The Maid and the Queen (32 page)

This was the admission Cauchon had been waiting for. Her reply was duly noted and recorded. As he and the others left the cell, the bishop of Beauvais turned to the English officials who were waiting in the hallway. “Farewell, it is done,” he said.

And so came the morning of Wednesday, May 30, 1431, the day established by her judges for her public condemnation and execution. To
accommodate the earl of Warwick, the bishop of Beauvais had wasted no time and called an immediate meeting of the assessors, at which Joan’s relapse was confirmed by majority vote. The English used the intervening hours to erect raised platforms for the officers who would attend the burning and to construct a low circular stone barricade in the middle of the public square of the Old Market of Rouen, the venue deemed most suited to accommodate the expected crowd. Into this a stake was driven.

Joan was informed of her impending death when she awoke that Wednesday by Brother Martin Ladvenu, who had been sent by Cauchon to hear her confession, another irregularity, as the prisoner’s heresy should have prohibited her from receiving this solace. This time there would be no reprieve, and Joan knew it. “‘Alas! Do they treat me thus horribly and cruelly, so that my body, clean and whole, which was never corrupted, must be this day consumed and reduced to ashes!… Alas! Had I been in the ecclesiastical prison to which I submitted myself, and been guarded by men of the Church and not by my enemies and adversaries, it had not so wretchedly happened to me as now it has! Ah! I appeal before God, the Great Judge, from the great wrongs and grievances being done to me.’ And she complained marvelously in that place of the oppressions and violences which had been done to her in the prison by the gaolers and by others who had been let in against her,” remembered an eyewitness. Nor did Joan fail in her despair to identify her true adversary. After her confession, Cauchon himself visited Joan for one last interview. “Bishop, I die by you,” she cried out passionately as he entered her cell.

She was made to put on the long robe and hood of the condemned and in this costume was paraded down to the Old Market. The English, taking no chances, surrounded her with some eight hundred soldiers equipped with blades and axes; more were waiting at the square. By nine o’clock when she arrived, the platforms were already filled by her judges and assessors, as well as numerous English officials, and a great crowd had gathered, some in the marketplace, others hanging out of windows or perched on roofs.

Again, she was first made to endure a protracted sermon on the evils of heresy and the need for all true Christians to snuff it out without mercy, lest the one infect the whole; but this time she was not offered the chance to recant. Instead, as soon as the pastor had finished, Cauchon stepped forward and delivered the judges’ verdict:

“We declare that thou, Joan, commonly called the Maid, art fallen into diverse errors and diverse crimes of schism, idolatry, invocation of devils and numerous others…. And thereafter, after abjuration of thine errors, it is evident that thou hast returned to those same errors and to those crimes, your heart having been beguiled by the author of schism and heresy…. Wherefore we declare thee relapsed and heretic.” Then the bishop uttered the words that the English had been waiting for since they had first laid down their 10,000 livres tournois the previous December. “By this sentence… we rule that like a rotten limb you be cut off and rejected from the unity of the church and we remit you to secular justice.”

The execution of Joan of Arc.

Again by precedent, Joan ought to have at this point been handed over to the sheriff and taken to a civil court, there to go through the official process of sentencing and punishment, but the English were in no mood for formalities. No sooner were the words out of Cauchon’s mouth than she was seized by the executioner and dragged to the stake.

And it was at this point that Joan broke: Joan who in an effort to exhort her men to victory had so often in the past defiantly planted her standard in the name of God and king, enduring with steadfast purpose a rain of arrows and cannonballs by the enemy; Joan who had met without fear or doubt those
who were her superiors in age, learning, and lineage, expertly trading barb for barb, subtlety for subtlety, for months on end without losing her composure; Joan who by nineteen had suffered deprivation, humiliation, and oppression such as the most hardened soldier of fortune had not experienced and who yet never lost the clear song nor sweet joy of her faith, finally succumbed to the terror and anguish that lay before her. Piteously shrieking and crying, “imploring and invoking without cease the aid of the saints of paradise,” so that she moved the hearts of even those who supported the English cause, she was bound to the stake and the fire lit. Because of her youth and vitality, and the low stone parapet encircling the stake, which prevented the fire from overtaking her at once, the duration of Joan’s agony was prolonged even beyond that which was common for the ordeal. In the over half an hour that it took for her to die in the smoke and flames she continued to beg her angels for mercy and to proclaim her faith in God: “Once in the fire, she cried out more than six times, ‘Jesus!’ and especially in her last breath, she cried with a strong voice, ‘Jesus!’ so that everyone present could hear it; almost all wept with pity,” recounted an onlooker. After this, her head fell forward, the flames finally overcame the stone parapet that surrounded her, and she perished.

