Joan of Arc

by Timothy Wilson-Smith

  The English tried to make him hurry up, and as he tried to console her, asked him if they were going to dine there, so the executioner was told to do what he had to do. ‘As she was dying, she cried, with a loud voice: “Jesus!”’

  Testimonies collected in 1450 left no room for doubt that the 1431 trial had been a political trial masquerading as a religious inquest. Their accounts must have pleased Charles VII, but Pope Nicholas V was probably embarrassed. He wanted the French and the English to make peace in order to join forces against the Turks and so defend the capital of the Greek world. He could not know that in 1453, as the French drove the English from France, the Turks would finally capture Constantinople. By 1455 there was no hope of routing Sultan Mehmet III, and the new pope was less cautious than the old one, so the case to annul the condemnation could be resumed. On 7 November Isabelle Romée and her two sons came to the cathedral of Notre-Dame to demand justice for her daughter from judges who were the pope’s representatives:

  She had a daughter born in legitimate marriage whom she had baptised and confirmed and brought up in the fear of God and respectful of the traditions of the Church so far as she could ensure, given the child’s age and humble status. Growing up in fields and grazing land, she often went to Church and after going to confession she would receive the sacrament of the Eucharist every month. Because the people were suffering so much, in her heart she had great pity on them and, though very young, she would fast and pray for them devoutly and fervently. She never thought, spoke or did a thing against the faith . . . Enemies had her arraigned in a religious trial. Despite her denials and appeals, both unspoken and spoken, and with no help in her defence, she was put through an unjust, violent, wicked and sinful trial. Judges condemned her falsely, damnably and illegally, and put her to death very cruelly by fire. To damn their souls and to atone for the notorious, infamous and irreparable loss to me, Isabelle, and mine . . . I demand her name be restored.

  After this speech, however carefully rehearsed, Isabelle was so overcome that she had to be taken to the cathedral sacristy. The final nullification trial could begin.

  During the 1452 inquiry, witnesses had been initially examined on twelve articles corresponding to the twelve articles of the original trial, but these were found not to correspond accurately to the actual way in which that trial had been conducted. Manchon, the notary, the two friars Martin Ladvenu and Ysambart de La Pierre testified, as did Pierre Miget, one of the original judges, and Pierre Cusquel, a Rouennais master mason. Those who had spoken at the 1450 inquiry usually elaborated what they said in the subsequent inquiries of 1452 and 1455.

  Judicially, the notary Manchon’s testimony was the most damning, since, as a man versed in canon law, he noticed points that were not strictly correct, such as Joan’s incarceration in an English prison, the threat of torture, her prudential reasons for wearing men’s clothes (she was guarded by soldiers), but most shocking of all, the way in which evidence was altered. ‘I, as notary, wrote down Joan’s answers and defence. Two or three writers, secretly hidden nearby, omitted from their writing everything in her favour. The judges urged me [Manchon] to do as they did, but I refused.’ Manchon also pointed out that whereas Cauchon chose to take part, the Inquisitor was afraid of not taking part; the process was at English expense (in 1455 he mentioned the 1,000 crowns given for her surrender to the English and the 300 crowns given to the Burgundian soldier who had captured her), with the implication that the English wanted their money’s worth; and the assessors and theologians summoned dared not refuse to attend. Manchon wrote out what had been said in French, and believed it was subsequently translated into Latin. He also swore that ‘the copy of the process that was shown to me is the true copy made’ and he identified his own and his companion’s signatures. ‘One copy was given to the Inquisitor, one to the King of England, and one to the Bishop of Beauvais.’ With Thomas de Courcelles he translated his version into Latin, ‘long after the death and execution of Joan’. Because of the constant interruptions Joan had endured, some secretaries wrote down only what they wanted to record, without any record of the words that could have exonerated her. Manchon himself complained about such omissions, and when some said ‘she had not replied as he had written’, he ‘wrote Nota at the top, so that the questions might be repeated and the difficulties removed’.2

