried to show that they had been – but on the conduct of the trial Maître Guillaume Manchon, the trial notary, was the key witness. Of all the depositions his was the longest and the most damning. To him the proceedings were suspect, since he thought Cauchon and the Paris ‘masters’ acted out of ‘hatred and anger over the cause of the King of France’. In the 1450s this was a view that anyone aware of the state of affairs was prudent to withhold.

  First, Maître Nicolas Loiselleur, a friend of Cauchon’s, pretended that he came from Joan’s part of the country so that he could talk to her, be her confessor and use her words against her in the trial. When the trial began, Loiselleur secretly put Manchon, his assistant Boisguillaume and other witnesses by a hole in an adjoining room to enable them to hear her and report what they had heard to him. Her comments were used as the basis of
memoranda for questions in the trial, to find a means of catching her out.

  When the process was under way, Maître Jean Lohier, a learned Church lawyer, came to Rouen, and was asked to give his opinion on what Cauchon had said. He asked for two or three days for research, but was told to give his opinion that afternoon. Lohier said the proceedings were invalid because they were not carried out in public where people were free to express their views, that the business concerned the honour of the King of France, as Joan supported him, but the king had not been called, there were none of the necessary legal documents available, and she had been given no counsel. Cauchon was wild with Lohier for saying this. ‘This Lohier . . . would discredit everything, and says it is of no value. If we were to believe him, everything must be begun again, and all we have done would be worthless!’ It was a Saturday afternoon in Lent, and on the following morning Manchon spoke to Lohier at the church of Notre-Dame at Rouen, and asked him what he thought of the trial and of Joan. Lohier told him that if Joan were to say ‘It seems to me’ instead of ‘I know for certain’ when she talked about her revelations, her judges would have no grounds for condemning her. He added, ‘It seems they act more from hate than any other motive; and therefore I will not stay here, for I have no wish to be involved.’ His views were not welcome in Rouen. He left and spent the rest of his life at the papal court, where his final job was to be the Dean of Appeals; and in Rome he died.

  In the early stages of the process, as Manchon was busy for five or six days writing out Joan’s answers and excuses, the judges, speaking in Latin, often tried to force him to change the words by altering their meaning. By Cauchon’s order two men were put by a window near the judges’ seat, hidden by a curtain, to write and report the charges against Joan, saying nothing about her excuses – this, Manchon thought, was Loiselleur’s work. ‘When a session was over, in the afternoon, when notes of what was written were compared, the others had a different version to mine, without any of the excuses, and Cauchon was wild with me.’ Where Manchon wrote ‘Nota’ in the record – his minutes were eventually used in the 1455 retrial – there was disagreement, questions had to be asked, and, Manchon claims, ‘it was found that what I had written was true’.

  Often, says Manchon, Cauchon and the ‘Masters’ wanted to compel him to write what they imagined, not what he himself had heard. ‘And when there was something that did not please them, they forbade it to be written down, saying that it was no use for the process; but he wrote only according to his hearing and knowledge.’

  Joan had said that she wished to submit to ‘our Holy Father the Pope and to the Holy Council’. The theological language made Cauchon suspicious, and he asked who had spoken with the Maid. The Guard said Maître Delafontaine, his lieutenant, and the two friars. As Delafontaine and the friars were absent, Cauchon was furious with Maître Jean Lemaître, the deputy inquisitor, and said he might do him an injury. When Delafontaine knew that he was threatened for this reason, he left Rouen, and did not return. As for the friars, they might have died but for Lemaître, who excused them and said that if they were harmed, he would stay away from the trial. From then onwards, the Earl of Warwick would not let anyone visit Joan, apart from Cauchon or those sent by him; and the deputy inquisitor could not go without him.

  When the sermon at St-Ouen was over and Joan had abjured, Loiselleur said to her, ‘Joan, you have done a good day’s work, if it please God, and have saved your soul.’ She then asked: ‘Take me to a Church prison, so that I can be out of the hands of the English.’ On Cauchon’s instruction she was taken back to the castle. On the following Sunday, Trinity Sunday, the masters, notaries, and others involved in the trial were called. They stated that they were told that she was back in men’s clothes and had relapsed. When they reached the castle, Cauchon was away and 80 to 100 English soldiers ‘met us in the castle courtyard and said we clerics were all false, treacherous Armagnacs and false counsellors, so we found it hard to get out of the castle, and did nothing all day’. Manchon was summoned the next day and refused to go without a guarantee of safe passage, after the fright he had had the day before, and unless one of Warwick’s followers acted as a surety. On these conditions he returned and took part in the rest of the trial, apart from the private examination of Joan, the account of which he would not sign, in spite of pressure from Cauchon.

