SEVENTEEN
The evidence that had been collected so painstakingly, first by the king’s officials in 1450, then by Church officials in 1452, 1455 and 1456, was not collected for its own sake. The reason for gathering the information was to answer certain questions. At first the lawyers had thought that they could use the twelve articles of the 1431 trial, but soon they found out that they wished to discuss many other questions, so they redrafted and expanded the number of articles to twenty-seven.
These new articles were not just the old ones redressed; instead, they were a new set designed to respond to the evidence that could be found to nullify the verdict of the first trial. The first five refer to English hatred of Joan, based on her championing of Charles VII’s cause and her victories over them (1, 2), a motive for taking her to Rouen and imprisoning her in the castle (3), for terrifying the judges, the advisers and the Promoter (4) and the notaries (5), so that the notaries did not dare record anything to favour her (6), so that she had no adequate advice or aid (7), was kept in chains in a secular prison (8). Joan was only nineteen or so, too young to defend herself (9). She was secretly visited so as to encourage her not to submit to the Church (10), she was interrogated in such a way that it was hard not to be trapped (11) and worn down (12), while she persistently said she submitted to the Church and the Holy Father (13), repeated that in court (14), but her words were not faithfully recorded (15) and if some thought that she would not submit to the Church (16), that was because she did not understand what was meant by the term ‘Church Militant’ or else because she thought that the Church was under English control (17). Besides, translations of the trial records from French into Latin were not always accurate (18). For all these reasons the trial sentence was unsafe (19), the trial documents untrustworthy (20) and its legal procedures incorrect (21). Joan could not defend herself properly (22) and, although a loyal communicating Catholic, she was condemned as a heretic to appease the English (23), she was taken to be burnt without authorisation from the secular authorities (24), she died a saintly death (25), she had been harried by the English to discredit the Most Christian King (26). All these facts are well known both in Rouen and throughout France (27).1
It was hard to deny the truth of the case so outlined. The articles said nothing about matters that the first trial had raised: was it permissible for a woman to act a man’s role; how far should a Catholic trust in private revelations; would God have sent a virgin soldier to fulfil a political plan; did God hate the English and the Burgundians? Those interrogated in the 1450s could not say much about Joan’s intimate experiences, they were relaxed about her wearing of men’s clothes and her months of fighting and by 1450 it must have seemed true, as it had not seemed twenty years before, that God intended Charles VII to be King of France and Henry VI to return to England.
On 18 June, Jean d’Arc and the Promoter, Chapitault, acting for the plaintiffs, appeared at the palace of the Bishop of Paris, and asked for a day to be fixed for the end of the case. The date was set for 1 July 1456, and notices were posted on the doors of Rouen Cathedral. On the following day it was announced that the final sentence should be delivered on Wednesday 7 July, and at eight o’clock that morning the rehabilitation was read by the archbishop. A procession and sermon was organised in place St-Ouen, and on 8 July a second sermon was preached in place du Vieux-Marché, where a cross was raised to perpetuate the memory of Joan’s death. This cross was later replaced by a fountain, with a statue of Joan under an arcade surmounted by a cross. In 1756, in the tercentenary year of the rehabilitation, a new fountain was erected that remains there today.
What is striking about the processes of rehabilitation – or, technically, the nullification – from their beginnings in 1450 to their conclusion in 1456 is that they showed none of the signs of haste that had been characteristic of the process of condemnation. Not all the previous difficulties were solved: by the 1450s, the key witnesses of the 1431 trial had died. Cauchon had a heart attack while being bled, Nicolas Midi died a leper, Estivet died in a sewer; others, like de Courcelles, were anxious to excuse themselves or to blame those who could not answer back and no one was going to say that the Anglo-Burgundian case had raised objections to Joan’s cause and conduct that were not always easy to contradict. And yet, from the start of the royal inquiry to the end of the papal inquiries, the witnesses speak with a freedom and liveliness that burst through the constraints of legal evidence. Attending to them, a student will find it hard to maintain that Joan was justly condemned. Accounts of her life that end with her death have missed out many of the most dramatic scenes in the drama of her story: the tales that in 1431 could not be told, the recollections of ageing men (and some ageing women) who had known her well. Some depositions may exaggerate, and, as only in some cases can their reliability be checked, the reader may not be sure which details to accept; but in the round and taken together they portray a Maid very unlike the Maid whom her judges had seen in 1431.
By 7 July 1456, when the court issued its decision, there could be no doubt what the decision would be. In the name of the Holy Trinity, acting on the authority of St Peter and his apostolic successors over the Church, the Archbishop of Reims, the Bishops of Paris and Coutances and the Dominican Jean Bréhal, professor of theology and one of the two inquisitors of France – all four judges being specially delegated representatives of the reigning pope – solemnly pronounced their sentence on the case brought by widow Isabelle Romée, mother, Pierre and Jean d’Arc, natural and legal brothers, of the deceased Joan of Arc, of good memory, commonly called the Maid, in the case brought against Cauchon the Bishop of Beauvais, Jean Lemaître, then vice-inquisitor of the diocese of Beauvais, and Jean d’Estivet, the Promoter. In the pompous terms beloved by lawyers anywhere and by churchmen everywhere, archbishop, bishops and Inquisitor declared the sentence on Joan was unsafe. They called the twelve articles ‘iniquitous, false, prepared without reference to Joan’s confessions in a lying manner’, they thought with St Paul that private revelations should be referred to God alone and that the accusations against her were false in fact as well as in law, and so the case against her should be annulled. After a general procession and a public sermon, their decision was published in the square of St-Ouen, and again on the following day in place du Vieux-Marché, where Joan had died.
It has been urged that this decision, like the decision it reversed, was a political decision; and clearly Charles VII was exonerated for having believed in Joan’s mission. His critics have excoriated him for not having tried to secure her release in 1431, but it is hard to see what he could have done then. He could do something only after Rouen had fallen to him and his servants could study the documents of the original trial; he could not have saved her life, but he could save her reputation. By 1450 it paid him to do so, but it became obvious that even if her first trial had been a political trial, in form it had been an ecclesiastical trial. Although he had worked hard to restrict papal control of the French Church, only a pope could override the original tribunal. In the end it needed a change of papacy to bring the final stage to a close. Pope Calixtus III, elected in 1455, tactfully appointed the Archbishop of Reims, the superior of the Bishop of Beauvais, a neighbouring Norman bishop, an inquisitor-theologian and finally the Bishop of Paris, since Parisian clerics had been all too willing to side with the Anglo-Burgundians against both Rome and the Valois King of France. The idea was to make the new judges credible representatives of the French Church. The judges’ verdict pleased the French King, but was not therefore unjust. It pleased Joan’s family, but did not decide if she was a saint.
In c. 1461, the most notorious poet of the age, François Villon, born in the year the Maid died, added Joan’s name to the list of those whose passing he lamented: Thais, mistress to Alexander the Great, Héloïse, lover of the philosopher Peter Abélard, Queen Blanche of France and Dante’s Beatrice, and:
Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine,
Qu’Englois brulerent à Rouan. . . .
Mais où sont les neiges d’autan?2
(‘And Joan, the good Lorrainer,
whom the English burnt at Rouen . . . But where are last year’s snows?’)
She was gone, and although Villon could not have known it, long after her death she would be more famous than she had ever been in a life so brutally curtailed.