  Neither did Manchon recall the use of preliminary evidence, which should have been inserted in the trial record. He thought that Joan was tried not in Paris, but in Rouen, because that was where the King of England and leading members of his council were. He reiterated the view of Lohier that the trial could not be valid because it was held in a castle, not in a legal court. He reaffirmed the atmosphere of intimidation in which the trial had taken place, as when someone was advising Joan on the question of submission to the Church and Cauchon had cried out, ‘Hold your tongue, in the devil’s name!’ Then there was another incident when the Earl of Stafford would have killed a person who had spoken up for Joan if he had not been told that they were in a place of sanctuary. Manchon added more on how Loiselleur ensured Joan’s confession to him was overheard. He also claimed that the twelve articles of her indictment were not read to her, that she had not understood what she had abjured and that she believed in her visions to the end.

  Brother Martin told how he was with Joan on the day of her death, until the very moment she died. When Joan saw the fire, she told him to go down and hold the cross of Christ high so that she could look at it. When the Bishop of Beauvais came to see her, she told him he was the reason for her death; he had promised to put her in the hands of the Church, but instead had given her up to her enemies. ‘To the end of her life she maintained . . . that her voices came from God, and that what she had done had been by God’s command.’

  Other witnesses, less important to her, were still useful to the court. They could give details of the way she was treated in prison, knew that she was kept in chains, even in an iron cage, asserted that she had been tested for virginity and found to be still a virgin – a fact that the judges had carefully omitted to mention in 1431 – and confirmed the tales of persistent intimidation by Cauchon and the English. Massieu summed up the general sense of the 1431 proceedings, saying:

  Many had a great hate against her, chiefly the English, who were very afraid of her: for, before she was captured, they did not dare to appear where they believed her to be. I heard it said that the Bishop of Beauvais did everything at the instigation of the King of England and his Council, who were then in Rouen . . . Some of them [the assessors] said she ought to be in the hands of the Church, but the Bishop [Cauchon] did not care, and sent her away to the English.

  Among the clerical witnesses, none was as revealing as Thomas de Courcelles. Born in Amiens, trained in law as well as theology, he was appointed Rector of the University of Paris in 1430. As a representative of the university, he became a leading figure at the Council of Basel, where he argued alongside many against Pope Eugenius IV and promoted the cause of the anti-pope Felix V. He also revealed his political skills at the meeting in Arras where the treaty was signed between the Duke of Burgundy and the King of France that led ultimately to French victory in the Hundred Years War. There it was said of him that he spoke like an angel, moving many to tears as he talked of peace. In 1440 at Bourges he eloquently supported the Gallican case that saw the French Church as semi-independent of Rome; and in 1442 he preached on the end of conflicts between the king and the University of Paris. Later, he negotiated the abdication of Felix V and in time he became Dean of Notre-Dame and an archdeacon in Rome. Although highly articulate and a distinguished public speaker, few of those involved in Joan’s 1431 trial or who testified on that trial in 1456 gave such imprecise testimony as de Courcelles.

  He stated that he ‘believed the Bishop of Beauvais accepted the task of trying Joan in a matter of the faith because he was a counsellor of the King of England and Bishop of Beauvais, in whose territory Joan had been taken captive. He had hear
d it said that money was given to the Inquisitor by a certain Surreau, receiver-general, but he did not know if the bishop was paid.’

  He remembered Lohier’s belief that the trial was illegal and he himself ‘never held Joan to be a heretic except in her refusal to submit to the Church’ and ‘never positively gave an opinion that she was a heretic’. Nor did he give an opinion as to whether she should be tortured – a statement that contradicts the trial record. ‘Many of the assessors . . . advised that Joan should be put . . . into a Church prison’, but he ‘did not remember’ that this subject formed a part of his discussions.

  Courcelles was clear that Joan was examined on the twelve articles that had been drawn up, but did not know if anyone had suggested they should be redrafted. He did know that Loiselleur had visited Joan in disguise and advised against it. He believed he heard Joan in confession. He stated that Joan had gone back to dressing in men’s clothes ‘because it seemed to her more suitable to wear man’s clothing, being with men, than a woman’s dress’. Finally, though he had been present at the last preaching made in the Vieux-Marché on the day she died, he had not watched her burn, since, ‘after the sermon and the reading of the sentence, I went away’.

