Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (51 page)

By the end of November 1431, six months after Joan’s execution, the official trial document had been completed, copied, bound, and distributed. Three original copies survive, each authenticated by Cauchon’s seal. Extant receipts and documents authorizing payments made to
“Pierre, bishop of Lisieux, formerly bishop of Beauvais … for the trial for heresy of the deceased Joan, formerly called the Maid,” have allowed scholars to calculate the total cost of Joan’s trial and execution at 10,865
livres tournois.
All but 770 wrung from Normandy’s taxpayers were disbursed from the English king’s treasury in six sums, five received by the bishop during the year 1431 and the last delayed by England’s wartime financial predicament until 1437.

A first-class lawyer of the time would have earned as much as three hundred livres a year; the village curé for a town like Domrémy received but five. Had Jacques d’Arc leased the house in which his family lived, he would have paid his landlord about two or three livres a year. Had he convinced Joan to marry, the wedding feast and dowry together would have cost little more. And had there been anything left of his daughter to bury, Jacques d’Arc would have set himself back a good ten livres for even an inexpensive funeral, with minimal bell ringing, clergy, and refreshments.

On December 16, Pierre Cauchon, thus swaddled in considerable riches as well as entitlements, attended Henry VI’s coronation in Paris.
As reported by Enguerrand de Monstrelet, the bishop of Winchester joined him, along with the Duke of Bedford, the Earls of Warwick, Suffolk, and Salisbury, and Louis of Luxembourg. At the formal banquet that followed the anointing, the bishop sat close to the newly anointed king. Beautiful or not, already the trial and execution of Joan of Arc had provided Cauchon with the altitude he’d anticipated; within a few years his diplomatic status would soar as high as mortally possible. In 1435, he attended the Council of Basel and then the Congress of Arras. He was general envoy for Henry VI; he was the English queen’s chancellor as well. During 1439 and 1440, his career took him back and forth across the channel, chasing the peace he never lived to see, as on December 18, 1442, he died at his home in Rouen, suddenly, while being shaved.

Little more than a decade would pass before his heirs had occasion to write to
“the judges of the nullification trial, through the intermediary
of its procurator, Jean de Gouvis, to disclaim any responsibility” for their great-uncle Pierre’s infamous crimes. “Hard-pressed to remain in the good graces of the new [French] government … they rejected him [Cauchon] absolutely.”

A larger sliver of poetic justice could be tweezed from the creeping years-long torture of Nicolas Midi’s dying by degrees, a literally untouchable pariah. The biblical scourge of leprosy descended on the venerable theologian three years after he delivered the “solemn sermon” on the morning Joan died, the one he conceived for her “salutary admonition and the edification of the people.”

“Most diligent care must be taken,” Midi called out to his barbarous audience, eager to get past the preaching and on to the stake, “to prevent the foul contagion of this pernicious leprosy from spreading to other parts of the mystic body of Christ.” And he cut off the limb he misjudged and ordered it be burned.

As Midi had been the one who boiled Joan’s interrogation down to the twelve articles that summarized her “doctrine,” his fate was almost immediately interpreted as a divine punishment. Not only was his death gruesome; it was slow enough that the once revered doctor of the Church was forced to witness the enjoyment his torture inspired in those he’d once counted his friends. It was, perhaps, unfortunate to have chosen the affliction that ended up killing him as a metaphor for Joan’s heresy.

From the time of Joan’s capture until her execution, the war had fizzled and stalled. The French continued to teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, and the English, having discovered the challenge of marshaling forces in thrall to even a captured and chained witch of such formidable power, funneled their dwindling resources into Joan’s trial. But by executing the girl who insisted peace was to be found only at the tip of a lance, they’d also removed the greatest obstacle to Charles’s attempts at reconciliation with Philip, Duke of Burgundy, and England’s continued presence in France depended on its alliance with Burgundy. Despite the efforts of the esteemed general envoy of the English, Pierre Cauchon, at the Congress of Arras, in
1435, that alliance was undone. Charles agreed to make reparation for the death of John the Fearless, and Burgundy, though it remained a free state, recognized Charles as the King of France, significantly undermining Henry VI’s claim to his throne. Paris, the jewel of all Europe, was once again the French capital.

Emboldened by the shift in his fortunes, by 1441 Charles had recovered the aggressive flair that characterized the teenage dauphin who had yet to be emasculated by his mother’s betrayal. The king of France, thirty-eight years old, once again climbed on a charger, took the lead of his army, and discovered how vitiated were the forces on which his nation’s independence relied. A truce from 1444 to 1449 allowed him to redirect what revenues he could muster from making war into reorganizing his ragged ranks of mercenaries, feudal levies, and volunteers into the
“first professional, permanent, national standing army that Europe had seen since Rome.” Now there were
compagnies d’ordonnances
, their senior officers appointed by the king, who disbursed funds directly to those officers to pay his men-at-arms. Locally recruited corps of anywhere between one hundred and four hundred knights, most of whom were cavalry and whose archers now carried longbows, replaced demoralized bands of ill-equipped, underpaid, and hungry soldiers. Thanks to the brothers Jean and Gaspard Bureau, whose innovations in the use of gunpowder made French artillery the most advanced in all Europe, French
“cannons quickly pulverized one English-held fortress town after another.” In 1449, the once impenetrable walls of Rouen, with their sixty towers, fell, and by 1453 the Hundred Years War was over. Had Joan lived to see what she had prophesied, she would have been forty-one years old.

