Understanding Jeanne's Importance

In late March or early April Joan finally took the field again with her small group (her brother Pierre, her confessor Friar Jean Pasquerel, her bodyguard Jean d'Aulon, and a few others), escorted by a mercenary unit of about 200 troops led by Bartolomew Baretta of Italy. They headed for Lagny-sur-Marne, where French forces were putting up a fight against the English. It was here, in the midst of war, that she was credited with helping to save an infant: according to her own testimony, she and other virgins of the town were praying in a church on behalf of a dead baby, that it might be revived long enough to baptize it; she said the baby came to life, yawned three times, and was hastily baptized before it died again.
Around Easter (April 22nd) she was at Melun where, as she would later say, her saints had revealed to her that she would be captured "before Saint John's Day" (June 24). She had said at many points that capture and betrayal were her greatest fears.

Meanwhile the Burgundian army was on the move despite all the promises of peace; and on May 6th Charles VII and his counselors finally admitted that the Royal Court had been manipulated by the Duke, "...who has diverted and deceived us by truces and otherwise", as Charles wrote in a letter on that date.
He would now order a damaging series of assaults on Burgundian territory to the east, but in the northeast the Armagnacs were in trouble: the Duke of Burgundy was now there in force. His strategy, based on an elaborate document outlining his plans, called for the bridge at Choisy-au-Bac to be taken, followed by the monastery at Verberie, and then a methodical series of assaults to block all the supply routes into Compiegne, which had refused to submit to him under the terms of the agreement signed the previous year. Choisy-au-Bac was taken on May 16; on the 22nd the Duke laid siege to Compi�gne. Joan was unwilling to let this city, which had showed such courage in its defiance, fall unaided: reinforced with 300 - 400 additional troops picked up at Crepy-en-Valois, on the morning of the 23rd at sunrise she and her tiny army slipped into Compiegne.

She apparently knew what was coming: according to the later statements of two men who had, as young boys, been among a group of curious children watching Joan pray in one of Compiegne's churches that morning, she was much troubled in spirit and told the children to "pray for me, for I have been betrayed." That afternoon, around 5 pm, she was among those leading a sortie outside the city when her troops were ambushed by Burgundian forces and she herself captured when, after having decided to stay with the rear guard during the retreat, the gates were prematurely shut behind her, thereby trapping she and her soldiers outside. Initially refusing the demands to surrender, she was finally pulled off her horse by a Burgundian archer and agreed to surrender to Lionel of Wandomme, a noble serving under John of Luxembourg.

The garrison commander at Compiegne, Guillaume de Flavy, came under immediate suspicion as a traitor, although his guilt was never proved. Since the Royal Court at that time was divided into factions, each of which routinely tried to eliminate any prominent leader who was supported by their rivals, it would be likely that a small group within the Court may have betrayed her. The evidence indicates that Charles VII probably was not among the guilty, however, nor did he abandon her, as is so often claimed: according to the archives of the Morosini, who were in contact with the Royal Court, Charles VII tried to force the Burgundians to return Joan in exchange for the usual ransom, and threatened to treat Burgundian prisoners according to whatever standard was adopted in Joan's case. Even the pro-Anglo-Burgundian University of Paris, which later orchestrated her conviction, sent a letter to John of Luxembourg frantically reporting that the Armagnacs were "doing everything in their power" to try to get her back. Dunois and La Hire would lead a total of three campaigns that seem to have been designed to rescue her by military means.
These attempts failed, and the Burgundians refused to ransom her.

The Trial

After four months spent as a prisoner in the chateau of Beaurevoir, Joan was transferred to the English in exchange for 10,000 livres, following the usual Burgundian policy of extracting money from their allies for almost any service rendered. Pierre Cauchon, a longtime supporter of the Anglo-Burgundian faction, was given the job of procuring her and setting up a trial. He had been given many such tasks in the past - there's a surviving letter from Duke John-the-Fearless of Burgundy (dated July 26, 1415) authorizing Cauchon to bribe Church officials at the Council of Constance in order to influence the Council's ruling concerning a murder which the Duke had ordered. They now needed someone who was willing to engineer a murder under the guise of an Inquisitorial trial, and Cauchon again got the job.

English government documents record in great detail the payments made to cover the costs of obtaining Joan and rewarding the various judges and assessors who took part in her trial [click here to see some of these financial accounts], and we know that the clergy who served at the trial were drawn from their supporters. Some of these men later admitted that the English conducted the proceedings for the purposes of revenge rather than out of any genuine belief that she was a heretic. [click here to see some of this testimony]

Joan was held at the fortress of Crotoy before being brought to Rouen, the seat of the English occupation government. Although Inquisitorial procedure required that suspects should be held in a Church-run prison and female prisoners should be guarded by nuns rather than male guards (for obvious reasons), Joan was held in a secular military prison with English soldiers as guards. According to several eyewitness accounts, it was for this reason that she clung to her soldiers' outfit and kept the pants and tunic "firmly laced and tied together": eyewitnesses quote her as saying that this was now her only means of defending herself against rape, since a dress didn't offer any protection at all. Her enemies eventually decided to use this against her by charging that it violated the prohibition against cross-dressing, deliberately ignoring the fact that St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Hildegard, and other medieval theologians specifically allowed an exemption in such cases of necessity. Joan pleaded with Cauchon to transfer her to a Church prison with women to guard her, in which case she could wear a dress; but this was never allowed.

