Meanwhile the University of Paris were deliberating upon their answer to the twelve articles. This body met on the 29th of April, within the convent of Saint Bernard. The ancient building, in which the University held many notable conclaves when even Popes were judged by the doctors of Paris, still exists, but it has been transformed into an oil warehouse. John de Troyes, senior of the Faculty of Theology, was the spokesman, and read the decisions of the faculty on each of the twelve articles. It is unnecessary to go through the long verbiage of abuse and blasphemy with which these theologians thought it their duty to bespatter Joan of Arc.
On every head these reverend seigneurs condemned her. After De Troyes had finished his reading of the opinions and the judgment, Guérold de Boissel read the deliberations of the Faculty of Decrees upon the six points of accusation. 'If this woman,' so ran the rede, 'was in her right mind when she made affirmation of the propositions contained in the twelve articles, one may say in the manner of counsel and of doctrine, and to speak charitably, first, that she is schismatic in separating herself from obedience to the Church; secondly, that she is out of the pale of the law in contradicting the article "Unam Sanctam Ecclesiam Catholicam"; thirdly, apostate, for having cut short her hair, which was given her by God to hide her head with, and also in having abandoned the dress of a woman for that of a man; fourthly, vicious and a soothsayer, for saying, without showing miracles, that she is sent by God, as was Moses and John the Baptist; fifthly, rebel to the faith, by remaining under the anathema framed by the canons of the Church, and by not receiving the Sacraments of the Church at the season set apart by the Church, in order not to have to cease wearing the dress of a man; and, sixthly, blasphemous in saying that she knows she will be received into Paradise. Therefore, if after being charitably warned she refuses to re-enter the Catholic faith, and thereby give satisfaction, she shall be given over to the secular judges, and meet with the punishment due to her crimes.'
And the University of Paris in solemn conclave ratified the above judgment. The University also sent Cauchon a letter of commendation, in which he was held up to the general admiration as a faithful pastor, zealous in good works, on whom the University trusted that the Almighty would, on the day of His manifestation, bestow an imperishable crown of glory.
Such were the sentiments of the most erudite, most pious, and most eminent school of learning existing in the capital of France. On the 19th of May Cauchon summoned yet another gathering of Joan's judges in the archiepiscopal palace at Rouen. Fifty of them attended. After some discussion, during which a few of the learned men present expressed their opinion that Joan of Arc should be at once handed over to the secular arm, it was decided that the prisoner should again be brought before them to be what they were pleased to call 'charitably admonished.' Accordingly, four days after, on the 23rd of May, in a chamber near Joan of Arc's dungeon, another meeting was held. On this occasion a canon of Rouen, named Peter Morice, was ordered to question the prisoner.
He commenced by delivering a long lecture, in which he recapitulated the twelve articles, and wound up his oration by imploring Joan to submit herself to the Church Militant, and threatening her with the loss of body and soul in this world and the next if she still refused to do so.
Joan of Arc was as unmoved and as firm when thus threatened as she had been when placed before the instruments of torture, and she replied:—
'If I were to see the fire itself, the stake, and the executioner ready to light the pile, and were I in the midst of the flames, I should not say anything else than what I have already spoken during the trial, and this is my determination, even unto my death!'
There is some probability for believing that, during the following evening after this last meeting of Joan of Arc and her judges, Loiseleur gained admittance to the prisoner, and, under the disguise of a friendly and sympathetic priest, promised Joan that if she would conform to the wishes of the judges, she should be taken out of the prison she now lay in and the custody of the English, and transferred to prisons belonging to the Church.
Poor Joan's chief desire was that she might be set free from the hands of the English. Be this as it may, there is no authority given for this idea of Loiseleur having probed her on this point; and Wallon, in his history of the Maid, makes no allusion to such an interview, and only states that John Beaupère went in the morning of the 24th to the prison, and he was soon followed there by Nicolas Loiseleur, who vehemently urged on Joan to comply with the demands which the judges had made.
Nothing had been neglected to give the greatest solemnity to the cruel farce which Cauchon had prepared to be now enacted—a solemnity by which the Bishop hoped to degrade Joan of Arc in the eyes of the people. It was that of obliging the prisoner to make a public apology and recantation of all her deeds—a declaration in fact to be made by her in the eyes of the whole world that all she had undertaken and accomplished had been through and by the aid of evil spirits.
