Laura Richards
Joan of Arc

So to the will of God she surrendered, who had never yielded to man, and laid down at His feet her glorious sword.

CHAPTER XVI
ROUEN

"Bishop of Beauvais! because the guilt-burthened man is in dreams haunted by the most frightful of his crimes … you also, entering your final dream, saw Domrémy… My lord, have you no counsel? 'Counsel I have none; in heaven above, or on earth beneath, counsellor there is none now that would take a brief from me; all are silent.'

"Is it, indeed, come to this? Alas! the time is short, the tumult is wondrous, the crowd stretches away into infinity, but yet I will search in it for somebody to take your brief; I know of somebody that will be your counsel. Who is this that cometh from Domrémy? Who is she that cometh in bloody coronation robes from Rheims? Who is she that cometh with blackened flesh from walking the furnaces of Rouen? This is she, the shepherd girl, counsellor that had none for herself, whom I choose, Bishop, for yours. She it is, I engage, that shall take my lord's brief. She it is, Bishop, that would plead for you; yes, Bishop, SHE – when heaven and earth are silent."

– De Quincey.

We need not dwell upon the joy of English and Burgundians, or of their French sympathizers: it was as rapturous as it was savage. John of Luxembourg, a typical soldier of fortune, had but one idea, that of turning his prisoner to good account. Who would pay most for her?

While the matter was pending, Joan was hurried from castle to castle, from prison to prison. Clairoix, the headquarters of Luxembourg, was not strong enough to hold her; she might escape, or there might be a rescue. She was sent to Beaulieu, and thence to Beaurevoir, where she stayed from June to September. Here she was in the kind hands of three ladies, all bearing her own name; Jeanne of Luxembourg, aunt of her captor; Jeanne of Bethune, Viscountess of Meaux, his wife, and her daughter Jeanne of Bar. These good ladies befriended the captive Maid: gave her the last womanly comfort and tendance she was to receive; begged her to put on woman's dress, and brought stuff to make it. Joan was grateful, but shook her head. She had no leave yet from God to do this: the time was not come. She would have done it, she said later, had her duty permitted, for these ladies rather than for any soul in France except her queen.

Harmond de Macy, a knight who saw the Maid at Beaurevoir and who offered her familiarities which she gravely repulsed, has left his impressions of her on record.

"She was of honest conversation in word and deed," he says: and adds at the end of his testimony, given after her death, "I believe she is in paradise."

Joan would give no parole. She steadfastly maintained her right to escape if she might. Here at Beaurevoir she made her one attempt to do so, moved thereto largely by anxiety for the people of Compiègne, now besieged. She was told that if the town were taken all the people over seven years of age would be put to death. This she could not bear. In vain her Voices dissuaded her: in vain St. Catherine almost daily forbade it. "I would rather die than live," said the Maid, "after such a massacre of good people."

Evading her jailers one day, she leapt from the tower, a height of sixty feet. Wonderful to relate, no bones were broken, but she was found insensible, and taken back to prison. For several days she could neither eat nor drink. Then, she told her judges later, St. Catherine comforted her, bidding her make confession and ask God's forgiveness for the leap. The saint told her that Compiègne would be relieved before Martinmas, as in fact came to pass.

"Then," she says, "I revived, and took food, and soon was well."

She denied having expected death from the leap: she had hoped to escape, partly to help Compiègne, partly because she was sold to the English.

"I would rather die," she said, "than fall into the hands of my English enemies."

She was to do both. English and French were of one mind. The former were headed (in this matter) by the Earl of Warwick, the latter by Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais. This man had been disappointed, through Joan's successes, in certain private ambitions. He pursued her from first to last with incredible fury and persistence; it was through his efforts that John of Luxembourg was enabled to sell her (despite the earnest prayers of the aged Jeanne de Luxembourg) to England for ten thousand livres; it was he who conducted her trial and brought her to her death.

From Beaurevoir she was taken to Arras; thence, after one night at the castle of Drugy, to Crotoy by the sea: and so, in November of 1430, she came to Rouen.