The trial included a series of hearings from February 21st through the end of March 1431. Normally, an Inquisitorial tribunal would hear witness testimony against the accused, but in this case the only witness called was the accused herself. The assessors therefore resorted to trying to manipulate her into saying something that might be used against her, as some of those present later admitted and which the transcript itself confirms.

The theological arguments put forward by Cauchon and his associates are mostly a set of subtle half-truths, not only on the "cross-dressing" charge but also concerning issues such as the authority of the tribunal: standard Inquisitorial procedure required that such tribunals be overseen by non-partisan judges and allowed the accused to appeal to the Pope; the eyewitnesses said Joan repeatedly asked for both, but such was never granted. They also related that she submitted to the authority of both the Papacy and the Council of Basle, but this was left out of the transcript on Cauchon's orders. Early in the trial they tried to link her to witchcraft by claiming her banner had been endowed with "magical" powers, or that she allegedly poured wax on the heads of small children, etc, but these charges were dropped before the final articles of accusation were drawn up on April 5th. In one of the more desperate bids to discredit her, Cauchon objected to her use of the "Jesus-Mary" slogan which, ironically, was used by the Dominicans and Franciscans who largely ran the Inquisitorial courts. Her saints were dismissed as "demons", despite the fact that they had counseled her to "go regularly to Church" and maintain her virginity, as even the transcript itself notes.

In the end, Cauchon would convict her on the cross-dressing charge, which he utilized in a manner which speaks eloquently of his character. According to several eyewitnesses - the bailiff Jean Massieu, the chief notary Guillaume Manchon, the assessors Friar Martin Ladvenu and Friar Isambart de la Pierre, and the Rouen citizen Pierre Cusquel - after Joan had finally consented to wear a dress, her guards immediately increased their attempts to rape her, joined by "a great English lord" who tried to do the same. Her guards finally took away her dress entirely and threw her the old male clothing which she was forbidden to wear, sparking a bitter argument between she and the guards that "went on until noon", according to Jean Massieu. She had no choice but to put on the clothing left to her, after which Cauchon promptly pronounced her a "relapsed heretic" and condemned her to death. Several eyewitnesses remembered that Cauchon came out of the prison and gleefully exclaimed to the Earl of Warwick and other English commanders waiting outside: "Farewell, be of good cheer, it is done!", implying that he had orchestrated the trap that the guards had set for her.

The scene of her execution is vividly described by a number of those who were present that day. She listened calmly to the sermon read to her, but then broke down weeping during her own address, in which she forgave her accusers for what they were doing and asked them to pray for her. The accounts say that most of the judges and assessors themselves, and a few of the English soldiers and officials, were openly sobbing by the end of it. But a few of the English soldiers were becoming impatient, and one sarcastically shouted to the bailiff Jean Massieu, "What, priest, are you going to make us wait here until dinner?" The executioner was ordered to "do your duty".

They tied her to a tall pillar well above the crowd. She had asked for a cross, which one sympathetic English soldier tried to provide by making a small one out of wood; a crucifix was brought from the nearby church and Friar Martin Ladvenu held it up in front of her until the flames rose. Several eyewitnesses recalled that she repeatedly screamed "...in a loud voice the holy name of Jesus, and implored and invoked without ceasing the aid of the saints of Paradise". Then her head drooped, and it was over.
Jean Tressard, Secretary to the King of England, was seen returning from the execution exclaiming in great agitation, "We are all ruined, for a good and holy person was burned." The Cardinal of England himself and the Bishop of Therouanne, brother of the same John of Luxembourg whose troops had captured Joan, were said to have wept bitterly. The executioner, Geoffroy Therage, came to Martin Ladvenu and Isambart de la Pierre afterwards, saying that "...he had a great fear of being damned, [as] he had burned a saint." The worried English authorities tried to put a stop to any further talk of this sort by punishing those few who were willing to publicly speak out in her favor.

It would not be until the English were finally driven from Rouen in November of 1449, near the end of the war, that the slow process of appealing the case would be initiated. This process resulted in a posthumous acquittal by an Inquisitor named Jean Br�hal, who ironically had been a member of an English-run institution during the war. Br�hal nevertheless ruled that she had been convicted illegally and without basis by a corrupt court operating in a spirit of, quote, "manifest malice against the Roman Catholic Church and indeed even of heresy". The Inquisitor and other theologians consulted for the appeal therefore denounced Cauchon and the other judges and described Joan as a martyr, thereby paving the way for her eventual beatification in 1909 and canonization as a saint in 1920, by which time even English writers and clergy no longer showed the opposition that their predecessors had. During World War I, in the midst of the canonization process and a period of French-English detente, Allied soldiers would pay tribute to the heroine by invoking her name on battlefields not far from her own.


Copyright © 2002 Allen Williamson