Joan of Arc (20 page)

Seguin Seguin was the only surviving member of the distinguished group who had examined Joan in Poitiers. When asked why she had come, she replied ‘in a grand manner’, that ‘there had come to her, while she was minding the animals, a voice, which told her that God had great compassion on the people of France, and that she must come into France’. On hearing the voice she began to weep; the voice then told her to go to Vaucouleurs, where she would find a captain who would conduct her safely into France and to the king, and that she must not be afraid. She had done what the voice had ordered, and had come to the king without meeting any obstacle. She was asked this question: ‘You have said that a voice told you, God wanted to deliver the people of France from the calamity in which they now are; but, if God wills to deliver them, it is not necessary to have soldiers.’ ‘In God’s Name!’ Joan replied, ‘the soldiers will fight, and God will give the victory’ (
‘En nom Dé, les gens d’armes batailleront et Dieu donnera victoire
’). Seguin then asked Joan what dialect the voice spoke in: ‘A better one than yours,’ was the reply. ‘He,’ said Seguin, referring to himself, ‘spoke the Limousin dialect.’ Joan spoke the dialect of Lorraine, strongly influenced by the proximity of Champagne, where ‘j’ or ‘y’ became ‘ch’, so that she pronounced ‘
joyeux
’ as ‘
choyeux
’ and used the typical Lorrainer expression
en nom Dé
, ‘in God’s name’.

Seguin found it harder to cope with her tone than her accent. He stated that ‘God wills that you should not be believed unless there appear some sign to prove that you ought to be believed; and we shall not advise the king to trust in you, and to risk an army on your simple statement.’ Joan replied: ‘In God’s Name! I am not come to Poitiers to show signs, but send me to Orléans, where I shall show you the signs for which I am sent!’ She then asked to be given men in such numbers as may seem good, and went on to foretell four things that Seguin had seen occur: the siege of Orléans would be raised, the king would be crowned at Reims, Paris would return to its natural obedience, and the Duke of Orléans would be brought back from England.

The committee at Poitiers had then reported all this to the King’s Council and given its view that in the existing extreme circumstances the king might as well send her to Orléans. They also made enquiries about her life and morals, found she was a good Christian, living as a Catholic, never idle, and arranged for her to live with women who were to keep the committee informed about her. ‘As for me,’ said Seguin, ‘I believed she was sent from God, because at the time when she appeared the king and all the French people who supported him had lost hope: everyone thought the cause was lost.’ He also remembered Joan was asked why she always marched with a banner in her hand: because she did not wish to use her sword or to kill anyone, she replied. Finally, Seguin, like so many others, testified to her hatred of swearing and to the way that she told the foul-mouthed La Hire to swear only by his staff; and in her presence he did so. ‘The soldiers thought her holy,’ said another witness.

Apart from Maître Thierry’s reference to the capture of St-Pierre-le-Moûtier, nobody knew about the months between the check before Paris (in September 1429) and Joan’s capture outside Compiègne (in May 1430); and the narrative resumes only when she was a prisoner. She was taken to Rouen Castle, where she was put in a prison opposite some fields. Raymond, Sieur de Macy, had much to say. The comte de Ligny, on whom Raymond attended, came to see her there. De Ligny also visited her with the earls of Warwick and Stafford, the comte’s brother, Louis de Luxembourg, the English chancellor of France and bishop of Thérouanne, and Raymond himself. De Ligny said: ‘Joan, I have come to ransom you, if you will promise never again to take up arms against us.’ She replied: ‘In God’s Name [
En nom Dé
], you must be having me on, for I know well that you have neither the will nor the power,’ and this she said over and over again, while the count persisted. She knew well, she ended by saying, that the English would have her killed, thinking that after her death they would gain the kingdom of France, but if there were a hundred thousand more ‘
godons
’ than there are at present, they would not have the kingdom ‘
godons
’ or ‘
goddams
’ was the common French name for the English). The Earl of Stafford was so furious at these words that he began to draw his dagger to kill her, but the Earl of Warwick stopped him.

