The Maid and the Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  The next day, her two judges, the bishop of Beauvais and the vice-inquisitor, along with a group of assessors visited her in her cell and sealed her fate by forcing her to confront the significance of having publicly recanted. “You said, upon the scaffold and the tribune, before us, judges, and before others and before the people, when you made abjuration, that it was falsely that you had boasted that those voices were the voices of Saints Catherine and Margaret,” Cauchon reminded her. “I did not mean to do and say so,” Joan fatally replied. “I did not say or mean to revoke my apparitions…. I would rather make my penitence once and for all, that is to say die, than to suffer any longer the pain of being in prison. I have never done anything against God and against the faith, whatever I may have been made to revoke; and for what was contained in the cédule of abjuration [the parchment she signed], I did not understand it. I did not mean to revoke anything unless provided it pleased God. If the judges wish it I will resume woman’s clothes; for the rest, I will do nothing about it.”

  This was the admission Cauchon had been waiting for. Her reply was duly noted and recorded. As he and the others left the cell, the bishop of Beauvais turned to the English officials who were waiting in the hallway. “Farewell, it is done,” he said.

  And so came the morning of Wednesday, May 30, 1431, the day established by her judges for her public condemnation and execution. To accommodate the earl of Warwick, the bishop of Beauvais had wasted no time and called an immediate meeting of the assessors, at which Joan’s relapse was confirmed by majority vote. The English used the intervening hours to erect raised platforms for the officers who would attend the burning and to construct a low circular stone barricade in the middle of the public square of the Old Market of Rouen, the venue deemed most suited to accommodate the expected crowd. Into this a stake was driven.

  Joan was informed of her impending death when she awoke that Wednesday by Brother Martin Ladvenu, who had been sent by Cauchon to hear her confession, another irregularity, as the prisoner’s heresy should have prohibited her from receiving this solace. This time there would be no reprieve, and Joan knew it. “‘Alas! Do they treat me thus horribly and cruelly, so that my body, clean and whole, which was never corrupted, must be this day consumed and reduced to ashes!… Alas! Had I been in the ecclesiastical prison to which I submitted myself, and been guarded by men of the Church and not by my enemies and adversaries, it had not so wretchedly happened to me as now it has! Ah! I appeal before God, the Great Judge, from the great wrongs and grievances being done to me.’ And she complained marvelously in that place of the oppressions and violences which had been done to her in the prison by the gaolers and by others who had been let in against her,” remembered an eyewitness. Nor did Joan fail in her despair to identify her true adversary. After her confession, Cauchon himself visited Joan for one last interview. “Bishop, I die by you,” she cried out passionately as he entered her cell.

  She was made to put on the long robe and hood of the condemned and in this costume was paraded down to the Old Market. The English, taking no chances, surrounded her with some eight hundred soldiers equipped with blades and axes; more were waiting at the square. By nine o’clock when she arrived, the platforms were already filled by her judges and assessors, as well as numerous English officials, and a great crowd had gathered, some in the marketplace, others hanging out of windows or perched on roofs.

  Again, she was first made to endure a protracted sermon on the evils of heresy and the need for all true Christians to snuff it out without mercy, lest the one infect the whole; but this time she was not offered the chance to recant. Instead, as soon as the pastor had finished, Cauchon stepped forward and delivered the judges’ verdict:

  “We declare that thou, Joan, commonly called the Maid, art fallen into diverse errors and diverse crimes of schism, idolatry, invocation of devils and numerous others…. And thereafter, after abjuration of thine errors, it is evident that thou hast returned to those same errors and to those crimes, your heart having been beguiled by the author of schism and heresy…. Wherefore we declare thee relapsed and heretic.” Then the bishop uttered the words that the English had been waiting for since they had first laid down their 10,000 livres tournois the previous December. “By this sentence… we rule that like a rotten limb you be cut off and rejected from the unity of the church and we remit you to secular justice.”

  The execution of Joan of Arc.

  Again by precedent, Joan ought to have at this point been handed over to the sheriff and taken to a civil court, there to go through the official process of sentencing and punishment, but the English were in no mood for formalities. No sooner were the words out of Cauchon’s mouth than she was seized by the executioner and dragged to the stake.

  And it was at this point that Joan broke: Joan who in an effort to exhort her men to victory had so often in the past defiantly planted her standard in the name of God and king, enduring with steadfast purpose a rain of arrows and cannonballs by the enemy; Joan who had met without fear or doubt those who were her superiors in age, learning, and lineage, expertly trading barb for barb, subtlety for subtlety, for months on end without losing her composure; Joan who by nineteen had suffered deprivation, humiliation, and oppression such as the most hardened soldier of fortune had not experienced and who yet never lost the clear song nor sweet joy of her faith, finally succumbed to the terror and anguish that lay before her. Piteously shrieking and crying, “imploring and invoking without cease the aid of the saints of paradise,” so that she moved the hearts of even those who supported the English cause, she was bound to the stake and the fire lit. Because of her youth and vitality, and the low stone parapet encircling the stake, which prevented the fire from overtaking her at once, the duration of Joan’s agony was prolonged even beyond that which was common for the ordeal. In the over half an hour that it took for her to die in the smoke and flames she continued to beg her angels for mercy and to proclaim her faith in God: “Once in the fire, she cried out more than six times, ‘Jesus!’ and especially in her last breath, she cried with a strong voice, ‘Jesus!’ so that everyone present could hear it; almost all wept with pity,” recounted an onlooker. After this, her head fell forward, the flames finally overcame the stone parapet that surrounded her, and she perished.

