SEVEN
On Monday 26 March, the day after Palm Sunday, Joan’s ‘ordinary’ trial opened. The court decided to draw up articles. If Joan refused to answer them, she would be said to have admitted them. Accordingly, on the following day the articles drawn up by the Prosecutor (or Promoter) were read out and Joan was questioned in French. Her battle for the right to silence had won a slight victory, for the Abbot of Fécamp asserted she should swear to tell the truth ‘in all things concerning the trial’ and would have problems only if she thought some matters the court considered were matters on which she would not give a full reply. Further, the Prior of Longueville thought she should not be compelled to answer yes or no.
Joan was willing to take an oath to tell the truth about anything relevant to the trial but refused an offer of advice, since she had no intention of not taking God’s advice. Then, that day and the next, the charges were read out to her in French. She was suspected of being
a witch, enchantress, false prophet, a caller-up of evil spirits, superstitious . . . given to magic arts, thinking evil in our Catholic faith, schismatic . . . sacrilegious, idolatrous, apostate of the faith, accursed and working evil, blasphemous . . . scandalous, seditious, perturbing and obstructing the peace, inciting to war, cruelly thirsting for human blood, encouraging it to be shed, having utterly and shamelessly abandoned the modesty befitting her sex, and indecently put on the ill-fitting dress and state of men-at-arms; and for that and other things abominable to God and man, contrary to laws both divine and natural, and to ecclesiastical discipline, misleading princes and people; having . . . permitted and allowed herself to be adored and venerated, giving her hands to be kissed; heretical or at the least vehemently suspected of heresy.1
There followed a list of seventy articles of accusation, against which Joan’s replies in the preparatory trial were carefully noted. The process of reading and recording took the court till the end of Holy Week. On Easter Eve she gave answers to some questions she had asked for time to think about. By Easter Monday the charges had been reduced to twelve key points, which the judges read over and reflected on during the next two days. By Easter Thursday, 5 April 1431, the final version was ready for detailed analysis by all the local experts.
Joan was to be investigated under twelve headings: her claim to ‘see’ Sts Michael, Catherine and Margaret; the sign ‘the prince’ had received; her conviction that she was visited by St Michael and the saints; her claim to knowledge through them of future events, such as an impending French success; her use of male clothes; her letters in the name of Jhesus Maria; her approach to ‘a certain squire’, in other words Robert de Baudricourt; her leap from the tower against the instruction of her saints; their promise to lead her to Paradise; her conviction that the saints speak to her in French, not in English, as they are not on the English side; her conviction that the voices come from God; and, finally, her conviction that what she had done had been done in God’s name.
Sixteen doctors and six licentiates or bachelors in theology stated that they believed her revelations did not come from God, as there were lies, improbabilities and misleading fictions in what she maintained. To this they each added their individual comments. A few, such as Guesdon, made excuses and left, but most, with no more than a nod to papal or conciliar authority, agreed to condemn Joan unconditionally. On 18 April Joan was exhorted ‘charitably’; on 2 May publicly admonished. ‘We first tried to lead her back [to the truth] by means of many notable doctors of theology whom we sent to her on many different days . . . but the cunning of the devil prevailed and they have not yet been of any effect.’ To this Joan replied: ‘I trust in my judge. He is the King of Heaven and of earth.’
The judges explained to her that they represented the Church Militant here on earth, ‘incapable of error or false judgement’, yet she persisted in her own obstinate trust in her private line to God. What struck them as abominable was her assurance that she had private relations with angels and saints, that she did not have to wear conventional feminine clothes, that she had been given a special role in French politics by God – in short, it was her belief in a unique destiny that appalled them. ‘I have a good master, Our Lord, to whom I refer everything, and to none other.’ She was ambiguous about submitting to the judgment of a council, but when asked if she would submit to them, she said, ‘Take me to him, and I will reply to him.’ In conclusion, she was keenly urged anew to submit to the Church under pain of being abandoned by it; she replied with seeming arrogance: ‘You will not do as you say against me without evil overtaking you, in body and soul.’
On Wednesday 9 May she was brought into the great tower of the castle of Rouen before her judges. Threatened with torture, she said, ‘if you were to tear me limb from limb and separate my soul from my body, I would not tell you anything more: and if I did say anything, I should afterwards declare that you had compelled me to say it by force.’ Then she said that on last Holy Cross Day she had been comforted by St Gabriel. She said she asked her voices whether she should submit to the Church, since the clergy were pressing her hard to submit, her voices told her that if she desired Our Lord to aid her she must wait on Him in all her doings . . . She asked her voices if she would be burnt and was told to wait on God, who would help her. Seeing the hardness of her heart and her manner of answering, the judges, ‘fearing that the torments of torture would not do her much good’, decided to postpone their application till they received more complete advice on the question. Loiselleur said he thought it good for the health of her soul to put her to the torture, but he deferred to other people’s opinions.
