FIFTEEN
One witness stands out from all the rest, as only he gave evidence in Lyons and only his evidence is preserved in the original French. Curiously, this makes the voice of Jean d’Aulon, once Joan’s steward, now Seneschal of Beaucaire, sound as formal as any of the other witnesses whose words are recorded in Latin, as the notary has kept carefully to the form of a legal document. Like their words, d’Aulon’s are always recorded in the third person, from the time in Poitiers when he first heard of Joan until the last time he was with her as a fellow prisoner at Beaulieu. During the year he knew her he had privileged access to certain moments in her public life: he was there when she learnt the verdict from Poitiers, when she was declared a virgin by the Queen of Sicily, when she was given armour to fight at Orléans. With her he entered Orléans, and he remembered how she leaped from her bed to encourage the attack on the boulevard of St-Loup, how before the assault on the bridge she was wounded by an arrow and he had her wound dressed, how she fought bravely in the upper Loire valley. He remembered her being examined by ‘certain masters in theology’ who had found her ‘a good Christian and true Catholic’, and by ladies, who found her a true virgin.1 Having told the story of her exploits, he then added, ‘he had never seen or known in her anything that should not be found in a good Christian’. She tried to go to Mass every day, she confessed and went to communion, she never swore or blasphemed. She loved a good honest man (‘bon prudhomme’) whom she knew to have led a chaste life. When the Maid had to do anything concerning war, she told d’Aulon that her ‘Counsel’ had advised her what she ought to do and she told him she was visited by three ‘counsellors’, but when asked for details of her ‘Counsel’, she told him sharply that he was not worthy to be told. He was sure ‘she was full of all the virtue which could be or should be in a good Christian’, and he said this ‘without love, favour, hate, or any suborning, but only for the truth, and as he has seen it and known it in the Maid’. He was one of those who, as a young man living beside her, said that although he had seen her naked body, he had never felt any sexual desire for her. He was also unique in that he added a piece of information about her sexuality; he had been told by her women that she had never known the ‘malady of women’. D’Aulon’s remark has inspired much speculation in the last hundred years. Perhaps Joan never menstruated, or perhaps nobody knew if she did or not. No other witness suggests that Joan had not reached puberty. What we do know is that one man who knew her well thought she had not done so, but then no witness had ever seen Joan relieve herself when on the march.
Many witnesses had memories that went back longer than d’Aulon’s, witnesses who had known Joan as a child; and in their cases there is nothing exciting to relate. In the region of Domremy, Greux and Epinal, labourers, wives, widows and sons remembered the girl who became a woman so fast. Jean Morel from Greux, her godfather, knew all about the fairies’ tree that had so fascinated Joan’s interrogators. He had heard that the fairies used to dance underneath it but came no longer, since the Gospel of St John had been read there; young girls used to dance there on Laetare Sunday in the middle of Lent and had feasts there on holy days; Joan had been there with the others, but she never went alone. He was glad to speak of her piety and the love she inspired in the village; and he was delighted to mention that when she was famous he had met her at Châlons, when the king was going to Reims to be anointed, and she had given him a red dress she had been wearing. Others had seen her pray, work in the fields, go to confession, knew she did not swear, recalled how she said ‘Adieu’ to her father when she set out for Vaucouleurs, and that later she had gone to ‘France’. Hauviette, a wife from Syonne, near Neufchâteau, had been with Joan to the well of the thorn on Laetare Sunday, and wept when her friend went away – Hauviette’s name was used by the poet Charles Péguy when he imagined Joan’s time in Domremy. Joan was kind, and she looked after the sick.
The picture these reports build up is of a simple, pious, serious girl, of no special status in her village, and one whose strong convictions alone marked her out from her friends. Before her original trial, investigators had been sent to Domremy, but they were searching only for evidence with which they could convict her; and they found none. Nicolas Bailly, Notary of Andelot, had come one day to the village with several other persons and, at the request of Jean de Torcenay, bailly of Chaumont for the ‘pretended King of France and England’ (Henry VI), he set about inquiring into Joan’s conduct and life, but could not ‘induce the inhabitants of Vaucouleurs to depose’. Now he admitted he had seen her often in her father’s house and said ‘she was a good girl, of pure life and good manners, a good Catholic who loved the Church and went often on pilgrimage to the church of Bermont, and confessed nearly every month’, as ‘I learned from a number of the inhabitants of Domremy, whom I had to question on the subject at the time of the inquiry that I made with the Provost of Andelot’.