They took her to the old castle built by Philip Augustus in 1205; used in the days of the English occupation as a prison for "prisoners of war and treasonable felons." Of this structure, with its six towers, demi-tower and donjon, only one vestige remains, the "Tour Jeanne d'Arc," a bulk of solid masonry one hundred feet high, forty feet in diameter, with walls twelve feet thick. You may visit it to-day; may stand in the dark cell, and see the iron cage in which, according to some authorities, the Maid was at first confined. During most of the time she was chained to a log of wood, her fetters loosened only when she was taken into court. She was guarded day and night by English men-at-arms, most of them common and brutal soldiers. She had no moment of solitude, no shadow of privacy. Her days were anguish, her nights terror; yet though her gaolers jeered, bullied, baited her with every foul jest and bitter insult, she kept the virgin treasure of her soul and of her body.

One day the Earls of Stafford and Warwick came to see her, and with them John of Luxembourg who sold her, and Haimond de Macy. The latter tells of the interview, saying that Luxembourg offered to ransom her if she would swear never to bear arms again.

"In God's name, you mock me!" said the Maid. "I know well that you have neither the will nor the power."

Luxembourg repeating his offer, she put him aside with: "I know these English will put me to death, thinking to win the kingdom of France when I am no more. But were they a hundred thousand more Godons than they are, they should not have the kingdom."

At this Stafford drew his dagger and would have stabbed her (she, poor soul, asking no better!), but Warwick held his hand. This latter noble, son-in-law of Warwick, the kingmaker, and called by some "the Father of Courtesy," was eager for the burning of Joan; it was, in his opinion, the only fitting end for her. No clean stab of an honorable dagger for the witch of the Armagnacs!

So we come to the Trial, about which so many books have been written; over which churchmen and statesmen, French and English, have wrangled through nigh upon six hundred years. I shall dwell on it so much as seems absolutely necessary, and no more.

On January 9th, 1431, Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, master of the bloodhounds in this glorious hunt, summoned his council. There were two judges, the bishop himself and Le Maître, Vice Inquisitor in the diocese of Rouen. The latter, after the first month, sat unwillingly; his conscience was not clear; he would fain be rid of the whole matter. The orders of the Chief Inquisitor, however, were strict; he sat on, ill at ease. The rest of the Council were clerks and "assessors"; all clerics of name and fame, canons of Rouen, abbots, learned doctors. You may easily learn their names, yet methinks they are best forgotten. Their number varied from day to day; sometimes there were forty, again there would be but six; most of them were French, but there were one or two Englishmen among them.

On February 20th, Joan of Arc, known as the Maid, was summoned to appear before this Council. She begged to be allowed to hear mass first, but was refused. On the 21st, she was brought before her judges in the chapel of the castle.

We may fancy the scene. Priests and prelates in goodly array of furred robes, episcopal crosses, and the like, sitting in half-circle, with bent brows and grim looks. Before their scandalized eyes, a slim girl in page's dress of black, her dark hair cut short, her face worn with watching and fasting, white with prison pallor.

She is accused of witchcraft, and dealings with familiar spirits; of wearing man's clothes (see them on the wench this moment!); of attacking Paris; of attempting suicide; of allowing ignorant people to worship her as a saint or holy person; of stealing a bishop's horse; of pretending to work miracles. One or two other charges were added in the course of the trial to this heavy list.

To begin with, the prisoner was commanded to give a full account of herself and her pretended mission. Joan was prepared for this. The Voices were with her in prison throughout the trial, counseling, warning, consoling. Sometimes she merely felt the blessed presences about her; sometimes they spoke plainly, even dictating her answers; always bidding her "answer boldly and God would help her."

Called upon to be sworn, she refused to take an unqualified oath. She did not know on what subjects they might question her.

"You may ask me things which I will not tell you. As to revelations to my King I will not speak though you should cut off my head."

She finally took a qualified oath, agreeing to speak plainly on such subjects as her conscience allowed. She would not repeat the Lord's Prayer (a favorite test of witchcraft; a witch, as everyone knew, could only say it backward!), save in confession; she would in no wise swear or promise to refrain from trying to escape; she had given no parole, and it was the right of every prisoner. She answered readily enough the questions concerning her birth, parentage, and so on.

She was interrupted every moment by some fresh question or rebuke. The notary Manchon, who was reporting the meeting, refused to act if things were not better ordered; he was an honest man, and reported Joan's words correctly, which was not the case with some other clerks present.