On Saturday 19 May the University of Paris addressed its official response to the ‘King of France and England’, who ‘with God’s grace began on a fine course of action for our holy faith, that is the legal proceedings against this woman known as the Maid, against her scandals, errors and crimes, which are evident throughout the kingdom.’ Beaupère, de Touraine and Midi had enlightened the university on the affair and in its turn the university asked their gracious Lord to end the affair as soon as possible. Master Jean Lefèvre and Brothers Martin Ladvenu and Ysambard de La Pierre hoped Joan would be charitably admonished and on 23 May her faults were publicly expounded to her in French by Pierre Maurice. The trial was over.
Joan had been unwilling to listen. All she said in her defence was ‘As for my words and deeds, which I declared in the trial, I refer to them and will maintain them.’ If she were condemned, she added, and ‘she saw the fire and the faggots lit and the executioner ready to kindle the fire, and she herself were in it, she would say nothing else and would maintain till death what she said in the trial.’ But on 24 May, after the public sermon, the proceedings took an unexpected turn. Quite suddenly, in her own style she recanted: ‘Let all I have said and done be sent to Rome to our Holy Father the Pope to whom after God I refer myself. As for my words and deeds, they were done at God’s command.’ If there were any fault it was hers and no other person’s. She referred herself ‘to God and our Holy Father the Pope’. This, she was told, was to no avail, as they could not seek the pope ‘at such a distance’, and anyway a bishop in his own diocese was a competent judge. Then she recanted in French and the document was then translated into Latin; it was said that she had renounced her apparitions, had broken God’s law by dressing like a man and having her hair cropped like a man’s, by bearing arms, by wishing to shed blood, by calling up evil spirits.
And I vow, swear and promise to you, to my lord St Peter, Prince of the Apostles, to Our Holy Father the Pope of Rome, His vicar and his successors, to you, my lords, to the lord Bishop of Beauvais and the religious Brother Jean Lemaître, vicar of the lord Inquisitor of the faith, my judges, that I will never let myself be persuaded or for any other reason return to the said errors, from which it has pleased God to free me; but I will always live in the unity of Our Holy Mother Church and the obedience of our Holy Father the Pope of Rome. This I say, affirm and swear by God almighty and the Holy Gospels. In sign of which I have signed this schedule with my mark.
Signed ‘Jehanne +’
For this statement she was sentenced to ‘perpetual imprisonment, with the bread of sorrow and water of affliction’, so as to weep for her failings and ‘never from this time on commit anything to make others weep’.
On the afternoon of 24 May Joan put on woman’s dress and she was visited in prison by Jean Le Maistre, Nicolas Midi, Nicolas Loiselleur, Thomas de Courcelles, and Brother Ysambard de La Pierre, who said how mercifully she had been treated. She said she would willingly wear women’s clothes and would let her hair be shaved off. Her resolutions did not last, for on 28 May she went back to male costume – ‘a short mantle, a hood, a doublet and other garments used by men’ – which she claimed she preferred to women’s clothes. ‘She was told she had promised and sworn not to wear man’s dress again, and replied that she never meant to take such an oath.’ The reason, she added, was that promises to her had not been kept; she was not allowed to go to Mass and she was still in chains and she was not put in a prison with a woman companion. ‘We her judges had heard from certain people that she had not yet cut herself off from her illusions and pretended revelations.’ Her voices had told her to answer boldly. The preacher, she said, had falsely accused her of many things she had not done. She said too that what she had declared and recanted on Thursday was done because she was afraid of the fire. She believed her voices to be those of St Catherine and St Margaret and that they came from God. If her judges wished it, she would wear women’s clothes. To nothing else would she agree.
Accordingly, on 29 May in the archiepiscopal chapel of Rouen, Cauchon sentenced her as a lapsed heretic. ‘We exhorted her to believe the advice of the clergy and the distinguished people who instructed and taught her things relevant to her salvation, and especially that of the two venerable Preaching brothers who were then standing near her’ – he was referring to Martin Ladvenu and Ysambard de La Pierre – and ‘we denounce you as a rotten member, which, so that you shall not infect the other members of Christ, must be cast out of the unity of the Church, cut off from her body, and given over to the secular power: we cast you off, separate and abandon you.’ He prayed that the secular power would be merciful to her if there were any signs of repentance in her. Her death sentence, however, he knew was now inevitable. The sentence was witnessed by the three notaries, Boisguillaume, Manchon and Taquel.