By this stroke the Bishop hoped to show to France that its heroine, instead of being a sainted and holy maid sent by God to deliver her country from the invader, was, by her own open and public confession, proved to be an emanation from Satan—a being abhorrent in the eyes of God and man. By this device, Cauchon hoped also to deal a blow to Charles, for when once it became known that his servant and saviour was a creature in league with the fiends, all the works done through her influence, and by her prowess, including his coronation, would also be proved to have been accomplished by the powers of darkness, and therefore deeds abhorrent to all good Catholics throughout his realm.
The place chosen for the stage on which Joan of Arc was to abjure before the eyes of Rouen—and through Rouen the rest of France—her deeds and her words, was the cemetery in front of that most beautiful of all Gothic fanes—the Church of Saint Ouen.
Adjacent to its southern wall the exquisitely carved portal named the Marmousets, then as now rich in statuary of royal and imperial benefactors of the Church, looks down upon what is the entrance to a fair public garden. In the fifteenth century this space was used as a place of burial.
Here, arranged with a view to dramatic effect, were placed two huge wooden scaffolds, or rather platforms, which faced one another. Upon one of these sat the Bishop of Beauvais in state. He had on his right hand the Prince Cardinal of Winchester, great-uncle of the child-king Henry VI., with other notabilities of the Church; the Bishops of Norwich, of Noyon, and of Thérouenne; the Vice-Inquisitor, eight abbots, and a large number of friars and doctors, clerical and lay—in fact all those who had attended the trials of the Maid of Orleans during the two preceding months. Upon the opposite platform stood Joan of Arc, a crowd of lawyers and priests about her. Here, too, stood Loiseleur close by the prisoner; he never ceased urging her to conform to the commands of the clergy about her.
A vast throng of the town's-people gathered below, and the place was all in a turmoil. A seething mob had followed the Maid from her prison to the cemetery, which, already full, now held with difficulty the fresh press of people who accompanied Joan of Arc and her guards to the purlieus of the Church of Saint Ouen.
William Erard had been appointed by Cauchon to preach in this 'terrible comedy,' as Michelet calls this farce of the Maid's abjuration. For text the monk selected the fifteenth chapter of Saint John's gospel: 'The branch,' etc. Erard showed in his discourse how Joan had fallen from one sin into another, till she had at length separated herself from the Church. To a long string of abuse about herself Joan of Arc listened with perfect patience; but the preacher, not content with hurling his invectives at the prisoner, began to attack her King for having listened to Joan's advice, by which conduct the King had, Erard said, also incurred the crime of heresy.
This attack on Charles roused the indignation of the Maid. Turning on the monk, without a moment's thought of her own situation, and the fresh danger she exposed herself to, the noble girl exclaimed: 'By my faith, and with all respect to you, I dare to affirm on my peril that the King of this realm is the noblest of Christians, and no one has greater love for the Faith and Church than my King!'
'Silence her!' shrieked the preacher, beside himself with rage at finding that these few words from the lips of Joan of Arc had destroyed all the effect of his eloquence on that vast crowd, whose sympathy must have been now strongly shown towards the glorious victim before them.
Again summoned to submit to the Church, Joan said: 'I have answered on that point already to my judges. I call upon them to send an account of all my actions to the Holy Father at Rome, to whom after God I submit myself.'
This was not what Cauchon wished his victim to express, for one of the charges that he had made against her was her refusal to submit to the Pope. He therefore changed the subject, and asked Joan of Arc whether she acknowledged that there were any things evil among those deeds she had committed or said.
'As to my deeds and sayings,' she answered, 'I have done them by the command of God.'
'Then you admit,' said the Bishop, 'that the King and others have sometimes urged you to act as you have done?'
'As to my words and actions,' she answered, 'I make no one, and particularly not the King, responsible. If any wrong has been committed, it is I who am to blame, and not another.'
'But,' said Cauchon, 'those acts and words of yours which have been found evil by the judges, will you recant them?'
'I submit them,' said Joan, 'to God and our Holy Father the Pope.'
'The bishops,' continued Cauchon, 'are the judges in their dioceses, therefore you must submit to the Church as your judges have determined that you shall do.'
Joan still refused, and the Bishop then began to read the sentence condemning her to death as a heretic.
Now arose a great uproar among the clergy and others on the platforms and among the crowd beneath. Loiseleur and Massieu urged her to abjure; the former promising that if she consented she would, after abjuring, be taken from her English jailers and placed in keeping of the clergy. In the midst of the hubbub Erard produced a parchment scroll, on which, he told Joan, were written the different accusations against her, which she had only to sign with her mark to be saved. All about this abjuration was a mesh of confusion to the mind of Joan. Massieu told her she need but make a mark on the parchment before her to be delivered: if not—and he pointed down to a grim figure near the foot of the stage they were on, where stood the headsman with cart and assistants, ready to draw her to the stake.