On the second day she came fasting to her trial, for it was Lent. She had eaten but once the day before. Massieu, the doorkeeper, seems to have been, like the notary, a decent man, and was wont to let her stop and pray on her way from cell to chapel, before the door of the chapel. One Estivet, a prison spy (mouton), and tool of Cauchon's, rebuked him fiercely for this leniency. "Rascal," he said, "how dare you let that excommunicate wretch come so near the church? If you persist, you shall be shut up yourself, in a tower where you shall not see sun or moon for a month."

Massieu, according to his own account, paid no heed to this threat, but continued to allow the Maid to kneel before the closed door of the holy place.

On the third day, after long and puerile questionings about the supposititious fairies of her childhood and the Voices of her early girlhood, she was asked suddenly, "Do you consider that you are in a state of grace?"

Here was a good strong trap, well laid and baited. If she answered "Yes," she was guilty of presumption in holy matters; if "No," her own mouth spoke her condemnation. Quietly the Maid uttered what her historian calls her inspired reply. "If I am not in grace, may God bring me thither; if I am, God keep me there."⁶²

Considering her steadfast and valiant bearing throughout these days of trial, we may well believe that the God she adored gave her strength and constancy. She had no earthly friend. The only person who visited her in the guise of human kindness was a spy of the Inquisition, one Loiseleur, a canon of Chartres and Rouen, and a close friend and ally of Cauchon. This base wretch, set on by his chief and the Earl of Warwick, did visit the Maid in her cell, in accordance with a mandate of the Inquisition which reads: "Let no one approach the heretic, unless it be from time to time two faithful and skilful persons, who shall act as if they had pity on him, and shall warn him to save himself by confessing his errors, promising him, if he does so, that he shall not be burned."

Loiseleur came in layman's dress, telling Joan that he was a man of Lorraine, her friend and that of France. He was full of interest and solicitude. The Voices gave no warning, and the lonely girl talked with him far more freely than with her judges. He would gently lead the subject to some point which was to be brought up the next day, and on his report the Council would frame its questions. Manchon, the notary, was asked to establish himself in a closet hard by, where he could hear and take down the words of the prisoner; this, to his lasting honor, he indignantly refused to do, saying he would report what was said in open court and nothing else.

The days dragged on, and the weeks; weeks of prayer, of fasting, of torment. On March 14th she was interrogated concerning her leap from the tower of Beaurevoir. Was it true that after her fall she had blasphemed God and her saints?

Not of her consciousness, she replied. "God and good confession" knew; she had no knowledge of what she might have said in delirium. St. Catherine had promised her help, how or when she knew not.

"Generally, the Voices say that I shall be delivered through great victory; and furthermore they say, 'Take all things peacefully; heed not thine affliction. Thence thou shalt come at last into the kingdom of Paradise.'"

The judges took up this question delightedly; it was one after their own hearts. Did she, they asked, feel assurance of salvation?

"As firmly as if I were in heaven already."

"Do you believe that, after this revelation, you could not sin mortally?"

"I know not. I leave it to God."

"Your answer (about her assurance of salvation) is very weighty."

"I hold it for a very great treasure."

"What with your attack on Paris on a holy day, your behavior in the matter of the Bishop's hackney, your leap at Beaurevoir, and your consent to the death of Franquet, do you really believe that you have wrought no mortal sin?"

"I do not believe that I am in mortal sin; and if I have been it is for God to know it, and for confession to God and the priest."⁶³

She begged to be allowed to go to church. If she might hear mass she would wear woman's dress, changing it on her return for the page's dress which was her protection against insult. If she must die, she asked for a woman's shift, and a cap to cover her head; she would rather die than depart from the work for which her Lord had sent her.

"But I do not believe," she added, "that my Lord will let me be brought so low that I shall lack help of God and miracle."

"If you dress as you do by God's command," they asked her, "why do you ask for a shift in the hour of death?"

"It suffices me that it should be long!" said the girl.

All this was but the preliminary inquiry. Now followed a week of respite, while the evidence was sifted and arranged, and articles of indictment drawn up. On March 27th Joan was summoned to hear her formal accusation, conveyed in seventy articles. The Court was asked to declare her "a sorceress, a divineress, a false prophet, one who invoked evil spirits, a witch, a heretic, an apostate, a seditious blasphemer, rejoicing in blood, indecent," and I know not what else beside. These seventy articles were presently condensed into twelve. On April 6th the learned doctors were called to deliberate on these twelve, which constituted the real accusation, by which the captive must live or die.

