Joan of Arc (23 page)

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 the 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.

T
he 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

It was hard to deny the truth of the case so outlined. The articles said nothing about matters that the first trial had raised: was it permissible for a woman to act a man’s role; how far should a Catholic trust in private revelations; would God have sent a virgin soldier to fulfil a political plan; did God hate the English and the Burgundians? Those interrogated in the 1450s could not say much about Joan’s intimate experiences, they were relaxed about her wearing of men’s clothes and her months of fighting and by 1450 it must have seemed true, as it had not seemed twenty years before, that God intended Charles VII to be King of France and Henry VI to return to England.

On 18 June, Jean d’Arc and the Promoter, Chapitault, acting for the plaintiffs, appeared at the palace of the Bishop of Paris, and asked for a day to be fixed for the end of the case. The date was set for 1 July 1456, and notices were posted on the doors of Rouen Cathedral. On the following day it was announced that the final sentence should be delivered on Wednesday 7 July, and at eight o’clock that morning the rehabilitation was read by the archbishop. A procession and sermon was organised in place St-Ouen, and on 8 July a second sermon was preached in place du Vieux-Marché, where a cross was raised to perpetuate the memory of Joan’s death. This cross was later replaced by a fountain, with a statue of Joan under an arcade surmounted by a cross. In 1756, in the tercentenary year of the rehabilitation, a new fountain was erected that remains there today.

What is striking about the processes of rehabilitation – or, technically, the nullification – from their beginnings in 1450 to their conclusion in 1456 is that they showed none of the signs of haste that had been characteristic of the process of condemnation. Not all the previous difficulties were solved: by the 1450s, the key witnesses of the 1431 trial had died. Cauchon had a heart attack while being bled, Nicolas Midi died a leper, Estivet died in a sewer; others, like de Courcelles, were anxious to excuse themselves or to blame those who could not answer back and no one was going to say that the Anglo-Burgundian case had raised objections to Joan’s cause and conduct that were not always easy to contradict. And yet, from the start of the royal inquiry to the end of the papal inquiries, the witnesses speak with a freedom and liveliness that burst through the constraints of legal evidence. Attending to them, a student will find it hard to maintain that Joan was justly condemned. Accounts of her life that end with her death have missed out many of the most dramatic scenes in the drama of her story: the tales that in 1431 could not be told, the recollections of ageing men (and some ageing women) who had known her well. Some depositions may exaggerate, and, as only in some cases can their reliability be checked, the reader may not be sure which details to accept; but in the round and taken together they portray a Maid very unlike the Maid whom her judges had seen in 1431.

By 7 July 1456, when the court issued its decision, there could be no doubt what the decision would be. In the name of the Holy Trinity, acting on the authority of St Peter and his apostolic successors over the Church, the Archbishop of Reims, the Bishops of Paris and Coutances and the Dominican Jean Bréhal, professor of theology and one of the two inquisitors of France – all four judges being specially delegated representatives of the reigning pope – solemnly pronounced their sentence on the case brought by widow Isabelle Romée, mother, Pierre and Jean d’Arc, natural and legal brothers, of the deceased Joan of Arc, of good memory, commonly called the Maid, in the case brought against Cauchon the Bishop of Beauvais, Jean Lemaître, then vice-inquisitor of the diocese of Beauvais, and Jean d’Estivet, the Promoter. In the pompous terms beloved by lawyers anywhere and by churchmen everywhere, archbishop, bishops and Inquisitor declared the sentence on Joan was unsafe. They called the twelve articles ‘iniquitous, false, prepared without reference to Joan’s confessions in a lying manner’, they thought with St Paul that private revelations should be referred to God alone and that the accusations against her were false in fact as well as in law, and so the case against her should be annulled. After a general procession and a public sermon, their decision was published in the square of St-Ouen, and again on the following day in place du Vieux-Marché, where Joan had died.

It has been urged that this decision, like the decision it reversed, was a political decision; and clearly Charles VII was exonerated for having believed in Joan’s mission. His critics have excoriated him for not having tried to secure her release in 1431, but it is hard to see what he could have done then. He could do something only after Rouen had fallen to him and his servants could study the documents of the original trial; he could not have saved her life, but he could save her reputation. By 1450 it paid him to do so, but it became obvious that even if her first trial had been a political trial, in form it had been an ecclesiastical trial. Although he had worked hard to restrict papal control of the French Church, only a pope could override the original tribunal. In the end it needed a change of papacy to bring the final stage to a close. Pope Calixtus III, elected in 1455, tactfully appointed the Archbishop of Reims, the superior of the Bishop of Beauvais, a neighbouring Norman bishop, an inquisitor-theologian and finally the Bishop of Paris, since Parisian clerics had been all too willing to side with the Anglo-Burgundians against both Rome and the Valois King of France. The idea was to make the new judges credible representatives of the French Church. The judges’ verdict pleased the French King, but was not therefore unjust. It pleased Joan’s family, but did not decide if she was a saint.

In
c
. 1461, the most notorious poet of the age, François Villon, born in the year the Maid died, added Joan’s name to the list of those whose passing he lamented: Thais, mistress to Alexander the Great, Héloïse, lover of the philosopher Peter Abélard, Queen Blanche of France and Dante’s Beatrice, and:

whom the English burnt at Rouen . . . But where are last year’s snows?’)

She was gone, and although Villon could not have known it, long after her death she would be more famous than she had ever been in a life so brutally curtailed.

T
he verdict of 1456 should have settled Joan’s reputation for good, but it did not. In contemporary England, which was soon exchanging the bitterness of defeat in a dynastic war overseas for the even more bitter experience of a dynastic war at home, there was no motive for anyone to study, let alone accept, the verdict. In France, apart from certain places associated with her life, such as Domremy and Orléans, there were not many signs of devotion to her memory. Joan belonged to history, she could become a figure of legend; only to a few was she a figure of myth.

History, legend and myth are various ways of coming to terms with the past. In narrative sections of the Old Testament it is possible to discover each of these kinds of explanation. The stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel or Noah and his ark are properly myths. With the arrival of Abraham, the story moves on to legend. When exactly history begins is hard to establish. Some would say with Moses, others with David, others with the Babylonian captivity or the return of the Israelites to the Holy Land. What is worth noting is that some of the later figures in the narrative have been given mythic qualities: Moses is the man who gave Jews the Law, David the king who centred Israel on Jerusalem, Ezra the prophet who centred the lives of those returning from exile on the worship of the Temple and the observance of the law. These mythic qualities were later said to be incarnate in Jesus, as a new Moses, a new David and a new Ezra, lawgiver, king, priest and prophet. And in traditional Christian hagiography this or that characteristic of a figure in the Bible was thought to be evident in the life of a particular saint.

This is all remote from the case of Joan. The chief primary sources in her case are a series of carefully drafted historical documents, those connected with the 1431 trial and the inquiries of the 1450s, but she also appears in narrative accounts of the period; and there are even records of some of her expenses. Legends became attached to her name and she was also treated as a myth, but once the history was known the legends faded away and the myths were seen as attempts to focus on the inner reality of a known life.