Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint (14 page)

Cauchon, meantime, was busy negotiating, being handsomely paid for his time and reimbursed for his travel expenses. He signed a document preserved in the British Royal Archives declaring his receipt of monies “for service to the King [of England] in several journeys, going to the Duke of Burgundy or to John of Luxembourg in Flanders, to Compiègne, to Beaurevoir, all in the matter of Joan, called the Maid.” On July 14, for example, he visited Jean de Luxembourg with letters of summons from the University of Paris, demanding Joan’s release to him: “The woman commonly called Joan the Maid, now prisoner, must be sent to the King [of England] to be delivered over to the Church for trial, because she is suspected of many crimes, sorceries, idolatry, intercourse with demons, and other matters relative to faith and against faith.”

By late autumn Charles’s silence and the lack of any offer or counteroffer for Joan placed Luxembourg in an impossible position, and he could no longer delay her sale to the English. Philip of Burgundy, his overlord, was awaiting news of Luxembourg’s decision, as was Bedford. Personal feeling about Joan or sympathy for her or a sense that his family might be quite right about her—these could no longer allow him to ignore the English offer.

T
HAT AUTUMN OF
1430, when it became clear that she would indeed be sold to the English, Joan acted desperately. There was a seventy-foot drop from her tower keep to the ground, and she jumped from her cell. “I heard that the good people of Compiègne would be put to fire and sword…and that was one of the reasons I leaped. The other was that I knew that I was sold to the English, and for fear of them, I did jump…. But I acted against my voices, and I was injured…. In leaping, I did not think to kill myself: I commended myself to God, and I thought in making that leap to escape.” Painfully bruised but otherwise unhurt, she was returned to her cell, unable to eat or drink anything for several days; she was monitored by several guards who threatened to chain her by the neck to the wall if she repeated the deed.

During the subsequent weeks she was treated more rudely. One of the knights in Jean de Luxembourg’s coterie, a Burgundian named Haimond de Macy, later admitted that he saw her “several times in prison, and on those occasions, I spoke with her. I also playfully tried, several times, to touch her chest and rub her breasts—but Joan would have none of it and repulsed me with a slap.”

The negotiations for the sale of Joan were finally settled, and on December 6 Pierre Surreau, charged with finance ministry for Normandy, handed over the sum of ten thousand gold
écus
to a knight named Jean Bruyse, who in turn delivered to the duke of Luxembourg “the English money, on behalf of our king, in order to have Joan, called the Maid, who is now a prisoner of war.” Precisely because she was a prisoner of war—and ennobled in the bargain—she should have been automatically protected by certain conventions to which aristocrats were loyal. But every one of those protections was ignored, and instead of being treated as a prisoner of war, she was treated as a dangerously irreligious person, a heretic, a living scandal. That was the only way to thoroughly disgrace her and her king; it would also be the short route to execution.

When Joan first visited Charles at Chinon in March 1429, the English controlled almost all of France north of the Loire River, including Reims and Paris, and their victory at Orléans seemed assured. The heir to the French throne, meanwhile, had no money, was badly advised, and seemed destined never to be king. Fifteen months later, when Joan was captured at Compiègne, Orléans had been saved for France, the English had endured a number of crushing defeats, much of the occupied territory had been restored to Charles, and he had been crowned at Reims.

It was therefore no exaggeration for anyone—historian, politician, poet or peasant—to state that the girl from Domrémy had had an impact on history so enormous that it alone might be called some kind of miracle. She had friends and supporters everywhere in France—soldiers and towns people, priests and aristocrats in all the places she had visited and the regions she had saved for France. But they were helpless against the wealth and power of dukes, princes and bishops.

At once the University of Paris sent a message to Henry VI: “We have just learned that into your power is now delivered the woman called the Maid—news at which we are entirely joyful, confident that she will be brought to justice in order to redress the great wrongs and scandals that have occurred here because of her.” They hoped to hold the trial in Paris, but Bedford realized that Paris was too politically mercurial, too near areas recently restored to Charles VII.

The trial should have been scheduled in the diocese where Joan was captured—that is, the diocese of Beauvais; the regulations of a proper Inquisition required that it be set either in the diocese of the prisoner’s birthplace or in the diocese where the alleged crimes were committed. No one seriously considered moving the case as far as the marches of Lorraine. As for Compiègne, that town lay in the diocese of Beauvais, which had returned to Charles VII.