They met in the private chapel of the Archbishop, which is still standing, in the courtyard hard by the cathedral. The articles were duly accepted, and the Maid was summoned to hear the result. But she lay ill in her prison, worn out with fasting and misery. Cauchon himself came to visit her, professing himself full of tender solicitude for her soul and body. He bade her note how kind they were to her. They desired only her welfare; the Holy Church was ever ready to receive its erring children, etc., etc. With her unfailing courtesy Joan thanked him. She thought herself in danger of death; she begged for confession and the sacrament, and burial in holy ground.

"If you desire the Holy Sacrament," said Cauchon, "you must submit to Holy Church."

The girl turned her head wearily on her pallet. "I can say no more than I have said!" was her only word.

But the Bishop pressed on relentless. The more she feared for her life, he told her, the more she would resolve to amend it, and submit to those above her. Then she said:

"If my body dies in prison I expect from you burial in holy ground; if you do not give it, I await upon my Lord." And as they still tormented her:

"Come what may, I will do or say no other thing. I have answered to everything in my trial."

Five Doctors in turn beset her with offers of favors if she would yield, with threats if she continued obdurate. In the latter case, they told her, she must be treated as a Saracen. Finally, since they might in no wise prevail over the dauntless soul, though the broken body lay helpless before them, they departed, leaving her to the tenderer mercies of the men-at-arms.

The Articles of Accusation had been sent to the University of Paris, with a request for the opinion of that learned and pious body. While waiting for the answer, the Bishop of Beauvais filled the time with various ingenious devices, all planned to break the girl's spirit. On May 2nd, being in some measure recovered from her illness, she was brought out for a public meeting before sixty clerics, Cauchon at their head. The Bishop addressed her in his customary strain, accusing, exhorting, admonishing.

"Read your book!" (i.e., the document containing her formal accusation), said Joan scornfully. "I will answer as I may. My appeal is to God, my Creator, whom I love with my whole heart."

Wearily, wearily she listened to the many-times-told tale; briefly and bravely she made reply.

"If I were now at the judgment seat, and if I saw the torch burning, and the fagots laid, and the executioner ready to light the fire; if I were in the fire, I would say what I have said, and no other word; would do what I have done, and no other thing."

"Superba responsio!" writes Manchon the clerk opposite this entry.

Since naught else might prevail against the obstinacy of this creature, how if they tried torture, or at the very least the threat of torture, the actual sight of its instruments?

Two days later (May 4th), she was brought out again, this time into a dismal vaulted chamber, the donjon of Rouen Castle. The usual place of her torment was too small for the things she now saw displayed before her; rack, screws, all the hideous paraphernalia of the Holy Inquisition; beside these, two executioners, ready to perform their office.

Joan was bidden to look upon these things, and told that if she did not avow the truth her body would be submitted to the torture. If we stood, as one may still stand, in that vaulted chamber, would not the answer ring out once more from those grim walls that received it?

"Truly, if you should destroy my limbs and cause my soul to leave my body, I will tell you no other thing (than she has already told); and if I should say anything (i.e., under torture), I would always tell you afterward that you had made me say it by force."

She trod, indeed, the narrow edge of a knife-blade. Question upon question was put; was answered briefly, clearly, and to the point. The clerics hesitated. Perhaps the torture might not be necessary, since there seemed a chance that even this might not prevail against this girl's stubbornness. In any case it would be well to leave the fear of it hanging over her for a time.

It was so left, for a week, while the doctors debated. One thought the use of torture might "impair the stately beauty of the trial as hitherto conducted." Another thought they had sufficient evidence without it. Three were in favor of it: Morelli, Courcelles, Loiseleur. The last-named was the Judas-spy who had visited her in prison; he thought torture would be salutary for her soul. After all, this particular depth of infamy was not sounded; the votes for mercy outnumbered those for torture. The executioner and his henchmen departed, the former testifying later that the Maid "showed great prudence in her replies, so that those who heard were astonished; and their deponent retired with his assistant without touching her."

