12

She was all innocence

Joan had not been forgotten. In the dazzling city of Constantinople, almost two years after her death, a servant of the Byzantine emperor asked a Burgundian visitor whether it was true that the Maid had been captured. ‘It seemed to the Greeks an impossible thing,’ the Burgundian reported, and when he told them what had become of her, they were ‘filled with wonder’.

Closer to home, her memory had been kept alive by the people of Orléans, whose gratitude for their liberation had not dimmed. Every year celebrations were held in the town to commemorate the miraculous events of 8 May 1429, when the Maid had forced the English into ignominious retreat. In 1435, thanks to Gilles de Rais, the Breton nobleman who had been one of Joan’s brothers-in-arms that glorious day, the anniversary was marked with a performance of breathtaking scale and ambition: a play entitled The Mystery of the Siege of Orléans. Since ‘mystery’ was a word that usually signified the depiction of stories from the Bible or the lives of saints, the burden of the drama was clear even before the cast of hundreds made their appearance on stage, speaking twenty thousand lines of verse in which, amid ingeniously constructed scenery, the Maid relived her divinely inspired triumph. In her honour, no expense was spared – and some at least of the extravagant outlay was deliberately incurred, since de Rais had specifically ordered that the actors should be costumed only in the finest fabrics, and that the crowds should eat and drink their fill while they watched. It was an epic spectacle, but its grandeur was fleeting. De Rais’s frenzied spending proved part of a vertiginous plunge into financial ruin. Then, five years later, he was tried and hanged for the sexual assault and murder of more than a hundred children. His play was not seen on stage again.

By the time de Rais died, his name indelibly stained with the horror of his crimes, hopes had been raised that Joan herself might return to the world. In May 1436 – a little more than a month after Paris had fallen to King Charles’s forces, just as the Maid had always said it would – a dark-haired woman had appeared at Metz, a town fifty miles from Domrémy, outside the north-eastern borders of the kingdom. She looked so like Joan – either that, or the desire to believe that Joan had somehow escaped the fire was so great – that many people claimed they recognised her, including two of the Maid’s own brothers. She wore men’s clothes and rode a horse with ease and skill, and her brief moment of celebrity brought her a wealthy husband, a knight of Metz named Robert des Armoises. This counterfeit Maid had given birth to two sons, it was said, by the time she moved west to Orléans in the summer of 1439. There, she was wined and dined and given purses of gold ‘for the good that she did the town during the siege’. But when she appeared in Paris in 1440, she was publicly denounced as a fraud by the parlement and university, and after that, with little prospect of further profit from her imposture, the woman slipped away from public view.

In Paris, as the years went by, the spectre of Joan herself – a wandering revenant haunting the kingdom’s memories of the war – was a provocative presence. She had led King Charles to his coronation and proclaimed his God-given right to the throne, but she had also appeared at the head of an army outside the walls of the capital, and died as a heretic condemned by the expert theological judgement of its university’s scholars. In such circumstances, the king’s silence on the subject of the Maid entirely suited the leading inhabitants of his first city. If the unhappy names of Armagnac and Burgundian were now to be consigned to the pages of history, then surely they should be joined by that of the girl who had claimed the mandate of heaven in defining ‘Armagnac’ as ‘French’ and ‘Burgundian’ as ‘traitor’.

But one problem remained. If the verdict of heresy still stood against the Maid, whose victory at Orléans had been the sign of heaven’s blessing on her king, then did a shadow still fall on the most Christian monarch? There was nothing to be done while Rouen and the archive of the court that had tried her there remained part of English France, and in any case the argument for letting past divisions rest was a powerful one. But in February 1450, four months after the English had finally been driven from Rouen, and three since the king had entered the city in majesty, Charles spoke, at last, of Joan. ‘A long time ago, Joan the Maid was taken and captured by our ancient enemies and adversaries, the English, and brought to the city of Rouen. They had her tried by certain persons who had been chosen and given this task by them, and during this trial they made and committed several errors and abuses, such that, by means of this trial and the great hatred that our enemy had against her, they had her put to death very cruelly, iniquitously and against reason.’ Of course, only a trial perverted by hatred could have condemned the Maid, and now the purpose of this royal letter, addressed to a theologian named Guillaume Bouillé, was to discover exactly what form that perversion had taken. ‘Because we wish to know the truth of this trial,’ the king went on, ‘and the manner in which it was carried out, we command, instruct and expressly charge you to inquire and diligently ask about this and what was said. And bring to us and the men of our great council the information that you find concerning this, or faithfully send it in a sealed letter.’

