Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (41 page)

Once her virginity had been confirmed—once it had been established that there was something of value to guard—Joan complained she couldn’t tie all her laces tightly enough to defend herself from the unrelenting predation of her guards. Anne of Burgundy went to the Earl of Warwick, captain of Bouvreuil castle. What member of the English peerage would allow so disgraceful an incident as a prisoner’s rape, knowing how such a contemptible crime would reflect upon the English, the English who were working so hard to dishonor the French? For that matter, how would it reflect on Cardinal Beaufort?

Warwick ordered his commander of the guard, John Gray,
“a gentleman in the service of the duke of Bedford,” to arrange for Joan’s guards to be replaced by a putatively less uncivilized team.

Having discovered that threats and bribes weren’t enough to marshal troops in terror of a sorceress, the English wasted no time in getting the trial under way. Soon after Joan’s arrival in Rouen, a chorister who was often in the cathedral where the judges gathered overheard a handful speaking among themselves.
“A case must quickly be framed against her,” one said, and, as soon as it was feasible, “an excuse … found for putting her to death.” A Dominican friar, Jean Toutmouillé, testified that
“they reckoned that while she was alive they would have no glory or success in the field of war.”

Eager as they were to recapture Louviers, fifteen miles south of Rouen, and check the accelerating decline in their fortunes, the English decided they “would not besiege the town until the Maid had been examined”—and executed. On January 9 the trial’s preliminary phase began. It continued for a month and was dedicated to the appointment of Cauchon’s immediate underlings, the selection of the sixty or so assessors, and the dissemination of muckraking spies to gather what they could about Joan. Cauchon named Jean Le Maître, the sub-inquisitor for Rouen, as his reluctant co-judge. Le Maître’s
assistant, Isambart de la Pierre, testified that, like many others, Le Maître had been
“moved by fear.” He attended only some of the trial’s sessions and
“took no part in the interrogations.”

“There was no one who was not afraid,” Guillaume Manchon testified for the nullification. As one of the trial’s three official notaries, Manchon was “present at all that has been said and done,” an eyewitness to everything that unfolded during the proceedings, his memory aided by the act of writing and rewriting the minutes.
“The English instituted the prosecution, and it was at their expense that it was conducted. I do not think, however, that the Bishop of Beauvais was compelled to prosecute Joan, nor was the promoter Jean d’Estivet. They did what they did voluntarily. As for the assessors and other counselors, none would have dared to refuse.”

When Isambart was discovered to have counseled Joan, prompting her when she was being interrogated, he was advised to be silent or be drowned.

“We only gave our opinions and took part in the trial out of fear, threats, and terror, and it was in our minds to run away,” one of the assessors, Richard de Grouchet, testified.

Some sixty assessors, of whom at least forty attended each day of the trial’s public sessions, were drawn from the University of Paris, mostly Dominicans. (The Inquisition recruited and trained judges almost exclusively from Franciscan and Dominican orders.) Some
“came of their own free will, some to win English favor, some because they dared not refuse,” and some sought vengeance; it wasn’t only Cauchon that Joan’s victories had chased out of their dioceses and away from their sources of power and revenue. All summoned were required to sit in judgment: none could abstain from offering his opinion, for example, on whether or not to put Joan to the rack, which was decided by vote. If the cowed collaborators outnumbered the chop-licking prosecutors, they had no strength in their numbers. The few brave enough to raise objections became immediate cautionary tales. Nicolas de Houppeville, a bachelor in theology at the University of Paris, was thrown out on the second day when a notary told Cauchon he had overheard the man say the trial presented a number of serious risks. Having noted the unseemly slavering of the bishop at Joan’s arrival in Rouen, how he
“spoke exultingly with great joy” of the
“beautiful trial” he had planned, a day’s worth of the proceedings was sufficient to confirm Nicolas’s suspicion that the trial would amount to a disgrace. The bishop, he pointed out, was a member of the opposition party. The trial was being financed by the opposition; the prisoner jailed by their military. Joan had already been rigorously and officially examined by the Church at Poitiers—by Cauchon’s superior, the archbishop of Reims. Cauchon had no ecclesiastical right to serve as her judge. Incensed, Cauchon demanded Nicolas de Houppeville appear before him, as he did, but only to declare that as Cauchon was not his superior the bishop had no jurisdiction over him, any more than he did over Joan. Technically, this was true, but it didn’t impede Cauchon’s having him thrown in prison. To betray any sympathy for Joan or allow her the smallest comfort—let alone be caught offering counsel to a girl alone, accused, and unrepresented—was to defy the bishop and, as several assessors made clear, place oneself “in danger of death.”

Jean d’Estivet was confirmed in the position he’d filled for Cauchon before, as promoter of the ecclesiastical court of Beauvais. Witnesses to his behavior betrayed surprise at his venom, but Cauchon, having worked closely with him before, knew exactly whom he’d chosen. A vindictive sadist subject to seizures of rage and fixated on the subject of female pollution, Jean took every opportunity to defame and castigate Joan, calling her
“a wanton and a whore” even after her chastity was verified, a
“loose woman and a filthy creature.”