At Vaucouleurs Joan moved for the first time into a grander world; and she astonished those she met with her assurance. Jean de Metz or de Novelompert, the first knight to follow her, heard her say that before the middle of Lent she must be with the king, for ‘no one in the world, neither kings, nor dukes, nor the King of Scotland’s daughter [Margaret, daughter of James I, who was betrothed to Louis, afterwards Louis XI] nor any others can recover the kingdom of France’; only she could provide the help that was needed. Who had told her that, he asked? ‘God,’ she replied. Jean was willing to take her to the king, but would she go dressed as she was? ‘I will willingly wear men’s clothes,’ she replied, so Jean then gave her the dress and equipment of one of his men. He was impressed by her lack of fear: ‘I had absolute faith in her, her words and her ardent faith in God inflamed me, I believe she was sent from God; she never swore, she loved to attend Mass, she confessed often, and frequently gave alms.’
Catherine Leroyer (who with her husband, a wheelwright in Vaucouleurs, had become an early convert to Joan’s cause), took Joan as a guest in her house at Vaucouleurs, where Durand Laxart had brought her to stay, and got to know her well. Joan, she said, was ‘good, simple, gentle, respectful, well behaved, and went freely to Church and to confession’. She believed that through Joan the prophecy, of which Joan reminded her, would be fulfilled, that France, which had been lost by a woman (presumably Charles VII’s mother), would be saved by a virgin from the borders of Lorraine. Bertrand de Poulengey testified that on the journey to Chinon ‘at night, Joan slept beside Jean de Metz and me, fully dressed and armed. I was young then; still I never felt for her any physical desire: I would never have dared to approach her, because of her great goodness.’
In Chinon Joan first came across the great of the land. The courtiers of the ‘King of Bourges’ may have lacked the glamour she would have expected, as they were dispirited by repeated failure. Of the people she met there none was so important to her as Charles himself, who could not testify on her behalf; and none was so true to her as one of the royal cousins, John II, Duke of Alençon, a descendant of Philip III (1270–85), so third cousin to Charles VI, and nephew by marriage to Charles VII’s sister. Although of the blood royal, he was yet more closely related to Charles by his recent marriage to Joan, daughter of Charles of Orléans, the king’s cousin, which firmly attached him to the loyal side of the royal family. He was young, handsome, brave, passionate. His father was killed at Agincourt and he himself had been captured at Verneuil in 1424 and ransomed for the huge sum of 80,000 saluts. To help raise his ransom money his wife pawned her jewels, while he had to give up the barony of Fougères to his uncle the Duke of Brittany and a property in Touraine to the Bishop of Angers; he was released from his oath to surrender his lands only after victory at Orléans. As Henry V had bequeathed Alençon itself to Bedford, now English Regent, Alençon’s true duke was a natural foe of Henry VI.
Once Alençon heard that a girl had arrived at Chinon declaring she was sent by God to defeat the English and raise the siege of Orléans, he hurried to greet her from St-Florent, where he was hunting quails. The two took to each other at once. She welcomed him as a man of the blood royal and named him ‘mon beau duc’. He was charmed to find she was a tomboy. After dinner the following day, while the king went for a walk, Alençon watched as Joan coursed, and when he saw how well she managed her lance, he gave her a horse. He was a witness to her first interrogation by senior clergy and knew she told them she heard voices and received advice as to what to do, but he was not sure if she told them what the voices told her. Once when they dined together she told him she had not told the clergy everything. He did not go to the more searching examination at Poitiers, but knew the clergy there told Charles that in his dire troubles he could make use of her. He was then sent to the king’s mother-in-law, Queen Yolande of Sicily, to ask for supplies to be prepared for the army of Orléans. Alençon did not set out with her, but he joined her later. He remembered how the captains and soldiers who took part in the siege said that what happened was a miracle.