Bouillé was, like so many of the Maid’s judges, a professor of the university of Paris, but his career had been in its infancy when she was tried nineteen years earlier, and his standing as a loyal servant of King Charles was unquestioned. He was ideally placed to review the technicalities of the process over which Bishop Cauchon had presided, and he lost no time in beginning his investigation. In early March, he questioned seven witnesses who had participated in the trial, including the notary Guillaume Manchon, the executor, Jean Massieu, and Martin Lavenu, the friar who had been at Joan’s side in her last hours. They had sat among the packed ranks of French clerics who had condemned the Maid, at a moment when the due process of God’s law had seemed wholly compatible with the rejection of her claims. Since then, of course, it had become clear that Charles was in fact the true heir to France, exactly as Joan had said, and now these men of God were moved to agree with their king that the defining influence on the trial had been the prejudice of his enemies, the English, in whose castle the hearings had taken place.

Two of them – the friars Isambard de la Pierre, who had been much involved in the judges’ deliberations, and Guillaume Duval, who had been there only a little – insisted that the earl of Warwick, governor to the young King Henry and commander of the English garrison at Rouen, had threatened to throw de la Pierre into the Seine if he sought to offer the prisoner any help. Cauchon had been in the pocket of the English throughout the trial, all the witnesses agreed. It was English pressure that had prevented any appeal to the pope, or any possibility that Joan might be kept in ecclesiastical custody rather than guarded by soldiers in a castle cell. The bishop had even sent a spy to extract information from her covertly, Guillaume Manchon explained: a canon of Rouen Cathedral named Nicolas Loiseleur had visited her to offer himself as a confessor and counsellor, gaining her confidence and drawing her out while Manchon and others took notes as they listened through a secret hole from a neighbouring room. And Martin Lavenu remembered that on the day of Joan’s relapse into heresy, when Cauchon had emerged from her cell, Warwick and his attendants had greeted him outside the door with applause and celebrations. ‘Farewell! It is done,’ the bishop had declared.

For several of the witnesses, the visible manifestation of that relapse – Joan’s decision to dress once again in men’s clothes – was a source of particular anxiety. After all, once she had submitted to the judgement of the court and put on the modest dress of a woman, why and how had she come to change her mind? De la Pierre and Jean Toutmouillé (a friar who, as a young man, had accompanied Brother Martin to attend Joan on her last day) described the intense distress in which they found her; she told them, they said, that, once she wore skirts rather than hose tied with laces to her doublet, she had been violently assaulted by her guards. Martin Lavenu believed that it was an English lord who had tried to rape her. The executor, Jean Massieu, meanwhile, was not convinced that her resumption of men’s clothes had been her own choice, even one forced upon her by such brutality. She slept each night, he explained, with her feet bound in irons chained to a great piece of wood, while three English soldiers kept watch in her cell and two more outside. He remembered Joan saying that, when she woke on the third morning after her submission, her guards had taken away the women’s clothes she now wore, and instead emptied out the bag in which her old tunic and hose had been left in a corner of the room. For hours she remonstrated with them, insisting that these were clothes she was forbidden to wear, but they would not relent, until by midday she was so desperate to relieve herself outside that she was left with no option but to put on the prohibited garments.

It had always been clear how physically vulnerable she was, a lone female prisoner in a castle full of men. The broader truth of that vulnerability, and the anguish that was its consequence, rang through these diverging stories, just as it had through Joan’s own scattered incoherence in the trial record for that fateful day. Equally apparent, through equally shifting narratives, was the overwhelming experience of watching the Maid die. De la Pierre, Manchon and Massieu all agreed that, in the midst of the flames, she had called constantly upon Christ and His saints with such pious devotion that almost everyone there, French or English – even, said de la Pierre, Cardinal Beaufort himself – was moved to tears. Someone (was it de la Pierre or Massieu? Both claimed the honour) had hurried at her request to a nearby church to fetch a crucifix, and held it before her eyes until they were rendered sightless by the fire. Martin Lavenu told of the misery of the executioner, who had been unable to hasten the end of Joan’s agony because the platform on which she burned was so high. De la Pierre – whose entire testimony was inflected with drama – described the man’s unbearable remorse at having participated in the death of such a holy woman. Though he had heaped up the pyre time and again, the Maid’s heart had remained whole and unconsumed, by which he had been dumbfounded (de la Pierre reported), as though it were clearly a miracle.