  Ever the skilful lawyer, Thomas de Courcelles had said nothing incriminating: as a man famous for verbal fluency he had been extraordinarily reticent.

  Laymen could afford to be freer in criticising the proceedings. One advocate in the civil courts, Laurence Guesdon, a burgher of Rouen, pointed out one lapse:

  . . . the sentence by which Joan was handed over to the civil authorities was read; and, as soon as it was pronounced, immediately . . . and before either the Bailli or himself [Guesdon], the witness, whose task it was, had given sentence, the executioner grabbed her and took her to the place where the stake was already prepared: and she was burned. And this he [Guesdon] held was an incorrect proceeding.

  This view was confirmed by Jean Ricquier, chaplain of Rouen Cathedral, who was about twenty at the time. He knew that Joan was handed over by the Church authorities; he saw the English seize her and lead her at once to the place of execution. He did not observe any sentence read by the secular authorities. Both he and the advocate knew this procedure to have been incorrect.

  It was a visitor to the city, however, who saw clearly the flaws in Joan’s trial. Although originally from Viville, in Bassigny, not far from Domremy, Jean Moreau came to settle in Rouen. He recalled how ‘a man of note from Lorraine came to the town’ and how, as he was from the same part of the country, they soon got to know one another. The visitor came from the marches of Lorraine and had been called to Rouen, ‘having been commissioned to get information in the native country of the said Joan and to hear what her reputation was’. He had done as he was asked and reported to Cauchon, expecting some reward for his trouble and expense. Instead, Cauchon railed at him, called him a traitor and a bad man, and said he had not done what he had been told to do.

  My compatriot complained that he could not get any wage from the bishop, who found his information useless. He told me that in what he had found out he had learnt nothing of Joan that he would not willingly have heard about his own sister, although he had made enquiries in five or six parishes near Domremy as well as in the village itself.

  Cauchon had not wanted to know the truth. Moreau also noted that Joan was said to be guilty of the crime of lèse-majesté, that is treason, and to have led the people astray. She was condemned, however, not for treason, but for heresy; and yet it is hard not to believe that in her judges’s eyes her offence was political rather than religious. Having seen the volumes of evidence collected, a commentator can be grateful to Moreau. At times it seems that the new judges needed a hammer to bludgeon a nut. In a few sentences Moreau said all that must be said: the original judges were dishonest and the process dishonest.

  In all, 150 witnesses related to the court their memories of Joan. Much of what they said may have seemed irrelevant to questions of heresy. Those who had known her as a child remembered Joan before she was a figure of national renown. Her life alongside French soldiers, about which Dunois, Alençon or Louis de Coutes spoke, filled in details of her campaigns. There was virtually no mention of the months when she campaigned in the upper Loire and few knew anything about her when she passed months in prison before coming to Rouen to be tried. For the trial itself there were abundant witnesses. Even if key figures at the trial, such as Cauchon and Estivet, did not testify, as they were no longer alive, it was amazing how many people had lived on into the 1450s. Beaupère appeared once, and, by extraordinary luck, the notaries who as young men had kept records of the trial were around in middle age to produce them or to verify them. A few priests had intimate knowledge of Joan’s spiritual life: Father Jean Pasquerel for the period of her public career, several Dominican friars, notably Brothers Martin Ladvenu and Ysambard de La Pierre, for the period of the trial. There were women who had provided lodgings for her, men who had brief encounters with her, a relation, Laxart, and others who repeated what they had heard about her. Seguin Seguin had seen her in Poitiers.

  One matter that had exercised the original judges, the fairies’ tree at Domremy, interested only those who came from the area. The original judges had worried about her clothes, whereas the witnesses of the 1450s, except for Beaupère, were not so concerned. A third, most important concern, the nature and status of her visions, was hardly touched on in the 1450s. Only Joan could describe them, and at the original trial words sometimes failed her. In the later trials her visions were regarded as private unless they contradicted the teaching of the Church; and how they did so was difficult to prove. At the original trial any appeal to the pope was not allowed, if, as many of the later witnesses averred, Joan had appealed to him. In 1431 it was hard to say who was pope, for many doubted the position of Eugenius IV, but her judges would not allow even an appeal to the Council of Basel. As far as they were concerned, their court was the court beyond which there was no appeal.