He joined her after Orléans had been saved. He came to love her habit of taking risks. Outside Jargeau she urged him to attack. ‘On, gentle Duke, to the assault!’ (Avant, gentil duc, à l’assaut!) she called out; and, when he told her it was too soon to attack so quickly, ‘Have no fear,’ she said to him, ‘the time is right when it pleases God; we must work when He wills it. Act, and God will act!’ Later she added, ‘Ah! gentle Duke, are you afraid? Did you not know that I promised your wife to bring you back, as safe and sound as you were?’ His wife was anxious he should not be captured and ransomed again. Joan had promised to return him in one piece or in even better shape than he was. They spent several days together with his wife and mother at St-Laurent, near Saumur.
Despite being the commander, Alençon did not object to Joan’s advice. He was conscious that during the attack on Jargeau Joan had told him to move from his current position just before enemy shot killed the Sieur de Lude beside him. It was she who led the attack and Alençon who followed. Forced to the ground by a stone that hit her helmet, she immediately got up and encouraged the troops: ‘Our Lord has condemned the English.’ Alençon yielded to her: she begged him to cooperate with Richemont, the disgraced Constable, who was Alençon’s uncle; and so together they won the battle of Patay. When the fighting was over, the defeated Talbot came into the presence of Joan, the Constable and Alençon, who said how surprised he was at what had happened. It is the fortune of war, commented Talbot tersely. And so they rejoined the king and went with him to Reims for the coronation.
Joan had said many times that she wished to accomplish four things: to beat the English, to have the king crowned and consecrated at Reims; to deliver the Duke of Orléans from the hands of the English; and to raise the siege of Orléans. She did not live to see her four wishes achieved, but Alençon did. Twenty-five years after he last saw her, he still thought of her as a chaste young woman, who hated women camp followers – at St-Denis, sword in hand, she had once chased one away – and was angry with him if he swore. He had seen her clad in armour, he had seen her naked breasts. She was an excellent Catholic, so far as he could tell, who communicated often, and when not fighting was ‘a simple, young girl’, but when ‘bearing the lance, bringing an army together, making war, directing artillery’ she was as skilful ‘as a captain who had fought for twenty or thirty years’. In the use of artillery she was marvellous.
This testimony is impressive since Alençon himself was hardly straightforward. Like his cousin Charles VII he dabbled in astrology. He was anti-English, but not always loyal to his king. During the Hundred Years War he rebelled with his godson Louis, the future Louis XI, and in the course of the nullification trial the king had him arrested. In 1458 he was condemned for treason by his peers, but on the accession of Louis in 1461 he was released. Louis, however, did nothing to prevent his being ruined from the results of his waywardness; and on his death the duchy of Alençon reverted to the crown. In fifteenth-century French history, Alençon was an erratic figure: in his unquestioning devotion to Joan, however, he was constant and consistent.
Another John played an almost more important part in Joan’s story. The Bastard of Orléans, half-brother to Charles, Duke of Orléans, who was famously imprisoned in England for twenty-five years after Agincourt, had been brought up as a member of the Orléans family after the murder of his father, Duke Louis. Born in 1402, he grew up with the Dauphin Charles. This shared upbringing, together with the fact that his half-brother was out of the country for such a long period, gave him a prominence in national affairs rare even for the illegitimate son of a peer of royal blood. From his mid-teens he was a professional soldier determined to avenge the wrongs of his house, of which he was the virtual head. His marriage in 1422 to the daughter of Louvet, president of the Parlement, linked him to the legal and bureaucratic classes who ran the administration; but when Louvet fell from grace the Bastard fell too, and was sent into exile. The English attempt to overrun the duchy of Orléans brought him back into the war, and when Orléans itself was under threat, he was the obvious leader of the defence. It was this task that first brought him into close contact with Joan. She died long before he had turned into the statesman who as ‘one of the finest French speakers there is of the French language’ used his eloquence to draw up the Treaty of Arras in 1435 between France and Burgundy; who was made count of Dunois in 1439; who ransomed his half-brother the duke in 1440; who reconciled the king and the Dauphin Louis; whose capture of Dieppe in 1443 prepared the way for the reconquest of Normandy; who eventually became the Count of Longueville; and who marched towards Guyenne in 1451 near the end of the Hundred Years War. Apart from a short period of falling-out with Charles VII in the 1420s and a longer period of falling-out with Louis XI in the 1460s he was in royal favour for most of his fifty years in public life. To Joan, however, he was merely ‘the Bastard’, and it was as ‘the Bastard’ that he testified in 1455: ‘I think that Joan was sent by God, and that her deeds in war were divine rather than human in inspiration.