Only one witness – the veteran theologian Jean Beaupère, who had taken a leading role in interrogating Joan during the early days of the trial – was less than reverent in speaking of her memory. She had had the wiles of a woman, he said, and he believed that her visions derived from human invention rather than a supernatural cause. No one else had yet mentioned the thorny issue of her voices, but Bouillé had the matter in hand, drafting a lengthy treatise in which he painstakingly assembled details from the trial transcript with which he might rebut her judges’ conclusions, while reanimating what had once, long ago, been the Armagnac defence of her claims.

There was plenty here to encourage those who, like Bouillé, wished to clear Joan of the calumnies that Bishop Cauchon had heaped upon her – or, as the king’s letter had originally instructed, simply to demonstrate that the trial had been filled with error and driven by hatred. For the moment, however, all was in vain. After only two days of testimony, the inquiry was called to a sudden halt, whether because of the pressing demands of the fight to drive the English from the rest of Normandy, or because the rattling of skeletons had proved disturbing to powerful men. The archbishop of Rouen – the man who had succeeded the English royal chancellor Louis de Luxembourg after his death in 1443 – was a canon lawyer named Raoul Roussel. He had led the august deputations who welcomed King Charles to the city in November 1449. He had also been one of Joan’s most assiduous judges. After more than thirty years of English rule, wounds were raw in Normandy in 1450, and nerves on a knife edge. Silence, it was clear, still had its virtues.

That was not, however, the opinion of a new player in the complex world of the French Church. Guillaume d’Estouteville was a Norman nobleman of irreproachably Armagnac credentials, a second cousin of the king and now a cardinal, sent by the pope in the spring of 1452 as a legate to the kingdom of France. His principal tasks were to make peace between the English and French – whose soldiers were still fighting, now that Normandy had fallen, in what remained of the English duchy of Gascony in the south-west of the kingdom – in the hope that the military efforts of both realms might be directed instead against the threat of the Ottoman Turks, and to press for the restitution of full papal powers within France after they had been limited by royal edict fourteen years earlier. But it soon transpired that d’Estouteville had another aim in mind. Whether because it was a subject dear to his own heart, or because he thought he detected a chance to accrue valuable political capital, the cardinal reopened the question of Joan’s trial, a matter which, he told the king, ‘greatly concerns your honour and estate’.

It was far from clear that King Charles was happy to receive instruction, however well intentioned, concerning his honour and estate, still less to see the pope’s representative reviving a process it had seemed politic to drop only two years before. But, technically, it could not be denied that a verdict delivered by the Church was the Church’s to rescind, should it so wish. In May 1452, d’Estouteville enlisted the newly appointed inquisitor of France, a friar named Jean Bréhal, to preside over a fresh inquiry at Rouen. Twenty-one years earlier, the Maid had stood trial in the city; now, the accused was the trial itself.

Together, d’Estouteville and Bréhal studied the transcript of Bishop Cauchon’s hearings and drafted a list of articles by which the proceedings might be condemned. Was it not true that the English had sought Joan’s death by every means they could, because of their mortal hatred of her? Had not the judges, assessors and notaries been intimidated by English threats, so that the trial and its record were neither free nor fair? Could it be denied that Joan, a simple and ignorant girl, had been left without advice or help, and confounded with interrogations of such length and difficulty that she could not defend herself? Had she not often said that she submitted to the judgement of the Church and her Holy Father the pope – and, if she had ever said that she would not submit to the Church, had she not meant only the churchmen before her, who had embraced the English cause? Had not Joan died in such a holy and devout manner that all those who saw it wept? And were all these things not commonly noised and known to be true?