Normandy, by contrast, had long been an English fiefdom, and Rouen was its capital. For sheer safety and prestige, that city was chosen as the place for the trial; young Henry VI lived there with his tutor Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. The decision to conduct the trial in Rouen should have meant the immediate dismissal of Cauchon from the case, but the Duke of Bedford obviated that rule by granting Cauchon an extraterritorial authority for this case.

On Saturday, December 23, 1430, Joan arrived at Rouen and was imprisoned in a tower of Warwick’s Bouvreuil castle, where he was to be her warden. Charged with heresy, she was denied all spiritual privileges and was not permitted to attend Mass on Christmas Day, which she spent shackled in an icy, dark chamber.

EIGHT

Cunning and Clothes

(January–February 1431)

H
er tower cell was a dark, hexagonally shaped room just two meters wide, with a narrow window at one end and a latrine at the other. During the day Joan was rendered virtually immobile, chained to the wall by an iron band around her waist and her arms held by cuffs; at night additional shackles were attached to her ankles and then to a wooden block at the foot of a plank bed. She could not walk without assistance, nor was there any comfortable resting position. Cauchon guaranteed that she would not attempt another escape.

Five men in constant shifts kept watch over their prisoner, three of them remaining in the cell with her all night. “They were Englishmen of the lowest sort,” according to Jean Massieu, the trial bailiff, or usher, who escorted Joan to and from the interrogations, “and they very much wanted her dead. They constantly mocked her, and she reprimanded them for their threats and insults.” She was also on public display for strangers, who made her an object of rude curiosity at all hours.

Because she was nominally a Church convict to be tried by the Inquisition, Joan rightly complained that she should have been detained in an ecclesiastical keep, where she would have been guarded by women, and not in a military prison; her protests about this manifest violation of Inquisitorial procedure were ignored.

The threat of attack by her male guards was averted at least partly because of Joan’s intricate attire, the laces and fastenings of the male garb she was permitted to retain only because it was planned as an important charge against her. Still, violent physical assault may have taken place were it not for the Duchess of Bedford, who visited Joan and then demanded that Warwick ban the guards from molesting their prisoner. “Still, some of the men tried to violate her,” according to Guillaume Manchon, chief trial notary, “and if the Earl of Warwick had not run to her aid when she cried out for help, she would have been assaulted.”

Joan was also menaced with a gruesome contraption. A tight cage was brought into the cell, and if her conduct warranted she would be forced to remain standing day and night in it, chained by the neck, hands, and feet to its bars. In his attempt to soften the impression of this dreadful situation and to suggest that Joan was indeed brought to a religious tribunal, Bishop Cauchon shared copies of the key to her cell with Henry Beaufort, cardinal of Winchester and the king’s great-uncle, who was present at the trial, and with Jean d’Estivet, prosecutor of the Inquisition.

As the trial was being prepared, the irregularities accumulated. Not only was Joan improperly housed in a military prison and denied women as guards; it also became clear that all the expenses of the proceedings—court costs, compensation paid to judges, officers, assessors and clerks—were being borne by the English, who were in complete control of the case. Any semblance of fairness, therefore, was doomed at the outset. In addition, Joan had no advocate, and anyone who tried to counsel or to guide her was in jeopardy of censure or even grave punishments, on order of Cauchon. More to the point, Joan was denied access to a lawyer—a direct violation of the Church law stipulating that a person under twenty-five, accused of heresy, must have the defense of a seasoned lawyer. She was no more than nineteen.

T
RIAL BY
I
NQUISITION
included two segments. First came the preparatory phase, a series of inquiries concerning allegations of guilt; at its conclusion the accused was either released or subjected to the next stage, a formal indictment. In Joan’s case this opening segment began on January 9 and was completed on March 26. The second phase was the formal trial, during which the prisoner was confronted with articles of accusation and had to provide a defense; this was held from the end of March until May 24.

An Inquisition bore little resemblance to a secular court either then or later. First of all, only a rumor of shameful activity or heretical thinking was necessary to bring someone to trial. The task of the primary Inquisitor was that of the judge of the case: not to interrogate witnesses but to ascertain the thoughts and opinions of the one accused. Following Church law (which was based on Roman legal practice), those accused were presumed guilty and had to testify alone; they had no latitude to challenge witnesses and were denied the right of appeal. If convicted of heresy, a prisoner was turned over to secular authority and burned alive at the stake, a punishment that would prevent a magical escape and ensure that no relics would be left for veneration.