'Abjure!' cried Erard and Massieu, 'or you will be taken and burnt.'
Even Joan of Arc's courage failed at that sight, and all the woman in her nature asserted itself.
'Do what I tell you,' cried Loiseleur; 'abjure and put on woman's dress, and all will yet be well.'
The text of the abjuration was then hurriedly read, Joan of Arc following it, and repeating the words, the sense of which she had no time to understand. She spoke the words, it is said, as one in a dream. Some said she did this mockingly, for she was observed to smile once or twice; but the poor soul's spirit was crushed, and doubtless the whole scene was to her like an evil dream—the poor broken-down body could not discriminate what words she was forced to repeat. A troubled, horrible dream must that have seemed to the hapless maiden, standing on that scaffold, with all the shouting mob about, and all her deadly enemies at hand. She made her mark on the parchment—a little cross—and the deed was done.
In the recantation, or abjuration, thus obtained from Joan of Arc, the twelve articles were included, with all their abuse set down. Thus was Joan obliged by her signature to declare that all her visions and voices were false and from evil spirits; also that she had been guilty of transgressing laws divine in having worn her hair cut short and the dress of a man; also in having caused bloodshed; also in having idolatrously invoked evil spirits; also in having treated God and His sacraments with contempt; and, besides all this, of having acted schismatically, and of having fallen foul of the Church: all of which crimes and errors she now abjured, and humbly submitted herself to the will of the Church and its ordinances. She promised with her abjuration not to relapse, and called on Saint Peter, the Pope, as well as the Bishop of Beauvais and other of her judges, to keep her word.
Not content with having inveigled Joan of Arc into signing this farrago of blasphemous nonsense, her judges, it seems, added fraud to their crime by reading to the prisoner a different recantation from that to which they had forced her to sign her mark. The one she marked contained only six lines, and it did not take longer to read these few lines, an eye-witness afterwards asserted, than it does to repeat the 'Paternoster'; whereas the one produced after the ceremony of the abjuration filled several sides. But in an act of such infamy as this of having cheated Joan of Arc not only into signing a recantation of her life-work, but of confessing to her existence having been one long series of superstitious and criminal workings with the spirits of evil, it matters very little whether she signed a longer or a shorter list of falsehoods invented by her persecuting judges.
While these things were taking place upon the platform on which Joan was bullied into signing this abjuration, the English and their faction in the crowd below began to fear that their victim would escape them; they had not grasped the astuteness of the French prelate, who was ready to hand his prisoner over to them directly he had obtained this recantation from her hand. Cauchon was, however, obliged to keep them waiting until he had got that by which he hoped to destroy Joan of Arc's fame, and at the same time, and by the same deed, to retain in his possession a formidable weapon by which he thought to weaken the cause of the French monarch.
Cauchon may well have felt on that afternoon that what he had done for the English cause merited as his reward the coveted archbishopric of Rouen. There remained but one further act for him to play in this drama before he quitted his platform. Rising from among his brother bishops he read a list of the crimes committed by the prisoner, and announced that, as Joan had now, owing to her abjuration of her sins, re-entered into the fold of the Church, she was absolved by him from her excommunication. However, he added, as she had sinned so grievously against God and the Church, he, for the sake of her soul's welfare, condemned her to perpetual imprisonment—'to the water of sorrow, and the bread of anguish,' so that she might repent of her faults, and cease ever to commit any more.
Then, in spite of the promises made to her of being placed in the charge of the clergy, Cauchon ordered that Joan should be taken back to her former prison.
Warwick is said to have displayed anger at this termination of the proceedings. Observing this, one of the judges pacified him by assuring him that Joan should not be allowed to escape her fate: 'Do not fear, my lord,' he said; 'you will catch her yet.'
That evening the Vice-Inquisitor, accompanied by Loiseleur, Thomas de Courcelles, Isambard de la Pierre, and a few other of the judges who had taken part in the proceedings that day at Saint Ouen, visited the prisoner. Their object in going to her was to insist upon her changing her man's dress, with which demand she now had to comply. That occurred on Thursday night, and on the Sunday following a rumour was spread abroad that Joan of Arc had discarded the woman's dress, and had again put on male dress.
Although, during the last days of the heroine's life, it is most difficult to gather anything authentic as to her treatment in the prison, we are led to understand, by the least untrustworthy testimony, that what happened in the interval between Thursday night and the following Sunday was as follows.