During the following weeks, these questions were put to some of the clerics who had participated in the trial, including, once again, Guillaume Manchon, Martin Lavenu, Jean Massieu and Isambard de la Pierre, whose testimony had acquired yet more startling colour in the intervening years. (An English soldier who hated Joan with a passion, de la Pierre said, had been utterly overcome by witnessing her death. After a restorative drink at a nearby tavern, the man declared that he had seen a white dove fluttering from the flames as the Maid’s last breath left her body.) Of the thirteen others to whom d’Estouteville and Bréhal now spoke, some enthusiastically agreed with the articles, and some strongly resisted. Many, of both persuasions, were keen to defend the accuracy of the trial record, and to note that Joan had answered questions well, even if she were a simple girl among learned doctors. Some were adamant that Bishop Cauchon had been a lackey of the English; others recalled that, when he was reproved by an English cleric for having accepted Joan’s abjuration at the cemetery of Saint-Ouen, he had become angry, and said it was his duty to seek the prisoner’s salvation, not her death. And it seemed that some – such as the civil lawyer Nicolas Caval, who had attended many sessions of the trial – could remember very little. ‘The English had no great love for the Maid,’ was his laconic observation, and he knew, he said, that she had been burned. But whether that was just or unjust he could not say, since it was a matter for the court.

There were others, of course, who did not appear before the cardinal and inquisitor at all, the influential and compromised figure of Archbishop Roussel chief among them. Still, when the examination of witnesses drew to a close, Jean Bréhal found that he had ample material to submit to scholars of theology and canon law for their expert assessment. Over the following months, many hours of intellectual endeavour were expended on the task of elaborating all the ways in which other scholars – those who had advised Bishop Cauchon’s trial two decades earlier – were wrong. Meanwhile, Cardinal d’Estouteville returned to Rome. He had failed to make peace between England and France: instead, in July 1453, the aged English commander Talbot and thousands of his troops were slaughtered by King Charles’s forces at Castillon, twenty-five miles east of Bordeaux. By the end of the year Gascony, as well as Normandy, was French, and – with the lone exception of the garrison grimly holding on within the fortified pale of Calais in the far north – the English had been driven out of the whole of France, just as the Maid had once told Talbot and his fellow commanders they would be.

This was final vindication for the king, and for the girl who had fleetingly been his champion. And it was good news, it seemed, for those who sought to revoke Bishop Cauchon’s sentence against her. So too was the fact that, when Raoul Roussel died on the last day of 1452, Cardinal d’Estouteville was appointed to succeed him as archbishop of Rouen. Still, the wheels turned slowly. Charles himself – now le roi très-victorieux, the most victorious as well as the most Christian king – showed no greater inclination to revisit this troublesome moment in his past than he had since the abandonment of Bouillé’s inquiry in 1450, while Pope Nicholas V had more pressing matters on his mind, given that the Turks had sacked and conquered the mighty city of Constantinople, the bulwark of Christendom in the east, in the spring of 1453. In 1454 Inquisitor Bréhal made the long journey to Rome to pursue his case, but it was not until June 1455 that he succeeded in securing from Nicholas’s successor, Calixtus III, a letter of authorisation for a new trial, in which – following the suggestion of one of the canon lawyers Bréhal had consulted – Joan’s surviving family, her mother and two brothers, were to act as plaintiffs. Three papal commissioners would oversee the process in the name of the Holy Father, all of them loyal servants of France: the bishop of Coutances, the bishop of Paris and the archbishop of Reims, Jean Juvénal des Ursins, a talented writer and historian who had been Pierre Cauchon’s Armagnac successor as bishop of Beauvais.

And so, on 7 November 1455, an extraordinary ceremony unfolded in the hallowed grandeur of Notre-Dame in the heart of Paris. Had Joan lived, she would by now have reached her forties. As it was, her bereaved mother Isabelle had quietly tended her grief for almost twenty-five years; and now she appeared in the cathedral before the archbishop of Reims, the bishop of Paris and Inquisitor Bréhal. Beside her stood one of her sons, Pierre, and supporters from Orléans, a town which had demonstrated its unwavering devotion to the Maid by providing her mother, who had found herself impoverished in her widowhood, with a comfortable home. While she knelt before the commissioners to proffer the papal mandate, her petition was explained on the old lady’s behalf: her devout and virtuous daughter, whom she had brought up in the true faith, had been falsely accused of heresy, a charge which was prompted not by any fault in her, but by hatred and enmity. Despite her innocence, Joan had been iniquitously condemned and cruelly burned,because her trial was riven with injustice and error. Her family had been unable to right this wrong while the kingdom was ravaged by war, but now that, by God’s grace, Rouen and Normandy had been restored to France – and the task thereby accomplished that had been started, in Joan’s time, at Orléans and Reims – they turned for help, as Joan herself had done, to the Holy See. Beyond these elliptical phrases, there was no mention of the Maid’s mission, her voices or her victories. Instead, the commissioners’ assignment was delineated with lawyerly precision: to demonstrate that the process by which the girl had been declared a heretic was flawed, and to expunge that verdict from the public record.

