The Maid and the Queen (30 page)

Her worst fears were realized when in autumn two events occurred that sealed her fate. On September 18, the aged lady of Luxembourg succumbed to overexertion and died while undertaking a fatiguing journey to Avignon, depriving Joan of her most formidable champion; and on October 24 the
siege of Compiègne was lifted with the aid of an army sent by Charles under the leadership of the count of Vendôme and the lord of Boussac, who had fought beside Joan at Orléans. John of Luxembourg, who was in command of the siege for the duke of Burgundy, was obliged to retreat ignominiously from the field, leaving behind his heavy artillery. He returned to the castle of Beaurevoir in what might be expected to be none too fine a humor, and under pressure from Philip the Good and the regency government he at last accepted the English offer. The ransom payment was hurriedly forwarded on December 6 and Pierre Cauchon, gleeful at his success and anxious to claim his prize, arrived soon afterward to arrange for Joan’s removal by an armed escort. “The Bishop of Beauvais whom I saw return after he had been to fetch her [Joan]…[gave] an account of his embassy… with joy and exultation,” reported an eyewitness. By Christmas Joan had been transferred to Rouen, deep in the heart of English territory, there to await interrogation by the Inquisition on matters pertaining to the true faith in preparation for her trial on charges of heresy and witchcraft.

T
HE JUDICIAL ACTION
against Joan of Arc began on January 9, 1431, and lasted nearly five months. During this period, both her jailers and the vindictive men who set themselves up as her examiners made every attempt to break her spirit by subjecting her to a continual stream of mental, verbal, and physical abuse. Although as a defendant in an Inquisition trial Joan had the right to be held in a Church prison and given access to the protection of nuns, she was instead consigned to the civil authorities, who placed her under a male guard in a tower cell of the castle of Rouen, owned by the English earl of Warwick. Under pretense of preventing her escape, she was kept shackled throughout the entire ordeal. “And I know for certain that at night she slept with two pairs of irons on her legs, attached by a chain very tightly to another chain that was connected to the foot of her bed, itself anchored by a large piece of wood five or six feet long. The contraption was fastened by a key,” Jean Massieu, a member of the French escort responsible for conveying Joan back and forth from her cell to the courtroom, later testified. Joan was also kept fettered in irons during the day while at trial, and she was further threatened with imprisonment in an iron cage, specially built to hold her, in which she would be kept standing “fastened by the neck, the hands, and the feet,” if she misbehaved or attempted flight. Of the five
soldiers who guarded her, three were stationed inside her cell and two just outside the door; all were “Englishmen of the lowest rank, those who are called in French
houssepaillers
[abusers],” reported another eyewitness. When she first arrived, Joan had been required to expose herself to yet another intimate physical examination to confirm her virginity, this one conducted under the auspices of the duchess of Bedford (the duke of Bedford concealing himself “in a secret place” and peeping at her to satisfy his curiosity). The prisoner’s maidenhood being established, the duchess “had the warders and others forbidden to offer her any violence.” However, while this may have prevented Joan from actually being raped by her guard, it did not stop the soldiers from abusing her in other ways just short of that, or of attempting to humiliate her through lewdness, and they evidently were encouraged to give free vent to their contempt, as Joan was to complain of their behavior toward her throughout her captivity.

Again contrary to established procedure, she was given no counsel, and when both a leading Church lawyer and a local cleric objected to this irregularity, the one was ostracized and the other jailed. Pierre Cauchon dispatched a spy to Domrémy to obtain incriminating evidence about Joan’s past that could be used against her in court; when the man reported back that he had found “nothing concerning Joan which he would not have liked to find about his own sister,” the bishop flew into a rage and refused to pay him for his time and expenses, complaining that “he was a traitor and a bad man and that he had not done what he should have done and was ordered to do.” Even more odiously, in a flagrant violation of canon law that stated clearly that only ecclesiastics from the diocese of Rouen had the authority to adjudicate the case, the bishop of Beauvais contrived to have himself named as the second of Joan’s two judges. His appointment, condoned by the duke of Bedford, drew strong protest from the other principal magistrate in the case, the vice-inquisitor, that “as much for the serenity of his conscience as for a more certain conduct of the trial, he did not wish to be involved in this affair.” Cauchon was forced to appeal to the chief inquisitor of France in order to compel his fellow judge to undertake his duty; the vice-inquisitor eventually appeared in court but continued to sulk throughout the trial, and his reluctance to officiate was obvious to all who participated in the inquest.