  The English remained cautious of Joan even in death, so much so that after the fire died down, the executioner was ordered to throw her heart, which had remained intact, along with the rest of her ashes, into the Seine. This prevented their being used as relics but also, according to witnesses, “because they feared lest she escape or lest some say she had escaped.”

  Still, the English had gotten what they had paid for: the Maid who had so humbled their army had been made to suffer torments and was now gone. But at least one of those present had an inkling of what the victory over this single, transcendent French soul had cost them. Master Jean Tressard, secretary to Henry VI, witnessed the execution and returned afterward to the castle much troubled.

  “We are all lost,” he said.

  * This was perhaps another reason why Yolande was not initially concerned for Joan of Arc’s safety and was content to have her remain a prisoner of John of Luxembourg.

  * The original seventy counts against her were later summarized and reduced to twelve for simplicity’s sake.

  CHAPTER 12

  Of Politics

  and

  Prisoners

  T WOULD BE GRATIFYING to be able to confirm the widespread belief that this one act, the terrible martyrdom of Joan of Arc—so unjust, so cruel, so iniquitous—resulted, as Master Jean Tressard predicted, in the immediate vanquishing of the English and the triumphal return of Charles VII to his hereditary throne. Or even that, if not quite the catalyst for a precipitous surrender, Joan’s execution at least marked the moral turning point in the conflict, the moment at which the native French population, repulsed by the deed, turned against the occupation and began the slow process of throwing off the yoke of the inv
aders. And yet the sad truth is that Joan’s death had absolutely no effect upon the war, or the politics of the period, or the eventual outcome of the struggle about which she had cared so deeply and in which, for a very brief period, she had played so critical a role. To her contemporaries, Joan’s condemnation and slaying, while deplored by those whose political leanings coincided with her own, represented little more than a sideshow, a momentary diversion—fleetingly noted and just as quickly forgotten.

  In part, this uninterest was due to a lack of information regarding the more troubling aspects of her trial. The official record of the proceedings was kept secret at Rouen. This did not stop both the English and the University of Paris from disseminating as much incriminating evidence and hearsay as was necessary to gain support for their actions. Within a month of Joan’s execution, Henry VI sent a letter around addressed to “the prelates, dukes, counts, and other nobles and to the cities of his kingdom of France,” commanding them “through preaching and public sermons and otherwise” to trumpet the story of her many impieties, emphasizing that before she had burned, the Maid had acknowledged her voices to be shams; the University of Paris masters penned a similar letter to Rome. These measures of course influenced popular opinion. To the outside world, Joan’s words and actions had been impartially reviewed by high-ranking and learned members of the clergy and had been found (as many who adhered to the Burgundian side in the war had already suspected) to be heretical. An anonymous Burgundian chronicler, known simply as “un Bourgeois de Paris,” devoted a lengthy passage in his journal to Joan’s philosophy and execution that is instructive as to the manner in which she was viewed by ordinary people of the opposing camp. “She rode with the King every day, amongst very many men-at-arms, no woman with her, wearing men’s clothing, points, and armor, and carrying a great stick in her hand,” he wrote. “If any of her men did anything wrong, she would wallop them hard with this stick, like a very brutal woman…. In several places she had men and women killed, both in battle and in deliberate revenge, for she had anyone who did not obey her letters killed immediately without pity whenever she could. She said and affirmed that she never did anything except at God’s command, as given to her frequently by the archangel St. Michael, by St. Catherine, and by St. Margaret, who made her do these things—not as Our Lord did to Moses on Mount Sinai, but themselves, personally, told her secret things that were to come; that they had ordered and did order everything that she did, her clothes and everything else.

  “Such and worse were my lady Joan’s false errors. They were all declared to her in front of the people, who were horrified when they heard these great errors against our faith which she held and still did hold. For, however clearly her great crimes and errors were shown her, she never faltered or was ashamed, but replied boldly to all the articles enumerated before her like one wholly given over to Satan,” the chronicler concluded.

  As difficult as it is to believe today, this unsympathetic view of Joan as a hardened, rather distasteful, unrepentant sinner was the one that in the aftermath of her execution was seemingly destined to prevail. To understand the heroism of the Maid it was necessary to hear her voice, to feel the force of her piety, to reflect on the magnitude of her courage and achievements, and all of this stood in great peril of being lost or deliberately destroyed by her enemies. To rescue Joan from this fate, three exceedingly unlikely events had to occur: Charles VII had either to win a major battle decisively (a dubious prospect at best) or somehow find a way to get himself recognized as the legitimate king of France by those municipalities, most especially Paris, currently occupied by his enemies; the English had subsequently to be expelled from all of their strongholds on the continent; and, finally, a conscious effort had to be made to discredit and overturn the heretical conviction of the Church, not an institution particularly known for changing positions or admitting errors. This was a daunting agenda for any sovereign, let alone one whose abilities were as limited as Charles’s.