An inquisitive crowd began to gather in the cathedral as others among Isabelle’s supporters stepped forward to speak, anxious to detail all the many ways in which Joan had been oppressed by the partiality and prejudice of her judges and guards. Her simplicity, her devotion and her actions for the good of the realm, all these, they said, were merits, not crimes, piety, not wickedness – that is, if they were interpreted correctly. The press of people became so great that the commissioners were forced to draw Isabelle and her companions aside into the quiet of the sacristy. There they explained, with care and concern, that they would receive her petition and undertake the inquiry, but that the process would be long and complex, and its outcome uncertain. The solemn judgement of the Church, they warned, could not be lightly overturned. The Maid’s mother and her friends should therefore seek learned counsel for themselves, and return to the commissioners’ presence in the episcopal court of Paris ten days later. There was much work ahead, but, at last, the case had begun.

Step by step, Inquisitor Bréhal found himself mirroring the meticulous stages through which Bishop Cauchon had moved a quarter of a century before. A distinguished gathering of theologians and civil and canon lawyers considered the grounds on which the verdict of Joan’s trial had been called into question. The infamy of those proceedings and the public perception of her innocence, they agreed, could hardly have been greater; it was therefore the commissioners’ duty to proceed with the inquiry. A promoter and notaries were appointed. Guillaume Manchon produced his original French notes of the trial, to be compared with the official Latin transcript, and the records of Cardinal d’Estouteville’s investigation of 1452 were scrutinised by the court. The learned counsel appointed for Joan’s mother and brothers made exhaustive representations detailing the Maid’s manifest virtues and the patent injustices of the process against her, which were drafted into a total of 101 articles for the commissioners – or judges, as they now were – to consider. And at the beginning of 1456, the judges dispatched officers to collect the testimony upon which they would form their conclusions. Twenty-five years earlier, there had been a single witness, interrogated on many subjects. Now, the witnesses were many, and the subjects few: in the region of Joan’s birth, the court’s questions concerned her childhood, her character and the beginning of her mission; in Orléans and Paris, her deeds in the war; and in Paris and Rouen, her trial and death.

In Domrémy, the villagers who had known Joan told the officers what they could, but there was no sign, in this little place far away from the scenes of her extraordinary exploits, that memories had been heightened by the passage of time. At home she had been ‘Jeannette’ rather than ‘Jeanne’, it seemed. The older villagers, her godparents among them, recalled a respectable family and a dutiful child, well-behaved, pious and modest, who worked hard – she span with her mother, they said, and guided the plough and tended animals for her father – and liked to go to church. She was as well instructed in the faith, noted one of her godfathers, as the other girls of Domrémy. This was reassuring, if a little non-specific. The reminiscences of the younger generation, who had grown up with the Maid, were scarcely more particular. A woman named Hauviette said she had wept when Joan left the village, because she was good and kind and had been her friend. Sometimes, the local boys had teased her about her displays of devotion to God: when Joan heard the church bells, one of them explained, she would fall to her knees in the fields and pray. And it was the bells that prompted one of the few memories in which the living, breathing Joan could suddenly be felt. Perrin Drappier had been the churchwarden in the village, and when in the evenings he forgot to sound the call to compline, she used to scold him, he said, and promise to bring him cakes if he would be more diligent.

Even if the Maid was a strangely insubstantial presence in their testimony, the villagers had done their work in demonstrating to the court the blamelessness of her early life. But Joan herself came into vivid focus as soon as the inquiry moved to Vaucouleurs, the town where she had persuaded the captain Robert de Baudricourt to send her to Chinon and the king. It was Durand Laxart, the husband of one of her cousins, who had been inveigled into taking her there; several of the younger inhabitants of Domrémy remembered him explaining that, at Joan’s insistence, he had told her father that she was coming to stay at his house in the nearby village of Burey-le-Petit to help his wife in her confinement with a new baby.

