The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (49 page)

Her sentence could only be reversed by the pope, and he showed no sign of doing this, in spite of a movement to rehabilitate Joan. So as far as the clerks and magistrates of Paris were concerned, the return of Joan would have been nothing but an embarrassment. As to those authorities of the Church who were trying to have the Maid declared innocent (they succeeded in 1456, and Joan was finally canonized in 1922), they would have found the return of their heroine – alive, healthy and married – an obstacle to their patriotic campaign. The king must have found himself under intolerable pressure to declare Joan an impostor. After all, if
he
declared her genuine, then it was “official”, and no one in France had a right to doubt her identity. Moreover, there would be some question of public recognition . . . On the other hand, if he expressed doubts about her, the whole scandal was defused. She could return home and drop out of sight. And everyone would be much happier. And that, it seemed, is precisely what happened.

Anatole France takes it for granted that the Dame des Armoises was an impostor. But then his biography of Joan of Arc is permeated with his famous irony, and takes the view that she was a deluded peasant girl; France was basically a disciple of Voltaire. The notion that she was an impostor is indeed the simplest explanation. But it leaves us facing the problem: why, in that case, did so many people who knew “the Maid” accept the Dame des Armoises as genuine? It is conceivable that her brothers may have decided that it would be to their advantage to have their famous sister alive, and so condoned the imposture. But why should so many old comrades have agreed to support the story?

The Dame des Armoises never as far as we know explained how she came to escape the flames. But then presumably she would not know the answer to this question. She would only know that she had been rescued, and that someone else had died in her place – perhaps another “witch”. It is easy to see how this could have come about. We know that Joan was an extraordinarily persuasive young lady, and that dozens of people, from Robert de Baudricourt to the Dauphin, who began by assuming she was mad, ended by believing that she was being guided by divine voices. We know that even in court Joan declared that she could hear St Catherine telling her what to say. Even at her trial she had certain friends; a priest called Loyseleur was her adviser. When Joan complained about the conduct of her two guards the Earl of Warwick was furious, and had them replaced by two other guards – which suggests that the earl held her in high regard. So it would not be at all surprising if there was a successful plot to rescue her. And it is possible that the English themselves may have been involved in such a plot; when Joan was apparently burnt at the stake in Rouen the crowd was kept at a distance by eight hundred English soldiers, which would obviously prevent anyone coming close enough to recognize her. At the trial for her rehabilitation in 1456 the executioner’s evidence was entirely second-hand, although three of Joan’s comrades who were with her at the “end” – Ladvenu, Massieu and Isambard – were actually present.
If
Joan was rescued, presumably they also were involved in the plot.

The rehabilitation itself has its farcical aspects. It began in 1450, and Joan’s mother was the person who set it in motion, supported by Joan’s
brother Pierre. We do not know whether Joan’s mother accepted the Dame des Armoires as her daughter, but there can be no doubt that she lent credence to the claim by not denouncing her as an impostor. Yet now she and Pierre joined in the claim that was based on the assertion that Joan was executed by the English in 1431. But then the aim of the rehabilitation was financial; Joan had been a rich woman, thanks to the generosity of the king, and the wealth remained frozen while Joan was excommunicated. So, whether or not Joan’s family believed that the Dame des Armoires was the Maid, they now had good reason to try to have her rehabilitated – even if it meant swearing that she was dead.

If the Dame des Armoires was genuine, she must have felt there was a certain irony in the situation. She had been an embarrassment to everyone during her first career as the saintly virgin warrior; now she was just as much an embarrassment as the heroine returned from the dead. It is thankless work being a saint.

29

Junius

Who Was the Eighteenth Century’s Most Feared Satirist?