  For all Joan’s courage, then, and despite the undeniable political legitimacy conferred upon Charles by the coronation at Reims, there was no indication at all at the time of her martyrdom that her king would ultimately prevail in his struggle against the English. The proof of this was that the war would drag on for a further twenty years. In the end, it would fall to another woman entirely, one unacknowledged by history, to take on the task left unfinished by the Maid.

  IRONICALLY, in terms of the war effort, the period of Joan’s captivity—from May 1430 to her death in May of the following year—marked the most productive and active interval of Charles’s reign. The council meetings convened at Sully-sur-Loire in March 1430 (from which a frustrated Joan had slipped away, choosing instead to act independently rather than endure what she considered to be endless talk) had for once actually produced something approaching a coordinated plan of attack. The king had finally been made to realize that Philip the Good had not really been negotiating for peace but rather had only been using Charles’s offers to improve the terms of his alliance with the English. Above all, Charles did not like to be taken for a fool, and his anger was palpable in a letter issued on May 6, 1430, to his supporters, in which the king disdainfully referred to Philip the Good as “our adversary of Burgundy.” The duke, the king fumed, “has, for some time, amused and deceived us by truces and otherwise, under the shadow of good faith, because he said and affirmed that he wished to arrive at the well-being of peace, the which, for the relief of our poor people who, to the displeasure of our heart, has suffered and every day suffer so much for the matter of the war, we greatly desired and do desire, he has set himself with certain forces to make war upon us and upon our countries and loyal subjects.” Charles’s bitterness over this duplicity had prompted him to approve an aggressive military campaign, much of it aimed directly at those areas held or desired by the duke of Burgundy. La Hire was sent into Normandy, the lord of Barbazan to aid the duke of Bar in Champagne, and the marshal Boussac and the count of Vendôme to Compiègne. Many of their efforts met with success. René besieged and won the Burgundian town of Chappes, which was heavily defended by an army sent by the marshal of Burgundy; the Bastard of Orléans joined La Hire in Normandy, worrying the English in Louviers, close to the Burgundian border to the north; and the lord of Boussac and the count of Vendôme not only raised the siege of Compiègne but won a further victory at Peronne.* Philip the Good suddenly found his participation in the war to be a good deal more onerous than had previously been his experience.

  But the energy displayed by the French military belied the poisonous nature of the royal court, which was rent by rivalry, intrigue, and corruption. Two principal political parties had formed, one under the leadership of Georges de la Trémoïlle, who, having vanquished Joan, once again occupied his former position as Charles’s closest and most influential adviser, and was very busy exploiting this advantage to maximum profit. The other, composed of the Angevins and their allies, focused on reconciling the king to Arthur of Richemont, Charles’s formerly rejected constable, as a means of obtaining a meaningful coalition with his brother, the ever-vacillating duke of Brittany. Bringing Arthur of Richemont back into Charles’s good graces meant restoring the constable to a dominant role at court and within the royal council, an appointment that La Trémoïlle, jealous of his authority (and riches), was desperate to prevent.

  Although Yolande of Aragon was still Arthur’s primary supporter and the ostensible leader of the Angevin party, by the spring of 1430 the queen of Sicily seems to have been in the process of retiring from the day-to-day workings of the court. She was, after all, nearly fifty years old and had been a dominant force in French politics since 1415, when the battle of Agincourt had thrust first her husband, and then herself, into a position of power within the old Armagnac coalition. Her great coup, the introduction of Joan to Charles at Chinon, had succeeded beyond all expectations. Orléans had been delivered from the enemy and by the coronation at Reims her daughter Marie’s position as the
legitimate queen of France was established. Moreover, as a result of Joan’s intervention, Charles was no longer in doubt as to his parentage, and seemed well on his way to recovering his kingdom. Yolande’s third son and chosen political successor, Charles of Anjou, was nearing adulthood. She had never sent him away as she had Louis III to Naples or René to Bar and consequently he had had the benefit of her political experience and advice since childhood. He was familiar with the workings of the royal court and was a trusted confidant of both his sister, Marie, the queen, and her husband. The political situation had stabilized to the point where the aging queen of Sicily could begin the process of edging toward a quieter, more peaceful existence. On March 30, 1430, by letters patent, sixteen-year-old Charles of Anjou took his place as an official member of the royal council and his mother retreated to her castle in Saumur.

  With this transition, Georges de la Trémoïlle saw his chance. In April, ambassadors from the duke of Brittany arrived to discuss the possibility, yet again, of the duke’s coming to a formal alliance with Charles VII. Charles of Anjou, not yet his mother’s equal at intrigue, was easily outmaneuvered by La Trémoïlle and seems to have been left out of these talks. He was therefore not in a position to protest when the ambassadors decided to cement the affiliation between the French king and the duke of Brittany by marrying the duke of Brittany’s daughter, Isabelle, to the count of Laval, a close friend of the constable’s, as a means of further protecting Breton interests at the royal court.