The soldiers placed in charge of Joan after her recantation and her return to the prison had rendered her existence a long martyrdom; and there is reason to believe that on her discarding her man's dress these ruffians attempted to violate the prisoner: so, sooner than suffer this, although she knew that to return to her former dress would be equivalent to meeting certain death, she did not hesitate to save her maidenhood at the exposure of her life.
Michelet, in his history of the Maid, quotes from the deposition of one of the officials—Massieu, who saw much of Joan of Arc in those last days—the statement that on the morning of Trinity Sunday, on waking, she asked the soldiers to leave her alone for a few moments while she dressed; that one of the men removed her woman's clothes, and in place substituted the dress of a man; and that, in order not to be naked, she was obliged to put on the latter.
Be this as it may, on the following morning, Cauchon, followed by several of his creatures, returned to the prison, in order that he might see and show to others that his victim had been entrapped at last. 'We have come,' he said to the prisoner, 'to find out the state of your soul, and we find you, in despite of our command, and despite of your promise to renounce this man's dress, again thus attired. Tell us the reason why you have dared again to wear these clothes.'
Joan's answer was that she preferred that dress to the other, and that, being placed among men, it was better that she should wear it than the dress of a woman. Although not placed in the judicial record of this interview, Manchon adds in his account of the proceedings on that day, that Joan of Arc also said that she had returned to wearing her male attire, feeling safer when in that dress than when she was dressed in woman's clothes. This seems to us an evident avowal that she had to resist the brutality of the men placed over her in the dungeon. Massieu also adds to Manchon's testimony that he knew Joan was unable to protect herself against attempts made to violate her. Her legs were chained to the wood with which her pallet bed was framed, and this chain was again fixed to a large beam about six feet long, and locked with a padlock; so that the poor creature could hardly move. To the above testimony of these two men, Isambard de la Pierre adds his. He states that when Cauchon came to the Maid's dungeon she bore all the traces of having undergone a violent struggle, 'being all in tears, and so bruised and outraged (outrageé) that he (Isambard) could not help feeling pity for her.'
But the strongest testimony of all is that of the priest, Martin Ladvenu, who heard her confession on the eve of her death, and he confirms Isambard's statement entirely. He even adds that not only had Joan of Arc to suffer from the brutality of the soldiery placed about her, but that a millourt d'Angleterre had acted as shamefully as these men towards her.
Although Michelet and other French writers have naturally not allowed this 'Millourt' (which, by the way, is quite as correct a form of spelling that title as the better known 'Milor') to escape the branding he deserves for his attempted villainy, it is but fair to add that Isambard de la Pierre, as well as Manchon, qualify his conduct as that not of a would-be violator, but of a tempter—a not inconsiderable difference in the scale of infamy.
To return to Cauchon and Joan of Arc.
'But,' said the Bishop, 'are you not aware you have now no right to wear such a dress?'
Joan answered that she had been misled into believing that if she wore the woman's dress she would be allowed to hear Mass and to communicate, and to be, she added, 'delivered from these chains.'
'But,' replied Cauchon, 'have you not abjured, and promised never to take to wearing this dress again?'
'I would prefer to die,' she answered, 'than to remain on a prisoner here. But if I were allowed to go to the Mass, and these chains were taken off me, and if I was placed in some other prison where some woman could be near me, then I should do all that is required of me by the Church.'
In all Joan of Arc's answers it should be noticed that she never, in spite of the terrible sufferings she endured, and the gross barbarities inflicted on her, in any single instance ever made any complaint of her treatment. There is something superhuman in this utter absence of any shade of vindictiveness, when one thinks that, by a few words, she might have saved herself from much of what she had to suffer. Never once did she blame even those who had deceived, insulted, and ill-treated her; her life was one beautiful example, full of divine charity and forgiveness.
Cauchon, to make doubly sure of completing his work, then asked Joan: 'Have you, since last Thursday, heard the voices of Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret?'
'Yes,' she answered.
'And,' continued the Bishop, 'what did they say?'
'They told me of the great sorrow they felt for the great treason to which I have been led, by my abjuring and revoking my deeds in order to save my life, and that by so doing I have lost my soul.'
On the margin of the original document of the MSS. of this examination, written in the prison, the original of which is in the National Library in Paris, we find alongside of this answer of Joan of Arc's the following words: 'Responsio mortifera.' Indeed it was an answer of deadliest import; for Joan in asserting that her voices had again spoken to her, and in saying that she had committed a mortal sin by recanting her deeds, had thrown away the only plank of safety left her.
It seems to us evident, however, that Joan of Arc was now quite eager and willing to meet the worst that her enemies could inflict upon her: death itself must now have seemed more tolerable than the daily death she was undergoing in her prison.