Still another week of fetters and darkness, of foul air and fouler speech; then came the reply from the University of Paris. They rejoiced in the "elegance" with which the crime of this person had been communicated to them. It was clear to their minds that her pretended saints were in reality three well-known fiends, Satan, Belial, and Behemoth. She was treacherous, cruel, bloodthirsty, a would-be suicide; a liar, heretic, schismatic and idolater. Nevertheless, in the opinion of the University, it might be well to give her one more "tender admonition." It could do no harm; the English were safe to deal with her in any case.

On May 23rd she received the admonition – it really seems to have been a kindly one this time – from Pierre Maurice, who appealed to her sense of honor and duty.

"What," he asked her, "would you think of a knight in your king's land who refused to obey your king and his officers? Yet you, a daughter of the Church, disobey the officers of Christ, the bishops of the Church. Be not ashamed of obedience, have no false shame; you will have high honor, which you think you will lose, if you act as I ask you to do. The honor of God and your own life in this world, and your salvation in the next, are to be preferred before all things."⁶⁴

Joan made no answer to this appeal, but it may have had its effect none the less.

The next day, May 24th, she was placed in a tumbril and brought to the market-place of St. Ouen, where a great crowd was assembled; priests, nobles, soldiers, citizens, all agog to see and hear. Would she abjure, or burn?

It was customary to preach a final sermon to a witch before burning her; Erard, the preacher, addressed Joan this morning. In the course of his speech he spoke of the king as a "heretic and schismatic."

"Speak boldly!" said the holy Voices in the ear of the Maid.

"By my faith," she cried, "full well dare I both say and swear that he is the noblest Christian of all Christians, and the truest lover of the faith and the Church."

Charles, were I set to devise for you a fitting doom, I would have you loiter through some dim place of forgotten things – not forever, but as near it as Divine Mercy would allow – seeing always before you the pale Maid in her fetters, hearing always from her lips those words of undying trust and love.

Enough; the matter was summed up. Here was the executioner, here his cart, ready to carry her to the stake. Would Joan of Arc submit to Holy Church, or would she burn, now, in an hour's time?

You are to remember that this child was not yet nineteen years of age; that she had been in prison, enduring every torment except that of actual bodily torture, for a year. To remember, too, that even our Supreme Exemplar prayed once that the cup might pass from him.

"I submit!" said the Maid.

Instantly a paper was thrust into her hand, and she was bidden sign it. Bystanders say there was a strange smile on her lips as she made her mark, a circle, as we know she could not write her name. She was hustled back to prison, leaving tumult and uproar behind her. The English were furious. They had come to see a burning, and there was no burning. Warwick made complaint to Cauchon; the King of England would be angry at the escape of this witch.

"Be not disturbed, my Lord!" said the Bishop of Beauvais. "We shall soon have her again."

Back to prison! not, as she had hoped and prayed, to a prison of the Church, where men whose profession at least was holy would be about her; where possibly she might even see and speak with a woman; where she might hear mass, and make confession. No! back to the old foul, hideous cell, to the brutal jeer and fleer of the English men-at-arms. Back, under sentence of imprisonment for life.

Meekly the poor girl went; meekly she put off her page's costume, and assumed, as she was bidden, a woman's dress.

On some aspects of the dark days that followed I cannot dwell; suffice it to say that they were the bitterest of all the bitter year; suffice it to say that when her judges came to her again they found her once more in her page's dress, which she refused to give up again until the end.

This was not the only change they found, nor the greatest. Back in the cell, the Voices had spoken loud and clear in rebuke and reproach. St. Margaret, St. Catherine, both were there. Both told her of the great pity of that betrayal to which she had consented, when she made that abjuration and revocation to save her life; told her that by so doing she had condemned herself.

"If I were to say" (it is herself speaking now) "that God did not send me I would condemn myself, for true it is that God sent me. My Voices have told me since that I greatly sinned in that deed, in confessing that I had done ill. What I said, I said in fear of fire."⁶⁵

And the clerk wrote against these words, on the margin of his notes, "Responsio Mortifera."

The Maid now clearly and emphatically revoked her submission. What she had said, she repeated, was said in dread of fire.

"Do you believe," asked Cauchon, "that your Voices are those of St. Catherine and St. Margaret?"