The preparatory phase of Joan’s trial unofficially began in December 1430, when a team of court examiners, supervised by a notary named Nicolas Bailly, hurried to places where Joan was well known. They were commanded to find testimony or evidence against her—a futile effort since none could be found. No
diffamatio,
or scandalous allegation, could be logged against her, and Bailly reported that he had found nothing about the Maid that he would not have been happy to find about his own sister. With that it was clear that there were no grounds for a religious trial, and when Cauchon convened his court for the first time in January 1431, he had to ignore the negative results of his examiners’ research.

In order to prove Joan a heretic, Cauchon would now have to interrogate her and try to catch her up in her own statements. She would have to confess to a serious crime, the nature of which was not to be disclosed to her or to the assembled assessors in advance. This was plainly illegal, for a heresy trial could not be based on the statements of the accused alone, nor could they be based on unspoken suspicions. But that was the procedure chosen in this case.

Cauchon’s plans were further stymied in January when another physical examination, which Joan demanded, confirmed her virginity. With that, she could not be put on trial as a witch per se, although heresy was often considered a form of witchcraft. This was another setback for Cauchon, who had hoped to demonstrate easily that Joan had misguided Charles VII by her contact with diabolical forces, that she was not in communion with God or the Church but rather with the powers of darkness—and that therefore the coronation of the king of France was null and void.

With the defamation and explicit witchcraft charges necessarily put aside, another approach was then taken: Joan’s battle standard, Cauchon alleged, was under demonic control, and the rings she wore (gifts from her family and the king) were instruments of black magic; otherwise, why would common folk kneel to touch and kiss them? (Clearly, Cauchon saw no contradiction in his terms: everyone coming into his presence knelt and kissed his ring.) Furthermore, it was said that she fought cruelly; that she wore men’s clothing in direct defiance of the book of Deuteronomy; and that she placed fidelity to her voices from God above her loyalty to the institutional Church. Taken collectively, Cauchon reasoned, those accusations ought to bring in a guilty verdict, and so he promised the Duke of Bedford.

As it happened, there was a significant, even a sublime, grain of truth in one accusation. Joan indeed claimed that her communication with God held a primacy in her life that superseded earthly authority. More than once she insisted that fidelity to God was paramount, of far greater importance than obedience to those who sought to interpret her experience. It seems never to have occurred to her—at least not until she was put on trial—that her experience of voices and visions would clash with the medieval requirement that spiritual experiences (especially those leading to heroic action) be submitted for Church adjudication.

T
HE COURT ASSEMBLED
for Joan’s trial had two judges: Pierre Cauchon, who successfully lobbied to be the director of the entire enterprise, and Jean Le Maître, the deputy Inquisitor for northern France. At first Le Maître rightly objected that Cauchon was not the proper judge because of his fiercely English bias and because he was not the presiding bishop of Rouen. A month after the trial began, Le Maître had yet to appear, and he was not seen until March 13, when he succumbed to Cauchon’s pressure and did what he was told. “I see clearly,” he confided to Jean Massieu, “that if I do not proceed as the English desire, I am looking at my own imminent death.”

The chief prosecutor, Jean d’Estivet, a foul-mouthed brute despised even by Warwick, was quite frank in his hatred of Joan; thus Cauchon assured that d’Estivet was extremely prominent and influential during the trial, and Cauchon and d’Estivet put most of the questions to her. There were, as well, about sixty clergymen and theologians on the case; called assessors, or advisory consultants, they were selected because of their sympathies to England. Paid from an English purse, they were expected to be steadfast in their commitment to find Joan guilty.

The formal preliminaries of the trial, “in a matter of faith against a woman named Joan, commonly called the Maid,” officially began on January 9, 1431. Eight assessors sat with Pierre Cauchon in the council chamber of Beauvreuil. The bishop then informed them that Joan “had recently been captured, and because she was suspected of being a heretic, had been handed over, at the request of the king of England and the faculty of the University of Paris…in order that inquiry might be made into the crimes and evil deeds of which she is accused, in order to give honor and praise to God and to exalt the holy Catholic faith.”

Cauchon then distributed, for all to see, the letters testamentary from the clergy of Paris, of Rouen and of the court of England. He also read the names of those he had summoned, who had agreed to be assessors and clerks of the trial.