'Did your voices urge you to resist giving way about the recantation?' questioned the Bishop.
'My voices,' Joan said, 'told me as I stood on the platform before the people that I should answer the preacher with boldness.'
'Did he not,' said Cauchon, 'speak the truth?'
'No,' she answered, 'he was a false preacher; and he accused me of having done things which I never did.'
'But,' then said Cauchon, 'do you mean to tell us that you still persist in saying that you have been sent by God?'
To which Joan replied that that was still her belief.
'Then,' continued the Bishop, 'you deny that to which you swore on oath only last Thursday?'
'My voices,' said Joan, 'have told me since then that I had committed a bad deed in saying that I had not done the things which I have done!'
'Then,' continued the Bishop, with eagerness, 'you retract your abjuration?'
'It was,' said Joan of Arc, 'from the fear of being burnt that I retracted what I had done; but I never intended to deny or revoke my voices.'
'But then,' said Cauchon, 'are you now no longer afraid of being burnt?'
'I had rather die than endure any longer what I have now to undergo.'
And with these broken-hearted words of the sufferer ended this long mockery of a trial, so patiently endured during three weariful months by the martyr Maid.
On quitting the prison, Cauchon met Lord Warwick among some Englishmen in the outer court of the castle. They were clamouring that the execution of Joan of Arc should be soon carried out. The Bishop accosted the Earl with a smile of triumph, and said to him in English:—
'You can dine now with a good appetite. We have caught her at last!'
The next day, the 29th of May, Cauchon summoned a large number of prelates and doctors—forty-two in all—to meet him at the archiepiscopal chapel, where he recounted to them all the circumstances of his late interview with the prisoner. He told them how he had found Joan, in spite of her abjuration, again dressed as a man, and of her having reaffirmed all that she had so recently abjured regarding her voices and apparitions. When he had concluded, Cauchon took the opinion of those around him. Without one dissentient voice, they all affirmed that she should be handed over to the secular arm—i.e., burnt. The deliberation had not taken long, and, after thanking the company, the Bishop made out a formal order by which Joan was summoned at eight o'clock on the next morning to the old market-place, there to be delivered into the hands of the civil judge, and by him to be handed over to those of the executioners. 'We conclude,' said the Bishop, as he dismissed the meeting, 'that Joan shall be treated as a relapsed heretic, for this appears to us right and proper in the sight of law and justice.'
Early in the morning of Wednesday, the 30th of May—a date which should be held sacred in France as that of the martyrdom of her who through all time must be her country's greatest glory—two priests (Martin Ladvenu and John Toutmouillé) were sent by the Bishop's order to the prisoner to tell her that her last day on earth had come. Toutmouillé describes, with some pathos, the manner in which Joan of Arc received the terrible news. She, he tells us, at first wept bitterly, and said she would sooner be beheaded seven times than suffer such a death as that of burning. She recalled with pain the promises made by Cauchon to her—that after she had abjured she would be taken to the prison of the Church, for then, she said, this cruel death would not have befallen her; and she called upon God, 'the omnipotent and just Judge,' to take pity on her. While she thus lamented her fate, Cauchon entered the dungeon. Turning on him, she cried: 'I lay my death at your door; for had you placed me in the prison of the Church, this cruel death would not have befallen me, and I make you responsible to God for my death.'
Then, turning away from the Bishop, she appeared more calm, and, addressing one of the judges who had followed Cauchon into the prison, exclaimed: 'Master Peter'—the man's name was Peter Maurice—'where shall I be this evening?'
'Have you not good hope in God's mercy?' he answered.
'Yes,' said Joan; 'and by His grace I hope to be in Paradise.'
Cauchon and the others having left her alone with Martin Ladvenu, she made her confession to him, and when that was finished she begged that the Sacrament might be administered to her. Without Cauchon's leave Ladvenu did not dare to obtain this supreme consolation for the martyr.