After this, while Macy was still in Rouen, Joan was taken to the place St-Ouen, where a sermon was preached to her by Maître Nicolas Midi – his memory tricked him, for the preacher’s name was Erard – and this man said among other things: ‘Joan, we have great pity on you; you ought to unsay what you have said, or we must give you up to the secular judges.’ She answered that she had done no evil, that she believed in the twelve Articles of the Faith and the Ten Commandments, that she referred herself to the court of Rome and that she wished to believe all things in which Holy Church believed. All the same they pressed her to recant, to which she answered: ‘You take great pains to seduce me,’ and, to escape danger, she said at last that she was content to do all they required. Then the secretary of the King of England, Lawrence Calot, drew out of his pocket a little written schedule, which he handed to Joan to sign. She replied she could neither read nor write. Nevertheless, Secretary Calot handed her the schedule and a pen to sign it and for whatever motive – Macy thinks it was as a sign of contempt – she made a circular mark. Then Calot took her hand with the pen and caused her to make some sort of signature, probably a cross (Macy was not sure). Macy concluded: ‘I believe her to be in Paradise.’

T
he many witnesses who had come forward to share their memories of Joan twenty-five years or so after they had known her regarded her with a mixture of awe and admiration, not just because of her piety and purity, but also because of her competence, courage and kindness. Indirectly, the often long depositions by acquaintances, colleagues and friends revealed how shocking had been the bias of the judges who had condemned her. Her questioners had seen her as a deceiver, yet she was transparent; as a witch, yet she remained a virgin; as heretical, yet she was scrupulously Catholic; as a sorceress, yet she claimed no special powers. They had seen her decision to revert to male costume as the conclusive sign of her wickedness, yet those who had lived with her thought her merely sensible in her choice – they had not been shocked. Some of them knew she heard ‘voices’, but none of those who did found her experiences unusually preposterous or even interesting – they were plain matter-of-fact about them.

But Joan’s new judges dealt in legal niceties rather than character assessment. As Macy realised, the key evidence concerned the trial; and what mattered most in the royal inquest and in the ecclesiastical inquests was the evidence of theologians and Church lawyers, for Joan, who could have been tried as a traitor to Henry VI and II, was tried for sorcery and heresy. Charles VII’s royal lawyers did not restore Joan’s good name because they could not: only a Church court could do that. Indeed, one royal official produced a witness who could have hindered Joan’s case, for in 1450 the king’s commissioner, Maître Guillaume Bouillé, secured the testimony of an unrepentant critic of Joan, who disappeared from history before he could speak to papal officials.

Maître Jean Beaupère, one of Joan’s most implacable interrogators twenty years earlier and who had by now retired to Besançon, just happened to come to Rouen to collect dues from his canonry in Rouen Cathedral. He felt free to express a view of Joan not unlike that he had maintained in 1431. For a royal inquest of the mid-fifteenth century, Bouille’s inquest proved to be remarkably fair. Beaupère himself still had no doubt that in many details his snide view of Joan had been sound. He believed Joan’s ‘apparitions’ had natural and human rather than supernatural and divine causes, and he referred back to the evidence of the trial.
¹

Before she was taken to St-Ouen to be admonished on the following morning, Beaupère went alone, with permission, into Joan’s prison, and warned her that she would soon be led to the scaffold to be preached to, telling her that, if she were a good Christian, she would say on the scaffold that she referred all her actions and words to the care of Holy Mother Church, and especially of the Church’s judges. And this she said on the scaffold, having been asked to do so by Maître Nicolas Midi. On due consideration she was sent back to prison for a time, after abjuring, though some Englishmen accused Cauchon and the Parisian delegates of favouring her errors.

After her abjuration, and, after taking her woman’s dress which she was given in prison, the judges were told the next Friday or Saturday that Joan had not repented of having put off a man’s dress and had taken a woman’s dress. For this reason,

my Lord of Beauvais (Cauchon) . . . sent me and Maître Nicolas Midi to her, hoping we would speak to Joan and persuade her to persevere in the good intent she had on the scaffold and be careful not to relapse. But we could not find the keeper of the prison key, of the three keys to the prison, the Promoter had one, the Inquisitor a second and the Cardinal the third; and, while we were waiting for the prison guard, several Englishmen in the castle court-yard threatened, as Maître Nicolas Midi told me, that anyone throwing both of us into the water would be well occupied. We went back, when we had heard this. On the castle bridge, said Midi, other Englishmen said much the same. We were afraid and went away without speaking to Joan.