As Joan stood in her cage, or lay on her block of wood, or paced as much as fetters allowed, which was only to make shuffling circles like a hobbled dog on a chain, spies were dispatched to Domrémy, Greux, Neufchâteau, Vaucouleurs, Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, Chinon, Poitiers, Tours, Orléans, Jargeau, Troyes, Patay, Reims, Senlis, Saint-Denis, Lagny, Compiègne, and any other place Joan was known to have stayed for so much as a night.
“Somebody important from Lorraine came to Rouen,” Jean Moreau, a merchant (a different Jean Moreau from Joan’s godfather), testified. This person had been “specially commissioned to gather information in Joan’s country of origin,
to find out what reputation she had there.” But the information he brought back to Cauchon—“nothing that he would not have liked to hear about his own sister”—earned him only calumny. The bishop called him “a traitor and a sinner and told him that he had not carried out his instructions properly” and refused him compensation for his expenses in visiting six parishes, as well as the agreed-upon fee for his labor. Another former spy, Nicolas Bailly, a “scrivener” (equivalent to a notary public) who with the provost Gérard Petit collected information about Joan, was similarly abused, even after having gone to the trouble to have a dozen witnesses appear in person to certify the accuracy of the reports made. Both were accused of being in league with the Armagnacs; neither was paid. There was nothing bad to be found in Joan, but there was a tissue of rumor and speculation from which to create
the single precondition required by an inquisitorial trial:
diffamatio
—a bad reputation, the kind men invent to destroy women brazen enough to claim powers men consider theirs alone.

All three notaries, Guillaume Manchon, Guillaume Colles, and Nicolas Taquel, testified to the corruption of what was presented as a trial that hewed to every letter of the law. Two auxiliary and unnamed notaries were hidden in an alcove behind a curtain in the room where the interrogations were conducted, writing and eliding as directed by a prelate. Manchon, Colles, and Taquel’s official French notes were sometimes redacted rather than translated into Latin by Thomas de Courcelles, a
“zealous university man and rector of the faculty of law” who was ultimately so ashamed of his involvement in the trial that he “suppressed his name wherever it occurred in the French minutes.” Courcelles testified for the nullification with the intent to vindicate himself along with Joan. Bedford’s confidant, the Rouen canon Nicolas Midi, a rabid exponent of the University of Paris, reduced the redacted notes to seventy articles of accusation, which were subsequently reorganized into twelve, excluding redundancies and some, but not all, of the more absurd false charges—the one, for example, that Joan kept a mandrake hidden in her bosom as one of the tricks of her trade, a magic tuber that was held to summon money. She’d heard that near her village there was one, she told Midi, though she’d never seen it. Whatever it was, she knew it was held to be “an evil and dangerous thing to keep.”

Twigs of fairy trees and trumped-up breaches of marriage contracts never made, unuttered blaspheming of God, and never-witnessed rituals with the devil: there was enough kindling to set below a stake. Hadn’t her own father dreamed many times of her disgraceful conduct with soldiers and, upon waking, instructed her brothers to drown her should they come true? A century of public burnings preceded the trial of Joan of Arc; still, many historians consider hers the first great witchcraft trial, catalytic in its effects across Europe, as high-profile political inquisitions like Joan’s yielded to those of countless unknown and mostly destitute women who lived outside the cold shoulder of society. Some were midwives, some were prostitutes, some were mentally ill or unfortunate enough to have been raped and ruined for decent society; all made the wrong enemy. None had the protection of father, uncle, brother, or son. Like Joan, they were judged by slander and called whores, filth, the devil’s handmaidens. Society had arrived at a kind of democracy, if not one that suggested the ethical evolution of the species: it was the right of every citizen to watch a witch burn, in person, for himself. The widespread demand for live performances of atrocities and live sacrifices—scapegoats on which to pin their accusers’ sufferings—meant witches were found everywhere.

For one year, from May 1429 to May 1430, Joan presided over a handful of battles resulting in a loss of fewer than ten thousand men, in total. Her trial, its verdict, and the publication of her example united as a catalyst for the three centuries’ worth of zealous, often hysterical, witch hunts amounting to the theatrically cruel execution of as many as a hundred thousand women—a
“vast holocaust,” in the words of one historian.

While her family, friends, and comrades were being interrogated, Joan was
“subjected to the Inquisition’s tactic of the prison informer,” of whom two are known. A canon of the Rouen Cathedral, Nicolas Loiseleur, one of Cauchon’s cherry-picked cronies
“very highly regarded by Bedford’s government,”
“pretended to be a man from the
Maid’s country and so succeeded in getting writings, conversation, and confidences from her (in prison) by giving her news from home, which was pleasing to her,” the notary Manchon testified. Loiseleur gained Joan’s trust before he revealed himself to be a priest and asked to be her confessor. Joan accepted, and whenever Loiseleur visited, Manchon said, spies in the hidden annex listened through the peephole wall of her cell and recorded all they said for Jean d’Estivet to pore over in pursuit of incriminating evidence. As none existed, none could be extracted. Disguised, Jean d’Estivet himself visited Joan, pretending to be another prisoner, without success.