  Manchon saw Joan being led to the scaffold surrounded by 700 or 800 soldiers with swords and staves, and no one daring to speak to her except Brother Martin Ladvenu and Maître Jean Massieu. She listened patiently to the sermon right to the end, then said her ‘thanksgiving, prayers and lamentations most notably and devoutly’, so that the judges, prelates, and all present were in tears. Manchon had never wept so much over anything, and ‘for a month after, he could not feel at peace’. For this reason, with part of the money he had received for his services he bought a missal, so that ‘he could pray for her . . . As for final repentance, I never saw greater signs of a Christian.’

  In his sermon at St-Ouen, Maître Guillaume Erard said: ‘Ah! noble house of France, which had always been the protectress of the Faith, have you been so abused that you would adhere to a heretic and schismatic?’ Joan replied by praising her king, calling him the best and wisest Christian in the world; Erard and Cauchon told Massieu to make her be silent.

  Jean Massieu was the final cleric to testify. He said he was present at every moment of the trial as clerk to Maître Jean Benedicite, the nickname of the Promoter, Estivet. From what he saw, he was sure the proceedings were motivated by hatred and a wish to dishonour the King of France whom Joan served, and to take revenge and bring her to death, ‘not according to reason and for the honour of God and of the Catholic Faith’. He said this because when Cauchon and the six clerics (Beaupère, Midi, Maurice, Touraine, Courcelles, and Feuillet, or someone else) interrogated her, before she could answer one of them, another would ask a different question, so that she was often rushed and anxious in her answers. And, besides, as he led Joan from her prison to the court, she would often ask if she could make her devotions in the castle chapel, which they passed. For granting her request he was often reproved by Estivet, who said, ‘Traitor! What makes you so bold as to let this excommunicated slut pray without permission? I will have you put in a tower where you shall see neither sun nor moon for a month, if you do so again.’ And when Estivet saw he was not obeyed, he stood in front of the chapel door, between Massieu and Joan, to stop her saying her prayers there and asked her expressly: ‘Is this the Body of Christ?’ When taking her back to prison on the fourth or fifth day, a priest called Maître Eustache Turquetil asked Massieu what he thought of her answers, if she would be burnt, what would happen. Massieu replied that so far he had seen only good and honour in her, but did not know what would happen; only God knew that. His answer was reported by Maître Eustache Turquetil to the ‘King’s’ people, that is Henry VI’s supporters, and he was said to be opposed to the king. For this reason Cauchon summoned him in the afternoon and told him to be careful to make no mistake, or he would be forced to drink more than was good for him. If the notary Manchon had not made excuses for him, he would not have escaped.

  Massieu is one source that explains why Joan went back to wearing male costume. At the end of the sermon that Joan had to hear after abjuring her voices, Massieu advised her to ask to be taken to a Church prison, as it was the Church that had condemned her, but Cauchon said she should go back to the castle. After dinner that day, the Thursday or Friday after Pentecost, in the presence of the Church council she took off her man’s dress and put on a woman’s dress, as she was told, and ‘the man’s dress was put in a bag in the room where she was kept prisoner, while she remained guarded in this place by five Englishmen, three of whom stayed all night in the room, and two outside the door of the room’. Massieu was sure that at night she slept chained by the legs with two pairs of iron chains, and fastened closely to a chain going across the foot of her bed, held to a great piece of wood, five or six fe
et long, and closed with a key, so that she could not move from where she was. Next Sunday was Trinity Sunday, and she told Massieu that when it was time to rise she asked the English guards to take off the irons so that she could get up. Then they took away her women’s clothes, emptied the bag with her men’s clothes in it and told her to put her dress in the bag. She told them she was forbidden to wear male costume, but they would not give her the female costume, however much she begged them to do so. ‘She told me all this next Tuesday before dinner, when the Promoter had left with the Earl of Warwick, and he [Massieu] was alone with her.’

  Some prisoners summoned to the castle were driven back by the English soldiers with axes and swords. Before Joan left the castle on Wednesday, when she was condemned, the Body of Christ was borne to her without stole and lights, which upset Brother Martin, who had confessed her, so a stole and lights were sent for, and Brother Martin gave her communion. Massieu’s version of her final acts is similar to Manchon’s version. He emphasises the way she invoked ‘the Blessed Trinity, the Blessed and Glorious Virgin Mary and all the Blessed Saints in Paradise’, naming some of them, and asked to be forgiven by those she had harmed and forgave those who had harmed her – and this went on for about half an hour.

  Massieu was with her until she died.

  With great devotion she asked to have a Cross: and, hearing this, an Englishman there made a little cross of wood with the ends of a stick, which he gave her, and devoutly she received and kissed it . . . crying and confessing God, Our Redeemer, Who suffered on the Cross for our Redemption, of Whose Cross she had the sign and representation; and she put the Cross in her bosom, between her body and her clothing. And, besides, she asked me humbly to get for her the Church Cross, so that she could see it continually till her death. And I got the Clerk of the Parish of St-Sauveur to bring it to her; which, being brought, she embraced closely and long, and kept it till she was fastened to the stake.