As for Joan’s innocence, she showed a woman’s subtlety, thought Beaupère. He did not understand from any of her words that she had been violated. As for her final penitence, he did not know what to say, for on the Monday after the abjuration (28 May) he left Rouen to go to Basel, as a delegate of the University of Paris. For this reason he had no news of the condemnation till he heard it mentioned at Lille in Flanders.

Careful though he had been to present himself favourably, Beaupère had not become an admirer of Joan’s. He had, however, fashioned a way of becoming rich: in 1432 he was a canon of Besançon, Paris, Laon and Rouen and soon a canon of Autun as well; he was pro-English when he acquired his benefices, anti-papal when it paid him at Basel and pro-French when Charles VII reconquered his kingdom. He remained constant only in his mistrust of a woman who had dared to answer back to her betters.

Of the six other clerics interviewed who had taken part in the trial, four were Black Friars, or Dominicans – Jean Toutmouillé, Ysambard de La Pierre, Martin Ladvenu and Guillaume Duval – and two were secular priests – Guillaume Manchon, the notary, and Jean Massieu, clerk to Maître ‘Jean Benedicite’, the nickname of the Promoter, Estivet. They were willing to suggest that the proceedings of that trial had been vitiated by lies and intimidation. They had much to worry about, for if they supported Joan now, they knew that they had been too craven to support her then. In defending her in middle or old age, they had to confront the moral failures of their youth.

Jean Toutmouillé was cautious in judging the trial, which he had not attended, but he related the common view ‘that they persecuted her from a desire of perverse revenge’. He says her enemies would put off besieging Louviers until she had been dealt with. Jean himself had been in the prison when Martin Ladvenu had to tell Joan she was to be burnt, which Ladvenu did ‘most considerately and charitably’, and he recalled how Joan had cried out in distress, saying that she would rather have her head cut off ‘seven times than be burnt in this way’. Had she been kept in a Church prison instead of in the custody of her enemies, she was sure that she would not have been so miserably treated. ‘I appeal to God, the Great Judge, over the great wrongs and injustices done me!’ When Cauchon came, she told him, ‘Bishop, I die through you.’ Cauchon retorted that she had not kept to her promise, meaning her promise to wear women’s clothes, and Joan reiterated her point about Church prisons and competent Church guards; and at this Toutmouillé left.

Brother Ysambard de La Pierre had been more intimately involved. At one stage he had urged Joan to submit to the Church, to which she replied she would submit to the Holy Father, and he had told her to submit to the Council of Basel. Joan had never heard of a general council, but when he explained that some people there were on her side and others on the English side – in fact most were pro-English – she cried out, ‘If there are any of our side in that place, I am quite willing to give myself up and to submit to the Council of Basel.’ This reply infuriated Cauchon. ‘Shut up,’ he said and told the notary to cut out any reference to her submission to the council. Brother Ysambard was also threatened by the English, who intimated that if he did not stay silent they would throw him into the Seine.

When Joan recanted and abjured and put on men’s clothes again, ‘I and many others were present when Joan excused herself for doing this.’ She had told him ‘that the English had tried violence on her, when she was wearing a woman’s dress’; and he ‘saw her weeping, her face covered with tears . . . so that he was full of pity’. She said publicly, after being declared an obstinate and relapsed heretic: ‘If you, my Lords of the Church, had placed and kept me in your prisons, perhaps I should not have been in this state.’

After the end of this session and trial, Cauchon said to the English ‘Farewell, be cheerful, it’s done.’ Brother Ysambard added that Joan had been asked ‘such difficult, subtle, and crafty questions . . . that the great clerics and learned men present would have found it hard to reply’. He had been with the Bishop of Avranches, ‘an aged and good cleric’, who had been asked for his opinion of the case. The bishop said: ‘He summoned me before him, and asked me what St Thomas [Thomas Aquinas] said about submitting to the Church. I sent him in writing the verdict of St Thomas: “In doubtful things, touching the Faith, recourse should always be had to the Pope or to a General Council.”’ The bishop agreed with this and seemed to be unhappy with the arguments put forward on this subject. His thoughts were written down but ‘left out, maliciously’.