In these days of investigative journalism, it is almost impossible to imagine a man who succeeds in maintaining a secret identity when everyone in the country is agog with curiosity to know who he is. It happens only in children’s comics. Yet that is precisely what happened in England in the final years of the eighteenth century. The mystery man was a writer who called himself Junius and whose murderously satirical letters set the whole country laughing at the government, and even at the King himself. As a satirist and literary stylist, Junius compares favourably with Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Butler – all of whom published their early works anonymously. But in these famous cases, the sheer brilliance of the satire made it inevitable that the identity of the authors of
Robinson Crusoe
,
Gulliver’s Travels
, and
Erewhon
should be discovered. Junius’s secret went with him to the grave.

The story begins in the reign of George III, the King whose “tea tax” was to cause the American Revolution and whose general Wellington later defeated Napoléon.

George III came to the throne in 1760, and his reign was troubled almost from the beginning. Under its greatest war leader, Prime Minister William Pitt, Britain had been fighting France for four years and was winning the war. The new King was anxious to end it, to the disgust of his subjects, who wanted to see the French well and truly thrashed. And Pitt – who not only wanted to thrash the French but to go to war with the Spaniards as well – resigned in 1761. The war came to an end two years later, and the “surrender” made the King still more unpopular.

But the real trouble – which brought England close to revolution –
was caused by a radical politician named John Wilkes. He was the kind of man who made every old-fashioned English gentleman foam at the mouth. He was blasphemous, ugly, cross-eyed, and a tireless seducer – but such a natural charmer that he liked to boast that he needed only half an hour’s start on the handsomest man in England. He had been a member of Sir Francis Dashwood’s Hell-Fire Club, a group that liked to dress as monks and invoke the Devil; Wilkes had terrified them when he introduced a sooty baboon into one of their orgies and they mistook it for Satan.

When Wilkes was elected to Parliament in 1757, he became a supporter of William Pitt. And when the King appointed his old tutor, a Scot named Lord Bute, as Secretary of State, and Bute began making peace with the French, Pitt resigned in disgust. Wilkes naturally regarded Bute as an enemy. Besides, most of the English detested the Scots – it was less than twenty years since Bonnie Prince Charlie had marched on London. So Wilkes founded a violently anti-Scottish newspaper called
The North Briton
. (A north Briton was, of course, a Scot – it was rather as if someone had founded an anti-Semitic newspaper called
The Israelite
.) Among other things it hinted that Lord Bute had gained his position by sleeping with the Queen Mother, an accusation that made the King apoplectic. The smear campaign was so successful that Bute resigned.

But now Wilkes went too far and put into the King’s mouth a satirical speech – supposedly written by Bute – that amounted to an accusation of base betrayal of Britain’s allies in the war. Wilkes was seized and thrown into the Tower of London, which – inevitably – boosted his popularity with the disgruntled populace. Wilkes claimed “Parliamentary privilege” – whereby a Member of Parliament has a right to speak his mind freely on political issues – and was released after a week. He now proceeded to make the King and his government still more embarrassed by suing Lord Halifax, the Secretary of State, for trespass. (He was backed financially by Lord Temple, Pitt’s brother-in-law, who had also financed
The North Briton
.) Wilkes won his case; he was awarded vast damages – $5,000 – and the Secretary of State lost his job.

The King was now out for Wilkes’s blood. To anybody with any sense, it should have been obvious that his administration was accident-prone and had better keep its head down. Instead, the new Secretary of State, Lord Sandwich,
¹⁴
decided to make Wilkes pay for his victory. The
House of Commons voted that Wilkes’s attack on the King had been a “seditious libel”. They also bribed a printer to hand over a pornographic poem – entitled “An Essay on Woman” – that Wilkes was having printed, and some of its juicier passages were read aloud in the House of Lords. The Lords thought it a joke, for everyone knew that Lord Sandwich had looser morals than Wilkes. (When Sandwich told Wilkes that he would either die of the pox or on the gallows, Wilkes retorted, “That depends on whether I embrace your mistress or your principles”.) But Parliament was shocked and voted that Wilkes had no right to Parliamentary privilege after all. Wilkes was force to flee abroad to avoid prison, but this only increased his popularity with the mob. The printer who had handed over the “Essay on Woman” could find no one to employ him and committed suicide.