He despatched a messenger to the Bishop, who, after consulting with some of the clergy, gave his permission. In the meanwhile, the city had heard that the day of the Maid of Orleans' execution had come, and the people crowded about the neighbourhood of the castle. In spite of the English soldiery, the people did not conceal their grief and dismay on learning that the heroine was so soon to perish. The Eucharist was brought into the prison, but without the usual accompaniments of candle, stole, and surplice. These 'maimed rights' raised the indignation of the priest Martin, and he indignantly refused to proceed with the ceremony until lights and stole were brought. During the time in which Joan of Arc was receiving the Sacrament, those persons who had been admitted within the castle recited the litany for the departing soul, and never had the mournful invocation for the dying, the supplication of the solemn chant, 'Kyrie eleison! Christe eleison!' been raised from a more tragic place, or on a more heart-stirring occasion. Outside, in the street, and all around the prison gates, knelt the weeping people, fervently praying, and earnestly invoking the Almighty and His saints for her who was about to lay down her young life in their behalf. 'Christ have pity! Saint Margaret have pity! Pray for her, all ye saints, archangels, and blessed martyrs, pray for her! Saints and angels intercede for her! From Thy wrath, good Lord, deliver her! O, Lord God, save her! Have mercy on her, we beseech thee, good Lord!' The poor, helpless people had nothing but their prayers to give Joan of Arc; but these we may believe were not unavailing. There are few more pathetic events recorded in history than this weeping, helpless, praying crowd, holding their lighted candles, and kneeling, on the pavement, beneath the prison walls of the old fortress.
It was about nine o'clock when they placed on Joan of Arc a long white shirt, such as criminals wore at their execution, and on her head they set a mitre-shaped paper cap, on which the words 'heretic, relapsed, apostate, idolatress,' were written.
This was the head-dress which the victims of the Inquisition carried, and in which they were burnt.
When Joan of Arc was taken forth to die, there mounted with her on to the cart the two priests, Martin Ladvenu and Isambard. Eight hundred English troops lined the road by which the death-cart and its load passed from the castle to the old market-place; they were armed with staves and with axes. These soldiers, as the victim passed, fell into line behind the cart, and kept off with their staves the crowd, eager to show its sympathy for Joan.
Suddenly, when as yet the procession had gone but a short distance, a man pushed his way through the crowd and the soldiers, and threw himself at Joan of Arc's feet, imploring her forgiveness.
It was the priest Loiseleur, Joan's confessor and betrayer. Roughly thrown back by the men-at-arms, Loiseleur disappeared in the throng, but not before Joan had bestowed her pardon on him. On the old market-place—where now not a single building remains which witnessed the tragedy of that day—was a wide space, surrounded by picturesquely gabled and high-roofed houses, like those which still survive in the old Norman capital, and within a short distance of the churches of Saint Sauveur and Saint Michel, now destroyed. Two tribunes had been raised on either side of the square. Between this, placed high on a stage of masonry, stood the pile. A placard affixed in front of this pile bore a long inscription, beginning thus: 'Joan, known as the Maid' ... and ending with a cumbrous list of epithets, among which 'apostate' and 'schismatic' were the least abusive.
Pending the final act, a monk named Nicolas Midi was ordered by Cauchon to address the prisoner and those present. The Bishop's words have come down to us.
'For your admonition,' he began, 'and for the edification of all those present, a learned discourse will now be delivered by the distinguished doctor, Nicolas Midi'; and the distinguished doctor then took for his text, from the first Epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, twelfth chapter, the words: 'If one member suffereth,' etc.
The gist of his sermon was to prove that it was necessary, in order to prevent others falling into sin, that the guilty member should be removed. Strange, indeed, how often the words of Scripture have been used and mis-used in excuse, or in vindication, of the most atrocious cruelties by so-called Christians, professing to preach the religion of mercy, of forgiveness, and of humanity.
The sermon being finished, the preacher addressed Joan of Arc in the following words: 'Joan, the Church, wishing to prevent infection, casts you from her. She no longer protects you. Depart in peace!'
Then Cauchon took up his text, which was to the effect that Joan, 'by renouncing her abjuration, had returned as the dog of Scripture did to its vomit; for which cause we, Peter, by the divine mercy Bishop of Beauvais, and brother John Lemaître, vicar of the very reverend doctor John Graverent Inquisitor of the heretical evil [especially retained by Cauchon in the present case], have by a just judgment, declared you, Joan, commonly styled the Maid, fallen back into diverse errors and crimes, schismatical, idolatrous, and guilty of other sins in great number. For these causes we declare you fallen back into your former errors, and by the sentence of excommunication under which you were already found guilty we declare you to be heretical and relapsed; and we declare that you, as a decayed member, to prevent the contagion from spreading to others, are cast from the unity of the Church, and given over to the secular power. We reject, we cast you off, and we abandon you, praying that, beyond death and the mutilation of your limbs, the Church treats you with moderation.'
These last words were the usual formula used by the Inquisition when its victims were about to be committed to the flames. Joan of Arc meanwhile was praying fervently; and when Cauchon had finished speaking, she humbly begged those around her to pray for her. Her tears, her fervour, and her submission, overcame the feelings even of her judges.
