While she was in the hands of Jean de Luxembourg her captivity was not intolerable and she was treated with some consideration. She tried to escape from one of the prisons where she was held and leapt from a tower some 60 ft. high. That she was not killed but only stunned by her fall seemed so extraordinary that the judges accused her of having attempted to commit suicide. In November she was sold by Jean de Luxembourg to the English, reluctantly it appears, and transferred to Rouen, which she reached late in December.
She was imprisoned in the castle and put in an iron cage until the trial began, that is to the end of January. Afterwards she was chained by the waist, wrists and ankles to a heavy beam. To add to “her martyrdom”—as her Voices called it—she was watched day and night by three common soldiers who shared her room and tormented her with insulting words and rejoiced over her misery.
Instead of burning her or drowning her straightway, the Duke of Bedford, governor of the English possessions in France, chose the more subtle method of having her judged and convicted by the ecclesiastical court which was to be held at Rouen under his eyes, not in the law courts, but in the castle. In this way, not Joan alone, but those who had employed her, and approved of her, the French king and the French clergy, would be branded, like her, with infamy, “heresy and schism”.
Bedford had his tools ready. Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, was to be the presiding judge. He was what, during the last war, we should have called a collaborator. He was a Frenchman in the pay of England; so was his nephew; so were some of the canons of the chapter of Rouen who sat on the tribunal. Cauchon drew a yearly salary of <1000 livres tournois> as a member of the Royal Council, not to speak of wages for other services as occasion offered. The Regent kept him pliable and dutiful by dangling before his eyes the possibility of a higher reward still. The See of Rouen was vacant: surely a fitting reward for a faithful servant of England.
Cauchon was cunning and unscrupulous. He was also an able man; he and Bedford understood each other. He selected the judges, he planned the proceedings. It must be “<un beau proces>”, for all Europe was listening. This is the course they decided to follow. Joan of Arc claimed that her visions were from God; to the judges this was unthinkable; if they were, it meant that God was against England, it meant also that theirs was a tribunal of traitors. Therefore, either Joan lied or, if she had had the visions, they came from the devil. In order to prove this, the obvious line was to discredit her, to show her up as a vain, superstitious, unreligious, dissolute woman; let them prove also that she was guilty of theft, of perjury, of murder, of attempted suicide, and it would become clear that she could not be God’s instrument but the devil’s. All these accusations were formulated so as to create a bias in the mind of the judges: they were never substantiated, but the impression was made and went deep. A political enemy is always wrong and his defence worthless; at least Cauchon could claim that they had heard what Joan had to say.
The next step was logical and deadly. Having made up their minds that the visions and revelations of Joan were from evil spirits, the judges insisted that Joan should agree with them and declare she had been deceived by her Voices. They said the Tribunal was the Church and that every Christian must accept the decisions of the Church: he is otherwise a heretic. To Joan, the visions were so real that she could not doubt them; she was too sincere to deny them; she was so unused to legal subtleties that she could not say “It seems to me” when she meant “I am certain”. And therefore, her own unyielding answers allowed the Tribunal to send her to the stake as a schismatic and a heretic.
She did not yield easily; the judges themselves complained of her skill in defending herself during this long trial which lasted from February to May, with six public sessions and nine private ones in her prison. She knew she was not facing a tribunal of impartial judges, but one of enemies. Once she said to Cauchon: “You say you are the Church. What is the Church? If you say it is yourself, I will not submit to your judgment, because you are my deadly enemy.” Repeatedly she expressed her submission to the Holy See, asked to be taken to the Holy Father the Pope and to be judged by him. Her appeals were rejected under the pretext that Rome was too far away. This alone would have made the judgment illegal. There were many other irregularities as well. The judges were her political enemies. They were under English influence and at times even under coercion; the trial was taking place in the castle instead of the Law Courts which were available. The French king was not represented. The accusation produced no names, no documents, no evidence, no proofs, no witnesses. The prisoner was given no counsel; no one advised her as to the meaning and import of the subtle and crafty questions she was asked, nor did she always understand them.
The trial became a mere battle of wits between a young girl deprived of all the means of defence to which she was entitled and a tribunal whose only business was to find her guilty. Even the summing-up of the accusation condensed into twelve articles was often in contradiction with the answers of Joan as recorded in the minutes and it is on this unfair presentation of the case that the University of Paris, on being consulted, condemned Joan without having seen her.
Her condemnation was in any case a foregone conclusion. In the churchyard of St Ouen Joan had signed a brief recantation which possibly was no more than a promise “not to bear arms and not to wear male attire”. This did not save her for long. Three days later the woman’s dress was taken from her and she had no option but to put on again the forbidden hose and doublet: this, in the eyes of the judges, who came to the prison to verify her guilt, was sufficient to revive the death sentence. While they were thus occupied, Warwick was waiting in the courtyard below. He and Cardinal Beaufort had the prisoner in their charge and he had been heard to declare that he did not intend her to die a natural death. He was there to make sure that Cauchon would not forget what was expected from him. It was not the first time he had intimidated members of the Tribunal, Brother Isambart for instance. With Cauchon, no threats were needed: he was their man. Coming out of the tower and catching sight of the earl he called out across the courtyard, in English: “Fare well, fare well, she’s caught, we have her this time”, and he was laughing. Even if we did not know of his partial conduct of the trial, this despicable joy over his victim’s fate would justify the contempt in which posterity has held his name.
He was busy during the next two days: he must draw up in writing a judgment that would satisfy his masters and give orders for the necessary preparations in the old market-place: two platforms for the ecclesiastical and civil authorities, another for the preacher and Joan, and a scaffold so designed that the victim could be seen in her agony by everyone in the marketplace.