‘I was at Orleans, then besieged by the English, when the rumour spread that a young girl, commonly called the Maid, had just gone through Gien, on her way to the noble Dauphin’ so as to raise the siege of Orléans and take Charles to Reims for his anointing. ‘I was the man put in charge of the town of Orléans and was Lieutenant-General of the King in affairs of war.’ To find out more about Joan he sent the king Sieur de Villars, Seneschal of Beaucaire, and Jamet de Tilly, then Captain of Blois, later Bailly of Vermandois.
They came back and told him publicly that the king had at first refused to see her, while she continued to repeat her views on her mission to save Orléans and take Charles to Reims. She also asked for men, arms and horses. For three weeks the king had theologians examine her, then he gave her what she asked for, sent her to Blois with the Archbishop of Reims and the Grand Steward; and there they joined Gilles de Rais, de Boussac, La Hire and others. As the English blocked the route, supplies had to be loaded on boats, but the winds blew in the wrong direction. The first time Joan met him, she asked him if he were the Bastard of Orléans and enquired about his plans. Dismissing his ideas of avoiding the English, she told him that God had better plans: He had taken pity on the town and would not let the English hold both town and duke. At that moment the wind changed and so supplies could be taken into Orléans by boat; and ever after the Bastard believed in her. She went with him, clutching her banner, on which Our Lord held a lily in His hand. Joan said she had seen St Louis and St Charlemagne (patrons of France) praying God for the safety of the king and the town.
Other reasons led him to believe Joan was from God: her letter to the English that told them if they did not retreat she would attack and defeat them; her capture of the boulevard des Augustins, where she was wounded by an arrow; the capture of Les Tourelles the next day and the relief of the city. Where he was cautious, she was reckless; and yet events proved she had been right. Only when the siege was over did she receive the care her wound needed and did she have a few slices of bread to eat.
Once Orléans was safe, the Bastard and Joan went to see the king at Loches and begged him to let them attack other towns in the Loire valley. The Bastard, Alençon and other captains were given troops and the towns fell quickly – thanks, the Bastard believed, to the Maid’s intervention. At Loches he saw Joan on her knees begging the king to go to Reims –her ‘counsel’, she said, told him he must do so. When the king’s confessor, Christophe d’Harcourt, Bishop of Castres, queried her about her ‘counsel’, she blushed and replied that when people doubted how God advised her, she sought solitude to pray, grumbled to God and a voice told her ‘Daughter of God! Go on! Go on! Go on! I will be thy help: go on’ (Fille De, va, va, va, je serai, va). She said that when she heard this voice she was filled with joy.
After the capture of so many strongholds, the nobles of the blood royal and captains urged the king to go to Normandy instead of Reims. But Joan insisted on his going to Reims, so that he could be consecrated, giving as her reason that once he were consecrated and crowned, his enemies’ power would decline, and so they would be unable to harm him or his kingdom: ‘All accepted her opinion.’
Before the town of Troyes, the council debated what to do. Joan’s suggestion was followed, and the town was besieged. Once the city had surrendered to him, the king went to Reims, where everyone submitted and he was consecrated and crowned.
While in Reims, Joan used to go every day to church at Vespers or towards evening; she had the bells rung for half an hour, collected the friars who were with the army and had them sing an anthem in honour of Our Lady. She was also preoccupied with her future: what was she to do? When the king was at La Ferté, Joan rode between the Archbishop of Reims and the Bastard and said she would love to be buried there. ‘Where do you want to die?’ asked the archbishop. ‘Where it pleases God,’ she replied, ‘for I cannot know either the time or the place, any more than you do.’ If it pleased God, her Creator, she would retire then, give up arms, go back to serve her father and mother and look after their sheep with her sister and brothers, who would be happy to see her again.