The Maid’s enemies died off, and her friends multiplied. Fantastic rumors spread. If Saint Michael hadn’t set Joan free, then mortal knights had ridden to her rescue. Too many and too shining for the enemy to hold at bay, they swept through the old market like crusaders storming Jerusalem. They trampled the English, and they freed the Maid who freed Orléans and brought the French king his crown.

Not only were there sightings of Joan’s apparition; there were
flesh-and-blood impostors. One among the flurry of alleged Maids even attracted international attention. A woman named Claude des Armoises, whose repertoire of parlor tricks included prestidigitation (she was said to be able to make broken glass and torn napkins whole again), emerged in 1436, two of Joan’s brothers her unlikely accomplices. Petit-Jean, or as he preferred to be called, Jean du Lys, passed through Orléans on August 5, en route to see Charles, for whom he claimed to carry a message from his sister. Two weeks later he was back in town, grumbling that although the king had promised him a hundred livres—probably in consideration of Jean’s having bankrupted himself to pay his own ransom from the English—the king’s officers had given him only twenty, to which the ever-grateful people of Orléans added another twelve. It was one thing, however, to claim to be his illustrious dead sister’s messenger as a means of jimmying himself past La Trémoille’s cadre to speak with the king about financial restitution, another to embrace a fraud in front of an audience. The
Chronique du doyen de Saint-Thibault-de-Metz
recorded that on May 20, 1436, a woman claiming to be the Maid and using the alias Claude des Armoises came to Metz in person, and there met with the local nobility as well as with her brothers Pierre and Jean. They had, they said,
“believed she had been burned; but when they saw her they recognized her and she also recognized them.” The last mention of this “Joan” was as the guest of honor at a banquet in Orléans on July 18, 1439. The
Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris
reported that Claude des Armoises was ultimately unmasked and
“confessed her imposture before the University of Paris.”

By the time the nullification trial was under way, any hope of monetary gain to be wrung from proximity to the Maid had evaporated, and Jean acquitted himself to the degree that he testified as to his sister’s innocence. Popular accounts of what is generally called the “retrial” of Joan of Arc suggest it was undertaken at the behest of Joan’s grieving and outraged mother, but it was, of course, Charles and his advisers who initiated the process, determined to neutralize whatever taint of illegitimacy might remain from Joan’s role in his anointing, a taint that hadn’t faded so much as changed in the twenty years since she’d died. Joan was on her way to becoming a national icon, a heroine more widely beloved with every year that passed. On
February 15, 1450, Charles appointed Cardinal Guillaume Bouillé, a University of Paris professor who was known to be ashamed of the institution’s contemptible role in Joan’s persecution and death, to initiate an inquiry into the trial of condemnation.

“A long time ago,” the king wrote, with the air of embarking on a fairy tale, “Joan the Maid was taken and captured by our ancient enemy,” and they “had her tried … and during this trial they made and committed many errors and abuses,” and they “put her to death very cruelly, iniquitously, and against reason.” To redress this shameful injustice, Charles did “command, instruct, and expressly charge” Bouillé to collect the evidence needed to begin the process of Joan’s vindication. The cardinal, deputized by royal decree, was to be provided access to whatever documents he wanted: to refuse him was to disobey the king. Bouillé was not the only cleric eager to redress what was as much an embarrassment to the Church as to the crown. By 1452 the grand inquisitor of France, Jean Bréhal, had joined the investigation into what they would discover had been more of a travesty than a properly conducted trial. Most of the documents generated by the inquiry have been lost, but it is known that from May 2 to May 8, 1452, twenty-two witnesses were interviewed, among them Guillaume Manchon, Jean Massieu, Isambart de la Pierre, and Martin Ladvenu. The papal legate, Cardinal d’Estouteville, sent a messenger to Charles on May 22. The inquisitor of the faith and Bouillé would arrive shortly with a dossier for the king to examine, he reported.
“They will reveal to you most clearly all that has been done in the trial of Joan the Pucelle. And because I know this matter greatly touches your honor and estate, I have acted with all my power.” Sufficient to mandate an official inquiry, the statements collected in Rouen were later included in the nullification trial record.

On June 11, 1455, Pope Calixtus III wrote to the bishops of Paris and Coutances and the archbishop of Reims, charging them to begin the work required to
“wipe out this mark of infamy suffered wrongfully.” Three years had passed, not long by Rome’s clock, papal politics as byzantine then as now. The nullification proceedings opened in Paris on November 7, 1455, with a petition from Isabelle Romée, who read from a prepared statement asking the Church to redress what she presented as not only the destruction of her daughter’s life but also
“an insulting, outrageous and scornful action towards the rulers and the people …