St Joan, unaware of these preparations, was waiting in her jail, still hoping, perhaps, to be transferred to a church prison. On Wednesday, May 30th, early in the morning, three Dominicans came to her: they were bringers of bad news and one of them, Martin Ladvenu, had been chosen as the Tribunal’s messenger. He was one of the youngest members of the Tribunal, being then just over thirty years of age. Awed by the important people who had sat to consider the case, he was still perplexed and uncertain as to the guilt of Joan, and gave a timid and qualified assent to the condemnation. But although he was probably not capable of rising above the partisan spirit, and of being fair to those who did not belong to the same political side as himself, he was not lacking in compassion and kindliness and he did all he could to comfort Joan during the last hours of her life. When he broke the terrible news to the poor girl, that this morning she must die and die by fire, she lost her composure: “Alas,” she said, “am I to be so horribly and cruelly treated that my body which has never been corrupted should to-day be consumed and burned to ashes? ” The bishop, unfeeling and callous, had the audacity to come in at this juncture, to try and justify his sentence. “Bishop,” she said, “I die through you, for this I summon you before God.” She knew well enough he was not a judge but an enemy.
By a contradiction which shows how little the Tribunal were convinced of the justice of their own sentence, they granted her—a declared schismatic and heretic—the privilege of Holy Communion, which all these long months had been denied her. She made her last confession to Ladvenu: the Blessed Sacrament was taken openly to her cell and she received her Saviour, with what feelings we may guess: He was the one friend who was not deserting her when she was abandoned by all others, who did not turn against her when, as it seemed, the Church had condemned her, the one friend who would stand by her to the last and welcome her at the end of the terrible day. “God willing,” she said later to Pierre Maurice at the foot of the scaffold, “this evening I shall be with God in Paradise.”
The cart that was to take her to the market-place was waiting for her in the courtyard. Dressed in a woman’s <cotte>, close-fitting bodice and long skirt, on her head a linen coif, its front fold let down to hide her face from prying eyes, she was led to the tumbril, pushed into it and the procession started. An escort of some eighty soldiers surrounded her, Martin Ladvenu walked by her side, and Joan was weeping. All Rouen had come to see her die; they lined the streets, appeared at every window, packed the market-place, that is, what space the English soldiers had left for them.
Standing on a platform facing that of Cauchon, Beaufort and the Tribunal, she had to listen to a long exhortation by Nicolas Midi, one of her judges. Since Midi is that same man who was selected six months later to offer an address of welcome to the English king on the occasion of his visit to Paris, you are at liberty to think it contained more insulting remarks than expressions of compassion. St Joan, they say, listened patiently and quietly throughout.
The sermon ended, Bishop Cauchon had the impudence once more to approach Joan to exhort her to repentance. Once more, she faced him with the same reproach: “Alas, I die through you, Bishop”. Returning to his seat, the bishop began to read out the sentence. Here are some samples of the expressions this traitor used in delivering his judgment on a saint:
“Having regard to the malice of her diabolical obstinacy” . . . She is guilty of “unheard-of crimes, damnable malice, perjury and blasphemy”. She is described as “a homicidal viper, a member of Satan . . . they must watch that the horrible contagion of her pernicious leprosy does not contaminate the Church.” She is “a rotten member that must be cast out from the unity of the Church”. Cauchon meant to earn the gratitude of his masters as well as his fee.
After the reading of the sentence of excommunication came a long pause, for a condemned person was not denied time to address the people if wishing to do so. For half an hour or more Joan spoke, protesting her faith and trust in God, asking for the prayers of the people as well as for the intercession of the saints, and her words, “pitiful, devout and Catholic”, were so moving that those who could hear her, even the Cardinal of England and many Englishmen, were seen to weep.
The soldiers grew impatient. Two sergeants came and forced her down from the platform where she stood and led her to the Bailiff who represented the English authorities. So far she had been excommunicated but not sentenced to death: yet no judgment was read in the name of the king, no sentence was pronounced, and the Bailiff, merely waving his hand, to signify these legal formalities were not worth troubling about, said: “<Menez. Menez>”—that is: “Take her away. Take her away”—and she was straightway taken to the stake and handed to the executioner. She asked for a cross and a soldier hastily made one with two pieces of wood tied together—she kissed it and put it in her bosom. Then her arms were pinioned behind her back and she was chained to the stake. At her request, Isambart, who, as well as Ladvenu, was attending her, sent for the cross of a near-by church and held it before her right to the end of her long agony. “To the end of her life”, affirms Martin Ladvenu, “she maintained and asserted that her Voices came from God and that what she had done had been done by God’s command. She did not believe that her Voices had deceived her, and in giving up the ghost, bending her head she uttered the name of Jesus in a voice that could be heard all over the market-place by all present, as a sign that she was fervent in the faith of God.” Her heart was unconsumed. By order of Cardinal Beaufort, the ashes and all that remained of St Joan were put into a sack and thrown into the Seine “that the world might have no relic of her of whom the world was not worthy”.[5]
On the scaffold at St Ouen St Joan had appealed to the Holy See. In 1456, twenty-five years after her death, another appeal was made, this time in the name of her mother and of her brothers who were still alive. The verdict of 1431 was reversed by Pope Calixtus III on the grounds of the obvious hostility and unfairness of the judges, of additions, suppressions and omissions in the summing-up, of the incompetence of the court, culminating in an illegal sentence and an irregular execution.
A mere reversal of the iniquitous sentence could not satisfy posterity, nor did it do full justice to the memory of St Joan, for she was more than the innocent victim of political and national quarrels, more than a great patriot: she was a saint, as many of her contemporaries had indeed believed and proclaimed her to be. On May 13th, 1920, in the great basilica of St Peter in Rome, Pope Benedict XV solemnly declared her to be one of God’s great servants and declared that she was to be honoured as Saint Joan, Virgin.[6]
