The Maid and the Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  “I had a daughter, born in legitimate marriage, whom I fortified worthily with the sacraments of baptism and confirmation and raised in the fear of God and respect for the tradition of the church, as much as her age and the simplicity of her condition permitted,” Isabelle testified. “So well that, having grown up in the middle of the fields and of the pastures, she went frequently to church and every month, after confession, received the sacrament of the Eucharist despite her young age and gave herself to fasting and to prayer with great devotion and fervor, on account of the necessities then so grave in which the people found themselves and with which she sympathized with all her heart.

  “Nevertheless,” the mother continued, “certain enemies… betrayed her in a trial concerning the Faith, and… without any aid given to her innocence in a perfidious, violent, and iniquitous trial, without shadow of right… they condemned her in a damnable and criminal fashion and made her die most cruelly by fire.” With that, Isabelle threw herself at the feet of the commissioners and burst into tears, waving the document she had brought to validate her suit; her grief was so profound that those who had accompanied her also cried out, and it was reported that the tribunal, visibly moved, accepted her petition.

  So began the Church proceedings that would result in the rehabilitation of Joan of Arc.

  IN CONTRAST to the earlier inquests by Bouillé and Cardinal Estouteville, which were rushed and superficial affairs designed only to prompt further action, this official retrial of the Maid of Orléans by the Inquisitor Bréhal and his three eminent colleagues was a painstakingly comprehensive examination carried out over a period of eight months. Determined that the judgment rendered by his tribunal be considered authoritative, and so permanently discredit and erase the previous ruling, Bréhal brought the same careful, thorough scholarship to the process that he had used when first researching the question of Joan’s alleged heresy. A diligent effort was made to solicit statements from all those who were still living who had ever known or come into contact with the Maid, or who could shed light upon the events in question, and the result was that scores of people testified on her behalf—some 115 in all. Moreover, as it was recognized that many of these witnesses were now older and might find it difficult or inconvenient to travel, the inquisitor made the innovative decision to physically move the court from place to place, and in particular to those towns where Joan herself had appeared, on the grounds that it was at these venues that the judges would be most likely to find informants. Additionally, in order that no evidence be overlooked or neglected, the proceedings were made public and the sessions opened to spectators, of which there were many, for persons of both the very highest and lowest birth were heard with equal attention. In a further effort to reach the largest audience possible, proclamations were read out in all the public squares by the local town criers well in advance of the tribunal’s visit, summoning anyone who could give testimony to appear before the court on a specific date.

  The result was a collective catharsis staged at the national level, in which not only Joan but the entire French populace achieved redemption. The inquisitor remained in Paris throughout November 1455, and it was here that spectators were treated to the stirring eyewitness reports of great men like the Bastard (now raised to the count of Dunois) and the duke of Alençon, who relived in vivid detail the mesmerizing, miraculous events leading up to the lifting of the siege of Orléans and beyond to the coronation at Reims, in what each now recognized to be among the most glorious adventures of the kingdom’s long history. From Paris, the tribunal moved to Rouen, where it sat in session from the twelfth of December through the twentieth and where the audience was electrified by the evidence of Guillaume Manchon, the notary from Joan’s Trial of Condemnation, who testified that Pierre Cauchon and others had deliberately conspired to falsify the official records, offering as proof a number of original documents that he had retained for over two decades, and which he now placed into the hands of the inquisitor. In January, Bréhal sent a representative to Joan’s home village of Domrémy to take depositions from her neighbors and childhood friends, as well as acquaintances and supporters from around the region, including two of the men who had made up the Maid’s original escort from Vaucouleurs to the royal court at Chinon in 1429. The final location was Orléans, where so many witnesses came forward that the tribunal was forced to stay in session for a full three weeks, from February 22 to March 16, in order to hear all the evidence.

  Out of these numerous and passionate attestations, the portrait of Joan as she is known today was recorded for history and seared into the consciousness of the kingdom like an engraving etched into a metal plate. There was brave Joan again on the banks of the Loire as the Bastard first remembered her: “Bearing in her hand her standard which was white and upon which was the image of Our Lord holding a fleur-de-lys in his hand, and she crossed with me and La Hire the river of the Loire, and we entered together the town of Orléans.” And again with the duke of Alençon just before the decisive battle of Patay: “Many of the King’s men were afraid [and] Joan said: ‘In God’s name, we must fight them, were they hung from the clouds, we should beat them…. The gentle king will have this day greater victory than he ever had and my counsel has told me that they are all ours.” And later at Troyes, with the Bastard again an eyewitness: “Then the Maid came and entered the council and spoke these words or nearly: ‘Noble Dauphin, order that your people go and besiege the town of Troyes and stay no longer in council, for, in God’s name, within three days I will take you into the city of Troyes by love or by force or by courage, and false Burgundy will stand amazed.”