"Yes!" replied the Maid. "Their voices and God's!"

These words were spoken on May 28th, to Cauchon, who had hastened to the prison, hearing that Joan had resumed man's apparel. Angrily he asked why she had done this. She answered that it was more convenient, among men, to wear men's dress. She had not understood that she had sworn never to wear it again; if she had broken a pledge in this, one had been broken with her, the promise that she should be released from fetters, and should receive the sacrament.

"I would rather die," she said, "than remain in irons. If you will release me, and let me go to mass and lie in gentle prison, I will be good, and do what the Church desires."

There was only one thing that the Church, as represented in the person of Pierre Cauchon, desired, and that was the end of her. She had "relapsed"; it was enough. He hurried joyfully away, passing in the courtyard Warwick and his men, who were waiting for news.

"Farewell!" cried the Bishop of Beauvais. "Be of good cheer, for it is done."

He summoned his Council in haste; they were all of his mind. Holy Church could have no further dealings with this impious and hardened prisoner. She must be given over to the secular arm, "with the prayer that there be no shedding of blood." Most sinister of all speakable words! At the stake, no need of blood-shedding.

Early in the morning of May 29th Martin Ladvenu and Jean Toutmouillé came to the prison. The latter told the Maid briefly that she was to be burned. She wept, poor child, and cried out piteously.

"Alas!" she said. "Will they treat me so horribly and cruelly, that my pure and uncorrupted body ("corps net et entier, qui ne fut jamais corrompu") must to-day be burned to ashes?"

She would rather, she cried in her agony, be seven times beheaded than burn.

"I appeal to God, the supreme Judge, against the wrongs that have been done me."

At this moment Cauchon entered the prison. He must see with his own eyes how his victim received her condemnation. She turned upon him, and uttered the words which, wherever his name is spoken, whenever his image is conjured up, are written in flame upon his forehead:

"Bishop of Beauvais, it is through you I die. I summon you before your God and mine!"

Presently she composed herself; made confession to one of the monks, and asked for the Sacrament. After some haggling among her persecutors the elements were brought to her, albeit in slovenly fashion, bare of the priestly pomp which was their due.

So we come to the 30th day of May, of the year 1431. At nine in the morning Joan left her prison for the last time. She was in woman's dress. Over her shoulders was the long black robe of the Inquisition, on her head a paper cap or mitre, bearing the words: "Heretic, Relapsed, Apostate, Idolater." As the cart in which she stood rumbled through the streets, the Maid of France lifted up her voice and wept over the city of her death.

"Rouen, Rouen, mourrai-je içi? Seras-tu ma maison? Ah, Rouen, j'ai grand peur que tu n'aies à souffrir de ma mort."⁶⁶

Hearing these words, the people around her, even the English soldiers, wept for pity. It is recorded that as the tumbril jolted its way over the stones, a man in priest's dress was seen pressing through the crowd, trying desperately to force a way to the cart. It was Loiseleur, the spy, come in an agony of repentance, to fling himself before the saint he had helped to condemn and implore her pardon. The soldiers repulsed him brutally; would have slain him but for Warwick's intervention. The crowd closed over him.

There were three scaffolds in Rouen Old Market that morning of May. On one of them the Maid was set to hear her last sermon preached by Nicholas Midi, of Rouen and Paris; on another sat judges and spectators, a goodly company; Cardinal Beaufort, Warwick, the "Father of Courtesy," Cauchon and all his priestly bloodhounds, who yet could not see blood shed.

The third scaffold was a heap of plaster, piled high with fagots, from which rose the stake. It bore the legend: "Jeanne, self-styled the Maid, liar, mischief-maker, abuser of the people, diviner, superstitious, blasphemer of God, presumptuous, false to the faith of Christ, boaster, idolater, cruel, dissolute, an invoker of devils, apostate, schismatic, heretic."

Nicholas Midi was long in speaking, and the English waxed impatient. Dinner time was near.

"How now, priest? Are you going to make us dine here?" some of them cried.

Cauchon read the sentence.

"Then she invoked the blessed Trinity, the glorious Virgin Mary, and all the blessed saints of Paradise. She begged right humbly also the forgiveness of all sorts and conditions of men, both of her own party and of her enemies; asking for their prayers, forgiving them the evil that they had done her."⁶⁷