The Bastard knew no one more sober, just as d’Aulon had known no one more chaste. ‘Neither I nor others when with her ever thought of her as a woman to be desired: she seemed holy.’ Fifteen days after the Earl of Suffolk had been made prisoner at the taking of Jargeau, someone sent him four lines, in which it was said that a Maid should come from the oak-wood and ride on the backs of the archers and against them (this was the so-called prophecy of Merlin). If some of Joan’s prophecies did not come true, she was sure that she had been sent to raise the siege of Orléans and lead the king to Reims.
By the time these words of prophesy had been spoken, the Bastard had seen his cousin the king enter Paris, his half-brother the duke return to the city of Orléans, and the English driven from the mainland of France, with the exception of Calais.
An even more intimate insight into Joan’s public life comes from the witness Louis de Coutes. Louis was the brother-in-law of Beauharnais, a bourgeois of Orléans, and a son of Jean de Coutes, captain of Châteaudun and chamberlain to the Duke of Orléans. Louis met Joan when he was fourteen or fifteen years old and page to Sieur de Gaucourt, captain of the castle, during her visit to Chinon with two gentlemen, who took her to the king. He saw her many times going and coming to the king. She was housed throughout her stay there in the tower of Coudray, and he passed the whole days with her, until night, when she always was with women. ‘He [Louis] remembered well while she was living at Coudray many days high-ranking people came to visit her there. He did not know what they did or said, because when he saw them coming he retired, nor does he know who they were.’ While she lived in that keep he often saw her on her knees praying, without knowing what she said, and sometimes she was weeping.
Joan was taken to Poitiers, then to Tours, where she lived with a woman called Lapau. There the Duke of Alençon gave her a horse, which he saw at the home of the woman Lapau, and the king gave her a whole suit of armour and a military household. Louis became her page there, along with a boy called Raymond, and from then onwards he stayed with her ‘as her page, at Blois, at Orléans, and until she came to Paris’. From Tours she went with the army to Blois, where she remained for a while with them – how long he did not remember. Then she went to Orléans via the Sologne and set out fully armed, along with her men-at-arms, whom she constantly told to trust in Our Lord and confess their sins. Once she reached Orléans ‘he saw her receive the sacrament of the Eucharist’.
When she reached Orléans on the side of the Sologne, Joan, many others and Louis were taken across the Loire, to the side of the city of Orléans; and from there they entered the town. During the journey from Blois to Orléans, Joan got badly bruised, as she had slept fully armed. In Orléans she lived at the house of the town treasurer, Jacques Bouchier, facing the Banner Gate, and there she received the Sacrament. The day after her arrival she went to seek the Bastard of Orléans, with whom she had an interview, and when she came back, she was annoyed because the captains had decided not to attack the English that day. All the same she went to a boulevard occupied by the French, opposite one under English control, and urged them in God’s name to leave or else she would drive them away. In response the Bastard of Granville said insultingly: ‘Do you want us to surrender to a woman?’ Although at first she retired to her lodgings (when Louis thought she would go to bed), she soon got up again saying, ‘Ha! sanglant garçon, vous ne me dyriez pas que le sanc de France feust repandu!’ (‘Ha, bloody boy, you didn’t tell me French blood was being spilt!’) He was sent to get her horse while Joan was dressed in her armour with the help of the ladies of the house; and so the French took the fort of St-Loup. She saw to it that clerics in their robes were spared, but Louis heard that all other English were taken away and killed by the local French. Once it was all over Joan came back to eat and Louis was amazed that as so often she ate only a piece of bread, and that just twice a day. Every night when women were with her she changed out of her armour, but if she could not find any women she slept fully clothed.
Joan went on and on fighting until ‘the fort of the bridge’ fell, and once Orléans was relieved, she went after the English at Beaugency and Meung. She was distressed at the brutality evident at Beaugency – she was very humane – and when a Frenchman struck a prisoner and left him for dead, she got off her horse, had him make his confession and comforted him as best she could. She went with the army to Jargeau, which was taken by assault, along with many English (among them the Earl of Suffolk and John de la Pole, his brother), and then to Tours to join the king and to Châlons and Reims. Louis stated: ‘There our king was crowned and anointed in my presence for I was, as I have already said, page to Joan, and never left her. I stayed with her till she came to Paris.