Manchon, the notary or chief note taker of the trial, later admitted, “I was compelled to serve, and I did so against my will—I wouldn’t have dared to oppose the king’s council. But the bishop of Beauvais [Cauchon] was not forced to act, nor was Jean d’Estivet. They acted quite freely and voluntarily. As for the assembled assessors, every single one of them was afraid of what would happen if they contradicted Cauchon and the English.”

Massieu, who as usher accompanied Joan almost every day, found nothing but good in her, and when he expressed this opinion quite casually to someone in Warwick’s household, his remark was reported. “That put me in a lot of trouble, but I got out of it by making excuses for myself.”

A young theologian named Nicholas de Houppeville had also been forced into serving on the case. According to Massieu, “After seeing what was going on, he [Houppeville] had no desire to be involved—and so he was banished, along with a number of other dissenters.” Before Houppeville was exiled, however, Cauchon made an example of him by tossing him into the Rouen prison, from which he was liberated only by the intervention of a kindly abbot. “As I saw it then and still see it today,” he said twenty-five years later, “the trial was more of a deliberate persecution than a juridical process.”

Such was also the opinion of Jean de Saint-Avit, the wise and just bishop of Avranches. He reminded Cauchon and the court that it was a custom hallowed since the thirteenth century (and the opinion of no less than Thomas Aquinas) that in such inflammatory and controversial matters as this trial, the case ought to be referred to the pope or to a general convocation of bishops. When he heard that, Cauchon simply dismissed Saint-Avit; but for his rank, Saint-Avit too might have faced imprisonment or exile on Cauchon’s command.

Another assessor, a priest named Richard de Grouchet, later confessed that he (and others he named) “wanted to get out of the trial, but we finally took part out of fear and coercion.” A priest named Jean Riquier summarized the process: “Everyone was either forced to please the English or did so voluntarily, and the English wanted a quick trial and a pretext to execute her.”

A Dominican friar at Rouen named Isambart de la Pierre swore that he was threatened by Cauchon with death if he said anything good about Joan. The judges and assessors, according to la Pierre, were variously motivated by partisanship, outright hatred of Joan, love of the money with which they were bribed, or fear of punishment. “Everything was done according to the wishes of the King of England [that is, according to the mandate of his regent, the Duke of Bedford], the Cardinal of Winchester, the Earl of Warwick, and other Englishmen who assumed the trial’s expenses.”
*
As for Joan, a Benedictine monk named Thomas Marie summarized the
fama
or word of mouth in Rouen at the time: “If the English had a woman like Joan on their side, they would have rewarded her with high honors and not treated her so dreadfully.”

That was also the judgment of Jean de la Fontaine, who was charged with making the summary of charges against Joan in February. He saw that the enormous evidence favorable to her was being deliberately excised from the record, and he promptly withdrew from the case; afraid for his life, he made a hasty exit from Rouen. Jean Lohier, a Norman priest, loudly proclaimed his opinion that the trial was invalid because no one was there to represent the cause of either Joan or Charles VII. “We shall ignore him and go on our way,” muttered Cauchon. Lohier quit the trial and took refuge in Rome.

Cauchon’s autocratic, tyrannical and malicious conduct with priests, bishops and assessors was entirely consistent with his attitude toward Joan, the trial he was preparing against her and his plan for her destruction. The critical issue at stake was clear to him: would Joan the Maid submit to the judgment of the institutional Church—that is, to him as its representative? Would she judge her own life as they would judge her? If so, she could readily be proclaimed guilty on their summary judgment; if she would not submit, she could nevertheless forthwith be condemned, since to deny the authority of the Church in matters spiritual was defined as the worst sort of heresy.

Cauchon’s reasoning was a finely tuned example of medieval ecclesiastical thinking in service to churchmen rather than the laity; it was, in other words, an example of how a system could easily sacrifice people to syllogisms. However one assesses his sense of the Church, his notion of the nature of faith and the meaning of conscience, Cauchon can only be regarded as a complete failure; indeed, he gave no indication that these mattered to him at all. Entirely controlled by greed and an almost maniacal drive for political power, he became an implacable egomaniac who orchestrated not only Joan of Arc’s condemnation as a heretic but also her death. He cannot simply be excused as a product of the fifteenth century, for people of that time—as seen in the reactions of many assessors—placed a high value on fidelity to canon and civil law, which he blithely ignored.