  And just as powerfully, from the humble people there arose the image of Joan as one of their own, unpretentious and generous: “Willingly did she give alms and gathered in the poor and she would sleep beneath the hood of the hearth that the poor might sleep in her bed.” “I often heard it said by Messire Guillaume Front, parish priest during his lifetime at the town of Domrémy, that Joan, called the Maid, was a good and simple girl, pious, well brought up, fearing God, so much so that she had not her equal in the town.” “I was, in those days, churchwarden at the church of Domrémy and often did I see Joan come to church, to Mass and to Compline. And when I did not ring the bells for Compline, Joan would catch me and scold me, saying I had not done well; and she even promised to give me some wool if I would be punctual in ringing.” Over and over they testified. And, finally, from the transcripts of her Trial of Condemnation, came Joan in her own words: “I call upon God and Our Lady that they send me counsel and comfort and thereafter they send it to me”; “It pleased God thus to do, by a simple Maid to drive out the King’s enemies”; “As for the Church, I love her and would wish to sustain her with all my power for our Christian faith…. I abide by God who sent me, by the Holy Virgin and all the saints in paradise. And I am of opinion that it is all one and the same thing, God and the Church, and of that one should make no difficulty. Why do you make difficulty over that?” And at the last, her enduring defiance in the face of her tormentor, Pierre Cauchon: “And me, I tell you, consider well ere you call yourself my judge, for you are assuming a great charge.”

  The tribunal returned to Rouen in May; on the last day of the month provision was made for those who wished to speak in defense of the original condemnation. No witnesses came forward.

  On June 10, the investigatory portion of the trial ended, and Jean Bréhal and his fellow judges retired to review the evidence in preparation for delivering a verdict. Ever the scrupulous academic, the inquisitor spent the next month composing a highly detailed summary of all the material collected, in which the testimony from the retrial was compared point by point with the evidence and arguments obtained from the transcripts of the Trial of Condemnation and the heretical charges were refuted in every case.

  Joan of Arc in her time.

  At last the judges reached their decision. On July 7, 1456, at nine o’clock in the morning, they convened in the great hall of the palac
e of the archbishop of Rouen. To emphasize the import of their findings to the kingdom at large, they were attended by the archbishop of Reims and the bishop of Paris among other dignitaries. The archbishop of Reims, as the most senior Church member present, read the verdict aloud to the expectant crowd that had assembled to witness the ceremony:

  “In consideration of the request of the d’Arc family against the Bishop of Beauvais, the promoter of criminal proceedings, and the inquisitor of Rouen… in consideration of the information… and juridical consultations… we, in session of our court and having God only before our eyes, say, pronounce, decree and declare that the said trial and sentence [of condemnation] being tainted with fraud, calumny, iniquity, contradiction and manifest errors of fact and of law, including the abjuration, execution and all their consequences, to have been and to be null, invalid, worthless, without effect and annihilated…. We break and annul them and declare that they must be destroyed….

  “In consideration of Joan’s appeal to the Holy See… we proclaim that Joan did not contract any taint of infamy and that she shall be and is washed clean of such and, if need be, we wash her clean of such absolutely.”

  As these words were delivered, a copy of the original transcript of the Trial of Condemnation was dramatically held aloft and torn to pieces as a literal expression of the act of nullification.

  The next day, in front of an even larger crowd, and to loud prayers and general rejoicing, the verdict of absolution was repeated at the Old Market, site of the Maid’s terrible execution, and a cross erected in her memory.

  “And thereafter my voices say to me: ‘Take it all in good part, do not whine over thy martyrdom; by it thou shalt come at last to the kingdom of Paradise,” Joan had once passionately declared to her inquisitors in response to their skepticism and attempts to undermine her commitment to her voices and state of grace. “[And] I firmly believe what my voices have told me, to wit that I shall be saved, as firmly as if I was there already.”

  Epilogue

  IN THE ABSENCE of a formal peace treaty, the verdict delivered in Rouen in 1456 exonerating Joan marked the symbolic end of the Hundred Years War. The last battle against the English had been fought three years earlier at Castillon, in Gascony, near Bayonne. An English force of between seven thousand and ten thousand soldiers, led by the redoubtable Captain Talbot, who had been freed from his Rouen prison in exchange for the peaceful surrender of the town of Falaise in 1450, attacked an entrenched French army, heavily fortified with artillery “both small and great,” on July 17, 1453. “The attack commenced with great valor, and each party fought manfully, so the business lasted a full hour; at the end of which, the men-at-arms of the duke of Brittany… were sent to relieve the French who had been thus long engaged at the barriers,” the successor to Enguerrand de Monstrelet’s chronicle reported. “On their arrival, by the aid of God and their own prowess, the English were forced to turn their backs and were beaten down, with all their banners, by these Bretons.” The majority of the English army was on foot; only the seventy-five-year-old Talbot remained mounted, and as such made an easy target. The old man’s horse was soon struck by a cannonball and fell atop his rider; as Talbot struggled to free himself from the animal’s weight, “he was put to death by the French, as he lay under him.” With the demise of that extraordinarily valiant commander died the last of England’s hopes for the reconquest of France. Bordeaux surrendered on October 19, and in the end only Calais remained to the English, as a sad souvenir of the once glorious legacy of Henry V.