Although only Cauchon and the vice-inquisitor had the power to judge and pass sentence on Joan, dozens of other clerics, some sixty-three in all representing both England and France, including a prestigious contingent of
masters from the University of Paris, took part in her examination and trial in an advisory capacity. Known as “assessors,” many of these prelates were as anxious as Cauchon to play a visible role in Joan’s conviction and so advance their careers. They made for such a noisy crowd on the first day of her interrogation that the notary responsible for recording the questions and answers couldn’t hear to do his job properly. “The assessors with the judges put questions to her, and sometimes at the moment when one was questioning her and she was answering his question, another interrupted her answer so much so that she several times said to those who were interrogating her: ‘Fine lords, ask one at a time,’” reported Jean Massieu.

Every deception and ruse that could be used to undermine her testimony was employed so shamelessly that even the administrative staff of the court protested. To ensure that the official record portrayed Joan’s responses as being sufficiently heretical, two concealed priests, one of them a canon of Rouen, kept a separate, edited account of the proceedings. “At the beginning of the trial, during five or six days, while I set down in writing the Maid’s answers and excuses, sometimes the judges tried to constrain me, by translating into Latin, to put into other terms, changing the meaning of the words or, in some other manner, my understanding,” Guillaume Manchon, the official court notary, later complained. “And were placed two men, at the command of my lord of Beauvais, in a window near to the place where the judges were. And there was a serge curtain drawn in front of the window so that they should not be seen. These men wrote and reported what was charged against Joan, and suppressed her excuses…. And after the session, while collating what they had written, the two others reported in another manner and did not put down Joan’s excuses.” Manchon protested this surreptitious note-taking by insisting on highlighting the differences between the clandestine register and his own official record. “On this subject my lord of Beauvais was greatly enraged against me,” he observed. This same canon of Rouen, a crony of Cauchon’s, ingratiated himself with Joan, the better to betray her. “[He] pretended to be of the Maid’s own country and, by that means, contrived to have dealings, interviews and familiar talk with her, by giving her news from home which were pleasing to her, and he asked to be her confessor,” Manchon continued. “And what she told him in secret he found means to bring to the ears of the notaries.” Again, the bishop of Beauvais made use of subterfuge and concealment in order to entrap Joan in the act of committing heresy. “In fact, at the beginning of the trial, myself and Boisguillaume, with
witnesses, were put secretly into a room near to where there was a hole through which one could listen, so that we could report what she said or confessed to the said [canon],” complained the notary.

To these as well as all other attempts to confuse, deceive, intimidate, or degrade her, Joan responded with a degree of courage that surpassed any feat she had achieved on the battlefield. During the investigatory phase of the trial, which lasted from her first court appearance on February 21, 1431, until March 26, she would frequently spend up to seven hours a day—from eight o’clock in the morning until noon, with a second session following the midday meal—patiently answering the inquisitors’ questions and often sparring with them verbally when the line of interrogation became too repetitive or inane. Fettered in irons throughout, she endured the assessors’ unending, none-too-subtle probing into her early life and religious beliefs, after which she would be marched back to her cell in the evening, dragging her chains, to face the insults and depravity of her English guard. Still wearing the leg irons, she would then be clamped into a second set of iron restraints. In these she would snatch what sleep she could, conscious always of the presence of the soldiers by her bed and the need to fend them off if necessary, only to be dragged from her quarters early the next morning to face her accusers for another long day of interrogation.