  One recent historian, François Neveux, has argued that in the ecclesiastical retrial the Inquisitor, Jean Bréhal, tried to blame Cauchon in order to preserve the good name of his own occupation, conducting inquests. The inquisitors had played an unenthusiastic part in Joan’s original trial. This is a legalistic case. Neveux ignores all the evidence on Joan’s character and behaviour provided by men like Alençon, the Bastard (now Dunois), de Coutes, d’Aulon and Father Pasquerel, let alone many obscure inhabitants of Domremy, Orléans or Rouen; and yet, even in legalistic terms, it is hard not to conclude that the trial and condemnation of Joan in 1431 was a travesty of inquisitorial justice. That in the end was the verdict of the 1456 trial of nullification. The documents of the nullification trial were phrased dully, but their cumulative effect is devastating.

  Time after time, best procedure in Joan’s trial had been ignored. She could have been tried as a traitor to Henry VI and II, but she was not. Her heresy should have been notorious, a view that Charles VII’s court and clergy had not noticed, but in fact, contrary to proper form, she was accused of heresy on the basis of cross-examination; and that should not have been the case. She should have been detained in a Church prison, but she was not. She should have been given counsel, but she was not until it was too late and then she was offered help only from the assessors in the court, who in view of their status could not give her unbiased advice. As her case was a concern of Charles VII’s, he should have been represented in the case, but he was not. He should have informed the pope and asked the case to be tried in Rome, but he did not. She should not have been tried by her enemies, but she was. She should not have been guarded by men, let alone Englishmen, but she was. The salvation of her soul could not have depended on whether or not she was dressed like a man, but it did. If it did, she should not have been tricked into wearing men’s clothes, but she was (or at least that is probably the case). After so many procedural errors, once condemned as a relapsed heretic, she should have been solemnly handed over to th
e secular power of Rouen, but she was not. There had been unjust ecclesiastical trials before, but Joan’s was one of the most unjust trials ever undertaken in any ecclesiastical court.

  SEVENTEEN

  Verdict and Rehabilitation

  The evidence that had been collected so painstakingly, first by the king’s officials in 1450, then by Church officials in 1452, 1455 and 1456, was not collected for its own sake. The reason for gathering the information was to answer certain questions. At first the lawyers had thought that they could use the twelve articles of the 1431 trial, but soon they found out that they wished to discuss many other questions, so they redrafted and expanded the number of articles to twenty-seven.

  These new articles were not just the old ones redressed; instead, they were a new set designed to respond to the evidence that could be found to nullify the verdict of the first trial. The first five refer to English hatred of Joan, based on her championing of Charles VII’s cause and her victories over them (1, 2), a motive for taking her to Rouen and imprisoning her in the castle (3), for terrifying the judges, the advisers and the Promoter (4) and the notaries (5), so that the notaries did not dare record anything to favour her (6), so that she had no adequate advice or aid (7), was kept in chains in a secular prison (8). Joan was only nineteen or so, too young to defend herself (9). She was secretly visited so as to encourage her not to submit to the Church (10), she was interrogated in such a way that it was hard not to be trapped (11) and worn down (12), while she persistently said she submitted to the Church and the Holy Father (13), repeated that in court (14), but her words were not faithfully recorded (15) and if some thought that she would not submit to the Church (16), that was because she did not understand what was meant by the term ‘Church Militant’ or else because she thought that the Church was under English control (17). Besides, translations of the trial records from French into Latin were not always accurate (18). For all these reasons the trial sentence was unsafe (19), the trial documents untrustworthy (20) and its legal procedures incorrect (21). Joan could not defend herself properly (22) and, although a loyal communicating Catholic, she was condemned as a heretic to appease the English (23), she was taken to be burnt without authorisation from the secular authorities (24), she died a saintly death (25), she had been harried by the English to discredit the Most Christian King (26). All these facts are well known both in Rouen and throughout France (27).1