The King’s next choice as Prime Minister was George Grenville, a former ally of Pitt. He was capable enough but proved to be a bore who was inclined to deliver long lectures; the King got rid of him in 1765. But it was under Grenville that the government first stirred up revolution in the American colonies by imposing a Stamp Act – a tax on newspapers, advertisements, and legal documents. This met with such violent resistance in America that the next administration was forced to repeal it. It was a “dry run” for the Boston Tea Party seven years later.

Grenville had been one of the chief persecutors of John Wilkes. Now the King turned to a defender of Wilkes, the Marquis of Rockingham, who had friends on both sides, Whig and Tory. Wilkes decided to return to England, and the King’s troubles began all over again. Wilkes stood for a London Parliamentary seat and was soundly beaten. Since he was an outlaw, the government did its best to have him arrested. He evaded them and got himself elected MP for Middlesex. Then he gave himself up. If the King had had any sense, he would have pardoned him. Instead, Wilkes received two years in prison and a fine of a thousand pounds. Wilkes instantly became the most popular man in England. An angry crowd rescued him from the officers of the law. He gave himself up again and was put in jail. A mob gathered and looked as if it would storm the jail; troops fired and killed five, wounding fifteen.

Wilkes wrote a violent article attacking the use of force against the rioters; Parliament voted it libelous and expelled him again. He got himself reelected by rebellious voters; Parliament threw him out again. He became the most popular cause of his time; there had been nothing like it since Daniel Defoe had got himself stuck in the pillory – for the same kind of offense – in 1703 and was pelted with flowers instead of rotten eggs. The well-meaning King, with his pathetic desire for
popularity and his determination to be a “true Briton” (like all the Hanovers, he was a German by parentage), was stumbling from disaster to disaster.

Rockingham resigned; party quarrels were too much for him. Now the King had an idea that he must have regarded as brilliant and foolproof: to persuade Pitt to take over again. That ought to undo all the squabbling and bitterness of the past six years. Unfortunately, Pitt’s manic depression was turning into madness. When the King made him Earl of Chatham, Pitt virtually retired to the House of Lords, and the administration was left in the hands of a much younger man, Lord Grafton. The country was in a state of chaos.

And it was at this point that Junius stepped into the picture.

Now whoever Junius was, he was a man who, for some reason, detested the King and his political allies and was a supporter of Pitt and Wilkes. He had a particular antipathy toward Lord Grafton, who had by now quarreled with Pitt. In 1768 Pitt and Grenville – who had also quarreled – received letters signed Junius, urging them to make up and unite against Grafton. In fact, Pitt resigned shortly afterward. Now Junius decided to take his case to the public.

His first letter was sent to a newspaper called
The Public Advertiser
, owned by Henry Sampson Woodfall. Newspapers were still something of a novelty in England. They had begun about fifty years earlier; by Junius’s time there were eleven of them in London alone. Most of their profit came from advertisements, but readers’ letters were also immensely popular – in fact, Junius’s first letter, dated 21 January 1769, was held up for several days while a backlog of letters was printed.

The style of Junius’s letters is not immediately appealing to a modern audience; it seems rather ponderous and pedantic. As far as his contemporaries were concerned, however, that was an advantage; they could see that he was a serious minded man who knew how to turn a good phrase. And the very first sentence of his first letter makes it clear that what concerns him is the freedom of the British people and the feeling that designing politicians like Prime Minister Grafton were trying to steal it. Junius starts with a contentious but rather dull statement: “The submission of a free people to the executive authority of government is no more than a compliance with laws which they themselves have enacted”. The English, he goes on to say, are a generous and good-natured people, who naturally respect the law and love their King. So it fills him with indignation to see these good qualities abused by schemers: “The situation of this country is alarming enough to rouse the attention of every man . . .” So far, his readers must
have stifled a yawn. But a few sentences later they were startled into attention: “The finances of a nation, sinking under its debts and expenses, are committed to a young nobleman already ruined by play”. To accuse the King’s Prime Minister of being a dissolute gambler was strong stuff.