Laxart himself did not mention this subterfuge. Instead, his focus was the crystalline clarity of Joan’s purpose and the irresistible force of her will. She had announced, he said, that she must go to the dauphin and lead him to his coronation. And she knew a prophecy that spoke of her mission: ‘Was it not once foretold that France would be devastated by a woman and then restored by a virgin?’ Who this first woman might have been was not clear, unless it was the mad king’s much maligned wife, Queen Isabeau, but the echoes of the biblical roles of Eve and Mary, and the part Joan believed she was destined to play in the story of the most Christian kingdom, were unmistakable. The couple with whom she had stayed at Vaucouleurs remembered similarly bold and resolute pronouncements. She was sent by the king of heaven to the dauphin, she told Henri le Royer, and, if she had to, she would go there on her knees. She did not fear the journey, because God would open the way before her; she had been born to do this, she said. And she had been full of impatience, Henri’s wife Catherine remembered, time weighing on her as it did on a pregnant woman waiting to give birth.

It was this certainty that had overwhelmed the men who accompanied her when she left, at last, for Chinon. Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy were the soldiers who, with their servants Julien and Jean, the royal messenger Colet de Vienne and another man named Richard l’Archier, had guided Joan for eleven days through enemy country on her way to the court. Jean de Metz was now a nobleman, rewarded by the king for his loyal service, and Bertrand de Poulengy an esquire of the royal household, but still, twenty-five years later, they were struck with awe at the memory of the Maid. It was because they believed she was sent by God to save France, they said, that they had offered themselves as her escort. Despite the hazards of their route, she had assured them calmly that there was nothing to fear. She was young and so were they, but when they snatched what sleep they could, lying side by side with Joan fully clothed in the doublet and hose she had swapped for her rough red dress, neither of them, they said, had felt any stirrings of desire for one so holy.

That claim was echoed, when testimony was received from the witnesses at Orléans and Paris, by the men who had fought beside her when she went to war. When he was with her, said the Bastard of Orléans, he had no carnal impulses of any kind, towards her or any other woman. Privacy was hard to come by in the field, and when she dressed and armed herself on campaign the duke of Alençon had seen her breasts – which were beautiful, he said – while her squire Jean d’Aulon had caught glimpses of her breasts and her bare legs, but neither of them had been aroused. If there was the faintest air of protesting just a little too much, none of these noble knights was prepared to admit it. But Marguerite La Touroulde, widow of the king’s counsellor René de Bouligny, in whose house Joan had stayed at Bourges – a witness who was equally convinced of the Maid’s holiness, if less perturbed by her physical presence – remembered Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy saying that they had lusted after her in the beginning, but were so abashed by her purity that they never dared speak a word of it to Joan herself. This sense of her bodily integrity was so strong that it went beyond her evident chastity. D’Aulon believed that she did not menstruate: he had been told, he said, that she never experienced ‘the secret malady of women’. And, according to the euphemistic observation of a royal servant named Simon Charles, her soldiers marvelled at the length of time she could stay on her horse without answering the call of nature.

Of course, the Maid’s physical virtue was the outward expression of her moral and spiritual merit. Every witness agreed that she was good and devout, simple and humble. She was all innocence, said the courtly sophisticate Marguerite La Touroulde, and knew nothing about anything except for waging war. On the field of battle, she conducted herself with remarkable confidence, as if she had been a captain for twenty or thirty years, the duke of Alençon declared. But there too she required godly behaviour. She could not abide oaths and blasphemy: La Hire and Alençon in particular, who were in the habit of swearing a great deal, had to curb their tongues in her presence. Nor would she tolerate the presence of whores among her men; if she came across a woman in the camp, she would chase her away angrily with the flat of her sword, unless a soldier came forward to marry her. She ate sparingly, and refused food that had been stolen rather than bought; she forbade pillage and plunder, and gave churches her special protection. She required her troops to confess their sins, and wept for the men who died without absolution, whether they were French or the enemy English. There could be no doubt that, as Simon Charles was moved to conclude, ‘she did God’s work’.