‘She was a good, upright woman, living a good Catholic life, and, when possible, never missing Mass,’ de Coutes continued. Swearing in God’s name distressed her. If Alençon swore or blasphemed before her, ‘she told him off’. Soldiers dared not use bad language in front of her, for fear of being rebuked. She allowed no women in her army. ‘One day, near Chateau-Thierry, seeing the mistress of one of her followers riding on horseback, she pursued her with her sword, without striking her’ and gently and charitably told her she must no longer be . . . with the soldiers’, or she would be in trouble. ‘He know nothing else, not having seen her since Paris.’
The last of the intimates who were with Joan during her few months of glory was her chaplain and confessor, Jean Pasquerel. Like that much more famous cleric Martin Luther, Jean Pasquerel was an eremitical friar of the order of St Augustine. He was at the convent of Tours in 1429 and at the convent of Bayeux in 1456. He first heard of Joan when at Anche, a place whose exact location is unknown. One day he was invited by a group of people to join them in visiting her; they told him they would not leave him until he had seen her. So he went with them to Chinon, then to Tours, where ‘he was then a reader in a convent’; and there they found Joan staying with Jean Dupuy, a burgher of the town. His companions spoke to her: ‘Joan, we bring you this good father; if you knew him you would love him very much.’ She said that ‘she had already heard of me and would like to confess to me tomorrow’. On the following day he heard her confession and sung the Mass before her. ‘From that day on, I always followed her and was constantly with her, until Compiègne, where she was captured.’
At Chinon, Father Jean heard that she had been visited on two occasions by women, the Lady de Gaucourt and the Lady de Trèves. Like many other witnesses he recalled how she went away to be examined at Poitiers, where Maître Jourdin Morin, Maître Pierre de Versailles, later Bishop of Meaux, and many others decided that ‘in view of the necessity weighing on the kingdom’, the king could use her help. They found nothing in her ‘against the Catholic Faith’. She returned to Chinon and thought she would be allowed to speak to the king but had to wait for the council to agree:
On the day when she was to speak to the king, just as she was going into the castle, a man on horseback said, ‘Is that the Maid?’ and insulted her and swore. ‘In God’s Name,’ she said to him, ‘do you, who are so near your death, take God’s name in vain!’ And an hour later he fell in the water and was drowned. The friar said he heard this from Joan and many others who said they had witnessed it.
Father Jean then tells the familiar story, according to which she told the king he was the true heir to the kingdom and other things that only he could know. That at any rate is what Joan told him, but there was no witness to corroborate her version of events. What sounds typical of her is Father Jean’s assertion that she was angry at being cross-questioned so much, since it stopped her from acting. She told him she had asked ‘the Messengers of her Lord, that is of God, who appeared to her’, what she should do; and they told her to take her Lord’s banner. And so she had her banner made, with the image of Our Saviour in judgement on the clouds of heaven and an angel holding in his hand a fleur-de-lis which Christ blessed. Father Jean was with her at Tours when the banner was painted. His account ties in with the treasury note that twenty-five livres tournois were paid to one ‘Hauves Poulnois, painter, living at Tours, for painting and getting materials for a great standard, and a small one for the Maid’.
When she went to help Orléans, Father Jean went with her and did not leave her till the day she was captured at Compiègne. As her chaplain, he confessed her and sang Mass for her. She was, he said, full of piety to God and Our Lady, confessed almost daily and communicated often. If near a friary, she told him to remind her of the day when the children of the poor received the Eucharist, so she might receive it with them; and this she did often. When she made her confession she was in tears.
When she left Tours to go to Orléans, she begged him to stay on as her Confessor; and this he promised to do. At Blois she asked him to have her banner made, which he did, and once in the morning and once in the evening he was to bring priests together ‘to sing anthems and hymns to the Blessed Mary’. Joan was with them and allowed only the soldiers who had confessed that day join her; she told her people to confess if they wished to come to the meeting, and the priests were always at hand to hear confessions. On the march to Orléans the priests were placed at the front of the army and sang the Veni Creator Spiritus and other antiphons.