Winchester was seen to weep, and a great wave of pity swept over the immense confused crowd; for her enemies as well as her friends among the people were all more or less under its influence.
In her prayers the heroine implored the Divine Mercy to pardon those from whom she had suffered so much. 'Pray for me in your churches,' she said to the priests—to those priests and to the Church that had deserted and condemned her; for in spite of all that she had endured at the hands of those Churchmen, Joan of Arc remained to the end as fervent and loyal a Churchwoman as she had been throughout her life.
One thing she missed. Turning to Massieu, she asked him if he had a cross. He had not, nor could one be found; but an Englishman broke his stave into two pieces, and these tied together formed a rude cross.
This cross Joan took, and placed it against her heart; but she still wanted a consecrated cross to be held before her while struggling in the flames, and this was at length obtained by the priest Isambard, who fetched one from the adjacent Church of Saint Sauveur.
Meanwhile the English soldiers began to grumble at the length of these preparations: 'Do they expect us to dine here?' they growled.
As soon as the cross from the church had been placed in her hands, she devoutly kissed it, invoking God and her saints to assist her in this the heaviest of her needs, when all human help had abandoned her.
The heroine appears to have been then seized by the English sergeants-at-arms, and given by them into the charge of the executioners; and while she was being led to the foot of the high pile of clay and wood—the instrument of her martyrdom—the men-at-arms surrounded and roughly handled their prisoner. The scene had become so poignant that many of the judges left their tribune, unable to endure the sight of that white-robed and helpless figure in the midst of the brutal soldiers hounding her on to her death. It must indeed have been a ghastly spectacle, even for men accustomed to scenes of savage brutality and cruelty. At length she was delivered from her tormentors, and, preceded by the executioner, she mounted the ladder, and was bound round the body by a chain attached to the stake.
The good priest, Isambard, closely followed her, and stood immediately beneath her, with the cross held and raised towards Joan, who but once removed her gaze from off it.
'Keep it,' she said to Isambard, 'keep it always before my eyes, till death.'
Then she took a last look around her—a last look on a world which had been so harsh and cruel a world to her, poor victim of all the powers of evil on this earth! She looked but once on the surging crowd beneath, at the old timbered houses of the town, filled from basement to high-peaked roof, with thousands of its citizens. 'O, Rouen, Rouen!' she cried, 'must I die here? I have great fear lest you will suffer for my death.' And with that she put away from her all earthly things, and gave herself up to Heaven. In the interval the executioners had lighted the lower portion of the pile of wood, and the fire, fed by the pitch-covered fagots, mounted rapidly.
Joan of Arc gave a cry of terror, and called aloud for 'Water, holy water!' The body had for an instant conquered the spirit—but it was only for an instant.
At that moment Cauchon had the inconceivable and apparently devil-driven curiosity to approach the martyr, hoping, perhaps, that in the first terror at seeing the fire springing up to her, Joan of Arc would let fall some words of reproach against her King or her saints.
'Joan,' he cried through the crackling of the flames, 'I have come to exhort you for the last time.'
'I die through you,' she said, as she had said once before, and then she was allowed to die in peace, so far as Cauchon and his Church were concerned. For her all earthly things were now over. Till the last sign of life expired the eye-witnesses who have given us the fullest account of her last moments—the priests Isambard and Massieu—declared that she continued to call on her God and on her saints. Frequently through the blinding smoke and the fierce rush of flame her face looked that of a blessed saint uplifted and radiant.
With one loud cry of 'Jesus!' her head fell on her breast.
Thus came Joan of Arc to her glorious end.
There is a tradition that when the ashes of the martyr Maid were gathered to be cast into the Seine, the heart was found unconsumed—Cor cordium!
Many other traditions are related regarding her death, but none with much certainty. The executioner is said to have come later on that day to Isambard in an agony of grief. He confessed himself, and told Isambard that he felt Heaven would never pardon him for the part he had taken in killing a saint. The poor fellow's responsibility for her death was really not greater than that of the fagots and the flames which had destroyed her life. On Cauchon and his gang of judges, lay and clerical—on the University of Paris and the Catholic Church—on Winchester and the English, noble and simple, who had sold and bought the glorious Maid, the crime of her martyrdom will ever rest, and surely no other crime but one in the world's history can be paralleled with it.
Twenty years after the events which I have attempted to describe, an act of tardy justice was accorded to Joan of Arc. Charles VII. at length felt it necessary, more for his own interest than for any care of the memory of Joan of Arc, to have a revision made of the iniquitous condemnation of the heroine.
This King, even if unable to rescue the Maid of Orleans from her captors, might at least have attempted her release, yet during all the time—over a year—of her imprisonment he had not even made a sign in her behalf.
