EIGHT
On 30 May 1431, in the market square of Rouen, Joan was burnt to death. She died quickly. There are many affecting descriptions of her last moments, but all date from the 1450s; not a single one was written down in 1431. Her judges had not worried about the manner of her death. What concerned them was an urge to justify themselves to the world beyond Rouen. On Thursday 7 June 1431, they announced that they had received sworn information on certain words, before many trustworthy persons, spoken by the late Joan while still in prison and before she was brought to judgement.
First, the ‘venerable and circumspect’ Master Nicolas de Venderès, licentiate in canon law, Archdeacon of Eu and canon of the church of Rouen, aged fifty-two or thereabouts:
declared on oath that on Wednesday the last day of May, on the Eve of Corpus Christi last, the said Joan, being still in the prison where she was detained in the castle of Rouen, said that since the voices who came to her had promised her she should be freed from prison, and she saw the contrary, she realised and knew that she had been and was deceived by them.
Brother Martin Ladvenu, Dominican priest, aged about thirty-three,
said and declared on oath that this Joan on the morning of the day on which sentence was passed against her . . . admitted before she was brought to judgement, in front of Masters Pierre Maurice, Nicolas Loiselleur, and the Dominican brother Toutmouillé, that she knew and recognised she had been deceived by the voices and apparitions which came to her; for these voices promised her, Joan, that she should be saved and set free from prison, and she clearly realised the opposite had happened.
Asked who induced her to say this, he said that he himself, Master Pierre Maurice and Master Nicolas Loiselleur urged her for the salvation of her soul, and they asked her if it were true that she had received these voices and apparitions. She answered that it was but she did not precisely describe . . . in what form they came to her, except as far as he could recall, that they came in large numbers and in the smallest size. Besides, he heard Joan ‘say and confess that because the clergy held and believed that any spirits which might come to her came and proceeded from evil spirits, she also held and believed in this matter as the clergy did, and would no longer put trust these spirits’. And in his opinion when she said this Joan was in her right mind.
Brother Martin said that on the same day he heard Joan say and admit that though in her confessions and answers she had boasted that an angel from God had brought the crown to the man she called her king, and that she had gone with the angel when he brought the crown, and many other things that were reported at greater length in the trial, all the same, with no use of force and of her own free will she saw and admitted that in spite of all she had said and boasted on this subject, there was no angel who brought the crown; that she, Joan, was the angel who had told and promised her king that she would have him crowned at Reims if she were set to work; that there has been no other crown sent from God, whatever she had said and affirmed in the course of her trial on the subject of the crown and of the sign given to the man she called her king.
The ‘venerable and discreet’ Master Pierre Maurice, professor of sacred theology, canon of Rouen, aged about thirty-eight years, had asked her if they really had appeared to her: she replied, in French: ‘Soint bons, soint mauvais esperits, ilz me sont apparus’ (‘whether good or evil spirits, they appeared to me’) and she usually heard them at the hour of Compline, in the morning when the bells were rung. Brother Jean Toutmouillé, a Dominican priest, about thirty-four years old, told how on the Eve of Corpus Christi he and Brother Martin Ladvenu had visited Joan to exhort her to save her soul, and heard her tell Pierre Maurice that what she had said about the crown was pure fiction, and that she herself was the angel. This ‘the said Master Pierre’ took down in Latin.
Her voices had deceived her, she told the good bishop, for they had told her she would be freed. She would trust herself to the judgement of the Church or ‘to you who are of the Church’. Jacques Le Camus, a canon of Reims, about fifty-three years old, swore to much the same story, stating: ‘I believe in God alone, and will no longer put faith in these voices, because they have deceived me.’ Master Thomas de Courcelles, master of arts and bachelor of theology, aged about thirty years, also heard her say she had been deceived by her voices. So too did Master Nicolas Loiselleur, master of arts, canon of the churches of Rouen and Chartres, about forty years old. Asked if she had really sent a crown to the man she called her king, she replied that there was nothing beyond the promise of coronation which she herself made to him, promising him that he would be crowned. Loiselleur thought that Joan was of sound mind, for she showed great signs of contrition and penitence for the crimes she had committed. He heard her, in prison before many witnesses and in public afterwards, ask with great contrition of heart pardon of the English and Burgundians for ‘having caused them to be slain, put to flight and sorely afflicted’.1
The English and Burgundians had reason to be content. No divine agent had rescued Joan. Her painful death confirmed her military failure to transform the unrelenting, harsh, meaningless nature of the war. She would soon be a distant memory.
In the harsh winter of 1434/5, while the Thames was frozen over and wine ships from Bordeaux had to dock at Sandwich, authorities in Arras kept records of the special snowmen set up in the town streets and squares. They included the figure of Danger, the Grand Veneur or huntsman with his dogs, the Seven Sleepers, the Danse Macabre and Joan of Arc and her men. Once spring came, the figure of Joan melted away. In Arras, however, only a few months later, her cause, the cause of Charles VII, started on a long, arduous route towards vindication and final triumph.