Throughout, she never flagged. The inquiry emerged as a test of wills between Joan and her examiners as the assessors tried, often with a conspicuous lack of success, to break her down. The first session, for example, was almost entirely devoted to Cauchon’s getting Joan to swear an oath “to speak the truth… in all matters on which you will be questioned,” and to demonstrate her religious training by having her recite the Pater Noster. Joan countered that she could not take such an oath as “it may happen that you will ask me a thing which I shall not tell you,” and declined to recite either the Pater Noster or Ave Maria unless Cauchon first agreed to hear her in confession and render absolution, an act that would have precluded the bishop of Beauvais from further participation in her prosecution. After persistent haranguing, the best Cauchon could do was to elicit a compromise from Joan: “About my father and mother, and everything that I have done since I took the road to come to France, I shall willingly swear; but never have I said or revealed anything about the revelations made to me by God except to Charles, my king. And even if you wish to cut my head off, I will not reveal them, because I know from my visions that I must keep them secret.”
Joan was equally unmovable when it came to Cauchon’s second demand; as the bishop ultimately refused her request to hear her confession, she never declaimed the Lord’s Prayer.

By the second day and for many of the sessions following, the inquiry shifted to Joan’s childhood, the emergence of her voices, her journey to the royal court at Chinon, and her mission in France. This interrogation was handled by Master Jean Beaupère, another former rector of the University of Paris who, like Cauchon, was in the employ of the English king. It was Beaupère’s job, as a man of superior theological learning, to trick Joan into a heretical statement. This he was unable to do despite repeated attempts. “This voice which you say appears to you, is it an angel or does it come immediately from God, or is it the voice of a saint?” he asked, and then, “Do you believe that it displeases God that the truth be told?” and, finally, “Do you know if you are in God’s grace?” to which Joan famously replied, “If I am not, may God bring me to it; if I am, may God keep me in it,” a statement of such obvious and forceful piety that Beaupère subsequently gave up on that line of questioning altogether.

Despite this setback, the following day Beaupère continued as Joan’s principal interrogator. Under his direction, the inquiry now took an extremely curious turn. In a discussion of her childhood in Domrémy, the assessor suddenly asked Joan about the Fairy Tree and the spring.

“Asked about the tree: [Joan] replied, that quite near to Domrémy there was a tree that was called the Ladies’ Tree, and which others called the Fairies’ Tree, and nearby was a spring (
fontaine
) and that she had heard tell that people with fevers drank of it and that they visited this spring in this way seeking a cure. But she did not know whether or not they were cured….

“That she had gone sometimes with other girls in summer time and made garlands for our Lady of Domrémy there… that she had heard from many old people, not of her own generation, that the fairies frequented the place; and that she had heard tell of one named Jhenne, wife of the mayor of the town of Domrémy, her godmother, that she had seen them there. Whether or not it was true she did not know… that she had never seen a fairy, as far as she knew, there or anywhere else.”

By the fifteenth century, the language of witchcraft (for the English demanded that Joan be tried as a witch) was very specific. Evil sorcery was connoted by the Latin term
maleficium,
which referred in general to demons, necromancers, witches, and diabolism. From 1400 to 1430 there were at least
seventy recorded cases of witchcraft that came to trial in Europe. The records of these proceedings invoked the devil, evil invocations, black magic, witches’ sabbaths, sodomy, demon worship, attempted murder through sorcery, ritualized spells, bewitchment, incantations, conjuring, apostasy, cults, desecration, infanticide, phantasms, cannibalism, divinations, and secret compacts with Satan. However, the word “fairy” does not appear in any of them. “It has long been clear that most of the charges leveled against Joan were deliberate falsifications,” wrote medieval witchcraft specialist Jeffrey Burton Russell. “But the irrelevance of witchcraft in her case is even more fundamental…. These charges… were quite removed from the usual witch tradition. Dancing with fairies or adoring them was an accusation drawn from old folklore, not from the thoroughly developed witch traditions from the mid-fifteenth century.”

Yet the inquisitors hammered away on this point: the tree (standing in for the wood where Raymondin had wandered despondently after killing his uncle) and the spring (representing the fountain where he first met the fairy Melusine), and, later, whether Joan had interacted with anyone in addition to her godmother who had “erred with fairies.” It is clear that the assessors, too, knew the story of Melusine, and were trying to taint Joan with it. Again and again she denied it. “She said that she had heard it said to her brother that they said in the countryside that she got her revelations from the tree and the fairies, but she did not and she had told him clearly to the contrary,” the official record reported.