But what of her mission: how could the witnesses be sure that she had been sent by God to save the king and the kingdom? The answer, all agreed, was her victories, which she had known would be won, and which could only be explained by divine intervention. There was no need, now, to speak of Paris, La Charité or Compiègne. It was Patay, Jargeau, Meung and, above all, Orléans that demonstrated the truth of the Maid’s claims. The Bastard remembered that, when Joan first arrived with supplies for the besieged town, the wind was blowing in the wrong direction for the boats to carry the provisions across the river. She told him that she brought help from the king of heaven, at the request of the royal saints Louis and Charlemagne, and in an instant the wind changed and the sails filled. The recollection of Joan’s chaplain, Jean Pasquerel, was a little different: the river, he said, had been too low for the boats to float, but suddenly, at the Maid’s approach, the waters rose and the flotilla began to move. For the duke of Alençon, meanwhile, who had not been at Orléans, the miraculous memories were more personal. The duke’s father had died at Azincourt, and he had been captured in bloody battle at Verneuil when he was just seventeen; it seemed that, by the time he fought at Joan’s side at Jargeau, fear had become his enemy as much as the English. But she was there to urge him on. ‘Noble duke, are you afraid? Don’t you know that I promised your wife to bring you back safe and sound?’ And she had pointed out a cannon on the town walls, and told him to move before it killed him; a few moments later, he said, he watched another man die on the spot where he had stood.

Alençon was now fifty, in constant pain from chronic disease in his kidneys, and bitterly resentful that he had never been restored to the wealth and power that should have been his birthright. But it was clear that, half a lifetime ago, he had been taken by surprise by the Maid, their brief partnership a gift from God in a golden moment when anything had seemed possible. And in that moment, others had seen her as the fulfilment of a heavenly promise made long before. Jean Barbin, a lawyer then living in Poitiers, remembered Jean Érault, one of the Armagnac theologians who had examined Joan there, speaking of a prophecy that referred to the Maid. Marie Robine, the peasant woman who had received divinely inspired visions at Avignon in the last years of the fourteenth century, had had many revelations concerning the calamities that would afflict the kingdom of France, Érault said. She had been terrified by a vision of great quantities of armour, fearing that she would be required to put it on and fight, but she had been told that it was not for her. Instead, a Maid would come after her, who would bear these arms and deliver France from its enemies. That Maid, Érault had been certain, was Joan.

If the coming of the Maid had been foretold in visions, then what of her own? The Bastard remembered how often she prayed; every day, he said, she would go to church at dusk and ask for the bells to be rung for half an hour. And he had been with the king at Loches when the royal confessor enquired if she wished to explain how her heavenly counsel spoke to her. She had blushed, and said that, when she was unhappy because people did not believe her messages from God, she took herself away to pray; then she heard a voice saying, ‘Daughter of God, go, go, go, I will help you, go!’ And then she was filled with a wonderful joy, and longed to remain in that state forever. Her squire Jean d’Aulon recalled that, when he had asked about her revelations, she told him she had three counsellors – one who was with her always, another who came and went, and a third whom the other two consulted. But when he begged to be allowed to see them, she said he was not worthy or virtuous enough. He did not ask again.

Questions she had been required to answer, however, were those of the theologians at Poitiers, one of whom, a friar named Seguin Seguin, now offered his testimony to the court. The Maid told them, he said, that she had been watching the animals in the fields when a voice came to her, saying that God had great pity for the people of France and that she must go to the king. Then, she added, she had begun to cry, and the voice had told her that she must not doubt her mission. But if God wanted to save the people of France, one of the learned doctors objected, surely He had no need of soldiers. ‘In the name of God’, Joan replied, ‘the soldiers will fight and God will give victory.’ It was a good answer, they thought. Then the friar himself asked in what language the voice spoke. A better language than yours, she fired back. (Seguin’s own tongue, he explained, was the dialect of the Limousin.) Did she believe in God? Yes, she said, and better than you. Why should they believe her, Seguin asked, without a sign to support her claims? ‘In the name of God,’ came the impatient response, ‘I have not come to Poitiers to give signs; but take me to Orléans, and I will show you signs of the purpose for which I am sent.’

Impatience and quickfire confidence were qualities that had helped to press her case with the theologians at Poitiers, for whom the idea that God might wish to help the Armagnacs required no further justification. But they had been no use when she faced theologians at Rouen for whom that most fundamental proposition was self-evidently false. Twenty-five years on, however, their roles were reversed: in the most uncomfortable and challenging sessions of the inquiry, those scholars – or the survivors among their number – had to decide how far they would go in attempting to defend what was now, in the France of Charles le très-victorieux, indefensible.