The English remained cautious of Joan even in death, so much so that after the fire died down, the executioner was ordered to throw her heart, which had remained intact, along with the rest of her ashes, into the Seine. This prevented their being used as relics but also, according to witnesses, “because they feared lest she escape or lest some say she had escaped.”

Still, the English had gotten what they had paid for: the Maid who had so humbled their army had been made to suffer torments and was now gone. But at least one of those present had an inkling of what the victory over this single, transcendent French soul had cost them. Master Jean Tressard, secretary to Henry VI, witnessed the execution and returned afterward to the castle much troubled.

“We are all lost,” he said.

C
HAPTER
12

Of Politics
and
Prisoners

T WOULD BE GRATIFYING
to be able to confirm the widespread belief that this one act, the terrible martyrdom of Joan of Arc—so unjust, so cruel, so iniquitous—resulted, as Master Jean Tressard predicted, in the immediate vanquishing of the English and the triumphal return of Charles VII to his hereditary throne. Or even that, if not quite the catalyst for a precipitous surrender, Joan’s execution at least marked the moral turning point in the conflict, the moment at which the native French population, repulsed by the deed, turned against the occupation and began the slow process of throwing off the yoke of the invaders. And yet the sad truth is that Joan’s death
had absolutely no effect
upon the war, or the politics of the period, or the eventual outcome of the struggle about which she had cared so deeply and in which, for a very brief period, she had played so critical a role. To her contemporaries, Joan’s condemnation and slaying, while deplored by those whose political leanings coincided with her own, represented little more than a sideshow, a momentary diversion—fleetingly noted and just as quickly forgotten.

In part, this uninterest was due to a lack of information regarding the more troubling aspects of her trial. The official record of the proceedings was kept secret at Rouen. This did not stop both the English and the University of Paris from disseminating as much incriminating evidence and hearsay as was necessary to gain support for their actions. Within a month of
Joan’s execution, Henry VI sent a letter around addressed to “the prelates, dukes, counts, and other nobles and to the cities of his kingdom of France,” commanding them “through preaching and public sermons and otherwise” to trumpet the story of her many impieties, emphasizing that before she had burned, the Maid had acknowledged her voices to be shams; the University of Paris masters penned a similar letter to Rome. These measures of course influenced popular opinion. To the outside world, Joan’s words and actions had been impartially reviewed by high-ranking and learned members of the clergy and had been found (as many who adhered to the Burgundian side in the war had already suspected) to be heretical. An anonymous Burgundian chronicler, known simply as “un Bourgeois de Paris,” devoted a lengthy passage in his journal to Joan’s philosophy and execution that is instructive as to the manner in which she was viewed by ordinary people of the opposing camp. “She rode with the King every day, amongst very many men-at-arms, no woman with her, wearing men’s clothing, points, and armor, and carrying a great stick in her hand,” he wrote. “If any of her men did anything wrong, she would wallop them hard with this stick, like a very brutal woman…. In several places she had men and women killed, both in battle and in deliberate revenge, for she had anyone who did not obey her letters killed immediately without pity whenever she could. She said and affirmed that she never did anything except at God’s command, as given to her frequently by the archangel St. Michael, by St. Catherine, and by St. Margaret, who made her do these things—not as Our Lord did to Moses on Mount Sinai, but themselves, personally, told her secret things that were to come; that they had ordered and did order everything that she did, her clothes and everything else.

“Such and worse were my lady Joan’s false errors. They were all declared to her in front of the people, who were horrified when they heard these great errors against our faith which she held and still did hold. For, however clearly her great crimes and errors were shown her, she never faltered or was ashamed, but replied boldly to all the articles enumerated before her like one wholly given over to Satan,” the chronicler concluded.