Father Jean’s version of how the supply boats got into Orléans differs slightly from that of the Bastard of Orléans. He says just that the water rose. Then he and the other priests went back to Blois, but some days later he got into the city by way of the River Beauce. Neither the priests nor their convoy were attacked by the English. He tells a familiar story about the capture of the fort of St-Loup on the eve of Ascension Day and about Joan’s distress at the sufferings of the wounded soldiers. She was worried particularly that so many English had died without having confessed. Making her own confession on the spot, she told him to invite the whole army to do so too and to thank God for the victory – and if they would not, she would give them no more help. That day she predicted that the siege would be raised within five days, and so things turned out. She would not fight on Ascension Day, but went to confession and received the host.
On that day too she dictated yet another letter to the English, telling them to leave France. She did not send it in the normal way, by means of a herald, since her herald Guyenne had not been sent back, so she attached it to an arrow and told an archer to shoot it at the English. The gesture merely provoked yet more insults, which reduced her to tears, but she soon recovered because she had received good news, she said, from God – and on the following day the Fort des Augustins fell. Although wounded by an arrow, she refused to let any of her soldiers use charms to heal the wound. She was hurt by yet more coarse language from the English commander Glasdale, but when soon after he fell into the Loire and was drowned, she wept for his soul.
Nothing about Joan’s life remained so vivid in Father Jean’s memory as the days that led up to the relief of Orléans. He may have put words in her mouth, for as late as May 1430 he wrote for her to warn the Hussites of Bohemia that if they persisted in their heresy, she might well come to sort them out when she had finished with the English; such sentiments confirmed her orthodoxy. He was content to make general comments, and his testimony omitted many details of her later story.
He believed firmly that she was sent by God because of her good works and her many virtues. So much did she fear God, that not for anything in the world would she displease Him. He then repeats himself. When wounded in the shoulder by an arrow, which went through from one side to the other, and some spoke of charming her, promising in this way to cure her on the spot, she answered that it would be ‘a sin’, and said she would rather die than offend God ‘by such enchantments’.
His final remarks were bolder. He was amazed that clerics as distinguished as those who caused her death at Rouen should have dared to commit such a crime as to put to death so poor and simple a Christian, cruelly and without a cause, or at least not one grave enough for capital punishment; they might have kept her in prison or elsewhere, but she had annoyed them so much that they had become her mortal enemies; and so, it seems, they were responsible for an unjust sentence. He stated that her actions and deeds were all perfectly known to the king and the Duke of Alençon, who held certain secrets they could tell if they wanted to. As for himself he had nothing more to say, ‘unless it be that many times Joan expressed to me a desire that, if she died, the king would build a chapel, where men could pray for the souls of those killed in defence of the kingdom’.
Nobody else who came across Joan from the day she arrived in Chinon to the day she was captured at Compiègne knew her as well as d’Aulon, Alençon, the Bastard, Louis de Coutes and Father Jean, but others had encounters with her they still liked to recall twenty-five years after they had occurred. Many such comments repeat tales that other witnesses had given. For example, she was a ‘simple shepherd-maiden’, who often went to confession and took communion, who ate and drank moderately, who tried to be rid of all women camp followers unless soldiers would marry them and that she was ‘good not only to the French, but also to the enemy’. Those who had examined her at Poitiers had found ‘nothing but good in her’, and discovered nothing against the Catholic faith. Joan had a great horror of dice, was generous in giving money away and astonished soldiers for the way she handled a lance or a horse. Thibauld d’Armagnac said she was like ‘the most skilled captain in the world who all his life had been trained in the art of war’.
Some witnesses are valuable because their evidence fills in gaps in the standard accounts. Maître Reginald Thierry, dean of the church of Meung-sur-Yèvre and surgeon to the king, told how when St-Pierre-le-Moûtier was captured, Joan stopped the soldiers from ransacking the church so that nothing should be removed. Pierre Milet, clerk to the Electors of Paris, captures precisely the tone of her voice when he transcribed part of the letter to the English in her own French dialect: ‘Messire vous mande que vous en aliez en vostre pays, car c’est son plaisir, ou sinon je vous feray ung tel hahay’ (‘Our Lord wants you to go to your own country, as it’s his pleasure, or if not I’ll give you what for’). There is a more precise witness to her idiom: Seguin Seguin, Dominican Professor of Theology and Dean of the Faculty of Theology at Poitiers.
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.’