Some elements of the Maid’s story were established beyond debate. The piteousness and piety of her death were described in heart-rending detail by those who were there, weeping, they said, in the old market square as she burned – and also, as a matter of common fame, by those who were not. She had been a simple girl, that much was clear, and the judges had tried to confuse, harass and exhaust her, but still she had answered their questions with wisdom beyond her years. And it was the English, out of hatred andfear and with the enthusiastic support of Bishop Cauchon, who had controlled the trial, paid for it, and pressed it to its tragic conclusion.

But other parts of the tale proved harder to tell. Some witnesses found themselves simply unable to remember what they themselves had done during the proceedings. Remarkably, the statement of the laconic Nicolas Caval was even shorter than before, and the bishop of Noyon, an influential diplomat named Jean de Mailly, could recall almost nothing, apart from Joan declaring that, if she had done anything wrong, it was her own fault and not the king’s. Thomas de Courcelles – an eloquent scholar who had been present throughout the trial before translating the notaries’ French minutes into the official Latin transcript – wove his testimony from weasel words as he attempted to explain his involvement. He had not argued that Joan was a heretic, he said, except in the case that she might obstinately refuse to accept her duty to submit to the Church. When it came to the judges’ final deliberations, he believed he had said that Joan was as she had been before – that is, if she had been a heretic before, she was so still, but he himself had never positively declared that she was a heretic.

No wonder, given the weight of scrutiny the trial record was now being required to bear, that the notary Guillaume Manchon seemed ill at ease in his own contorted statement. He had served in the trial only under compulsion, he said, because he did not dare resist an order from the royal council, and he complained bitterly of the pressure under which he had been placed by Bishop Cauchon and the English. Yet at the same time he insisted on his own integrity and that of the transcript he had produced. He was particularly exercised by the role of the spy in Joan’s cell, Nicolas Loiseleur, who had gained her trust, he said, by pretending to be her fellow countryman from the duchy of Lorraine, and to share her Armagnac loyalties. This was a yarn that, over the years, had evidently stretched in the spinning: another witness testified – though he could not remember who had told him – that Loiseleur had disguised himself as St Catherine in order to bend Joan to his will.

But even in Manchon’s own account of this treacherous deception, Loiseleur had tried to save Joan’s life by urging her to submit to her judges at Saint-Ouen. Here was the heart of the difficulty for witnesses who now claimed, queasily, that they had only been following orders. What had been right in 1431 in English Rouen – to secure the girl’s salvation by persuading her to abjure her heresy and embrace the loving counsel of the Church – was wrong twenty-five years later, in a kingdom from which God had driven the English with their tails between their legs. It all came down to the gift of vision: not revelations like Joan’s – since, as Inquisitor Bréhal and his colleagues now sagely noted, ‘it is very difficult to reach a settled judgement in such matters’ – but the ability to see which facts conformed with God’s plan for the world.

That, of course, was where Bishop Cauchon and his fellow judges had allowed their prejudice to lead them so deeply into error. And so, sitting in state on 7 July 1456 in the great hall of the episcopal palace in Rouen, the judges appointed to review Cauchon’s work declared that the twelve articles through which the Maid had been condemned had been drawn up ‘corruptly, deceitfully, slanderously, fraudulently and maliciously’. The truth, they said, had been passed over in silence, and fabrication put in its place. Information that aggravated the charges against her had been introduced without reason, and circumstances ignored that would have served to justify what she had said and done. As a result, the trial record and the sentence against her were utterly null, invalid and void. Joan had been innocent, and she was justified; and the judges decreed that a cross should be built in the old market square where she had died so cruelly, to preserve her memory forever.

It was done. Charles le bien-servi, the well-served as well as the most victorious, received the news in the heartlands of his kingdom, south of the Loire, where he was passing the summer months. The Maid had not been a heretic, an apostate or an idolater. Now, she could rest in peace, and her unsullied name would be remembered whenever the glorious story of his victories was told. The most Christian king, meanwhile, faced challenges ahead. He had suffered some recent ill-health, and his son, the ungrateful dauphin, continued to flout his authority. Regrettably, it had also become necessary in the previous weeks to dispatch his loyal servant, the Bastard of Orléans, to arrest the malcontent duke of Alençon on a charge of treasonable conspiracy with the English enemy. Still, he could survey with pleasure the God-given realm which he ruled like his royal father before him. And he could gaze with satisfaction across the narrow sea to England, where his nephew, the fragile king Henry VI, looked on distractedly while the princes of the blood, heirs to the great houses of York and Lancaster, tore the kingdom to pieces between them.