  Joan’s prophecies were thus fulfilled, and Charles VII recovered his kingdom and remained sovereign of France until his death on July 22, 1461, at the age of fifty-eight. From a very unpromising beginning, Charles matured in his later years into a competent ruler. He is even credited with implementing various exemplary reforms, the most significant of which was the maintenance of a standing royal army, an innovation that protected the civilian population from being preyed on by the many soldiers and mercenaries left unemployed by the cessation of formal hostilities. It is not difficult to see where Charles came up with this idea. In January 1457, several years after the decisive battle at Castillon, he was still haunted by fears of a surprise attack, for he wrote to the king of Scotland that he was forced “to watch all the coastline daily… from Spain to Picardy, which amounts to more than 450 leagues of land; in which he has continually to keep men-at-arms in great numbers and in great strength, pay their wages, who do not move from the said places, and in such a way that all the revenue of Normandy (which is one of the finest parts and greatest revenues of this kingdom) could not suffice by 100,000 francs to pay the men-at-arms detailed to guard the same.” Although the king died estranged from the dauphin, Queen Marie, who survived her husband by two years, helped her eldest son arrange for a peaceful succession, and Yolande of Aragon’s grandson ascended to the throne as Louis XI. This time around, the royal family wasn’t taking any chances: the coronation ceremony was held with much pomp and solemnity at Reims within the month. In a suitably droll twist of historical irony, Philip the Good himself placed the crown on Louis’s head and proclaimed him king.

  Despite overwhelming evidence, the role Yolande of Aragon played in the defeat of the English and the preservation of the French monarchy has been consistently ignored by historians. Soon after her death, Charles VII openly acknowledged the debt he owed this remarkable woman in a moving speech. “The late Yolande, of good memory, queen of Jerusalem and Sicily, in our youth did us great services in many ways that we hold in perpetual memory. Our said mother-in-law, after we were excluded from our city of Paris, received us generously in her lands of Anjou and Maine, and gave us much advice, support and many services using her goods, people and fortresses to help us against the attacks of our adversaries of England and others.” Yolande’s grandson, Louis XI, who became known as the Spider King for his cunning, admired her greatly. The queen of Sicily, he once famously recalled, “bore a man’s heart inside a woman’s body.”

  So accomplished a statesman was Yolande, and so cleverly did she hide her tracks, that the myth that Joan of Arc appeared at Charles’s court and convinced the king of his birthright unaided by any mortal being has stood unchallenged for nearly six hundred years. Still, if it is accepted, as it is often said, that without Joan of Arc there would be no France, it is also true that without Yolande of Aragon there would have been no Joan.

  Nor does penetrating the mystery of the Maid’s introduction to Charles detract in any way from the miraculous nature of her achievement. What is important about Joan is not that she heard voices, or presented the king with a special trinket, but her ferocious courage and unwavering faith. It was her willingness to fight for what she believed against seemingly insurmountable odds that has secured her place in history as an iconic figure. At her core, Joan is testimony to the transcendence of the human spirit.

  Joan of Arc was canonized in 1920. She remains an inspiration, not only to the citizens of France, but to oppressed people everywhere.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A BOOK THAT SEEKS TO unravel the hopelessly tangled threads of French politics during the latter half of the Hundred Years War, and relies so heavily upon primary sources in French (or, worse, medieval French!), would simply not have been possible for me without the help of my friend Marie-Paule de Valdivia, a native French speaker. Marie-Paule was unerringly patient and encouraging with my own feeble efforts at translation, and is responsible for all of the longer passages, including that marvelous letter from Yolande’s agents describing Charles VII’s coronation at Reims, which has never been translated fully into English before. I am so proud to be her friend, and so grateful for her elegant phrasing and generosity. Thank you, Marie-Paule.

  I am also indebted to Dr. Linda Gray, another close friend, for her help in determining the probable date of Charles VII’s conception. It was wonderful to be able to apply Linda’s modern medical knowledge and experience to this centuries-long mystery. I ha
d so much fun tackling this problem with her, and we were surely the only two people in the country engaged in a prolonged discussion of medieval menstrual cycles. A thank-you also to her husband, Dr. Greg Soloway, for his aid in researching the various psychoses associated with adolescent delusions or the hearing of voices. Although there was not in the end sufficient evidence to include a definitive diagnosis in the book, his efforts enriched my perspective on Joan and her angels.

  Similarly, this book would not have been possible without the insights into Jean of Arras’s work provided by Donald Maddox and his wife, Sara Sturm-Maddox, both professors of French and Italian at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Their book Melusine of Lusignan: Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France, which grew out of an international colloquium commemorating the six hundredth anniversary of the writing of The Romance of Melusine, was an invaluable resource to me. I know they have recently completed a new, more accessible translation of Melusine, which I look forward to reading—currently there is no modern translation available. As recognized experts in the field, no two authors are better suited to this task. I am also very grateful to and wish to recognize the work of Dawn Bratsch-Prince, professor of Spanish and department chair at Iowa State University. Professor Bratsch-Prince’s scholarship on Yolande of Aragon’s mother, Yolande of Bar (Violant in Spanish), added greatly to my understanding of the politics of the court of Aragon, particularly as she very kindly translated some of it from the Spanish for me.