There does not exist in the documents of the time a trace of any negotiation, of the smallest offer made to obtain her exchange by prisoners or by ransom, or of any wish to effect her release. But Charles was anxious on his own account, when France had almost wholly been gained back to its allegiance, that his coronation at Rheims should not be imputed to the actions and to the aid of one whom the French clergy and the French judges had condemned and executed as a heretic and apostate. Hence the vast judicial inquiry set on foot by the King to vindicate the fame of her whom the English and the Anglo-French had hoped, through the condemnation pronounced by Cauchon in the name of the Church, to vilify, and through her, by her trial, condemnation, and death, to discredit Charles and his coronation.
On the 15th of February, 1450, Charles VII. declared that Joan of Arc's enemies had destroyed her 'against reason'—so ran the formula—'and very cruelly,' and that it was his, the King's, intention 'to obtain the truth regarding this affair.'
Pope Nicolas V. made difficulties. Cardinal d'Estouteville, who had undertaken to manage the process of rehabilitation, presented the Pope with a claim for a revision of the sentence of condemnation in the name of Joan of Arc's mother and of her two brothers. The petition ran thus: 'The brothers, mother, and relations of Joan, anxious that her memory and their own should be cleansed from this unmerited disgrace, demand that the sentence of condemnation that was given at Rouen shall be annulled.' Not, however, until the death of Pope Nicolas V., and the accession of Calixtus III., was anything further done.
The new Pope (Alfonso Borgia) did not hesitate as to the line he intended taking in the matter, and he gave his sanction to the rehabilitation of the heroine by a rescript dated the 11th of June, 1455. It was as follows:—
'We, Calixtus, servant of the servants of God, accord a favourable ear to the request which has been made us. There has lately been brought before us on the part of Peter and John of Arc, also of Isabella of Arc, their mother, and some of their relations, a petition stating that their sister, daughter, and relative, Joan of Arc deceased, had been unjustly condemned as guilty of the crime of heresy and other crimes against the Faith, on the false testimony of the late William [John, it should be] d'Estivet of the Episcopal Court of Beauvais, and of Peter of happy memory, at that time Bishop of Beauvais, and of the late John Lemaître, belonging to the Inquisition. The nullity of their proceedings and the innocence of Joan are clearly established both by documents and further by clearest proofs. In consequence of this, the brothers, mother, and relatives of Joan are therefore at liberty to cast off the mark of infamy with which this trial has falsely stamped them; and thus they have humbly supplicated our permission to authorise and to proceed in this trial of rehabilitation.'
The prelates selected by the Pope as commissioners to follow the course of the trial of rehabilitation were John Jouvenel des Ursins, Archbishop of Rheims, William Chartrier, Bishop of Paris, and Richard de Longueil, Bishop of Coutances. On the 7th of November, 1455, this trial was solemnly begun in the Church of Notre Dame, in Paris.
It has been said that Joan of Arc's father died of grief on hearing of his daughter's martyrdom. He was certainly dead before the date of this trial. However, the now aged mother of Joan of Arc, Isabella Romée d'Arc, in her sixty-seventh year, was there. She was supported by her two sons, John and Peter, and was accompanied by many of her relations from Vaucouleurs, and friends from Orleans. The poor soul appears to have been much affected when she appeared before the sympathetic crowd. Many of those present must have come from far to see the mother of the famous heroine claiming at the hands of the Church the vindication of her daughter's fame.
Two meetings took place at Notre Dame, and a third was held at Rouen, at which the family of Joan of Arc were unable to be present—the mother from illness, and the brothers by affairs at home. The Procureur, whose name was Prévosteau, was the advocate for the Arc family. The debates lasted all through the winter, and into the early part of the year 1456. During the debates a hundred articles were drawn up and agreed to, relating to the life, death, and trial of the heroine. None of these are of much importance or interest.
It was not until the witnesses of Joan of Arc's life at home, and of her actions abroad, gave their testimony that the debates became interesting. Then began to pass before the eyes of the spectators a succession of people who had known Joan of Arc, and who had taken part in the same actions as those of the Maid—peasants from her native village, townsfolk from Orleans, generals and soldiers who had ridden with her into battle and fought by her side.
In fact, here appeared all sorts and conditions of men, from farm labourers to princes of the blood royal. The testimony of these people helps one to follow the life of Joan of Arc throughout its short career with something like precision. The sittings of the commissioners took place at Paris, Orleans, Rouen, and also at Domremy. It may be said without exaggeration that the whole of France and all its classes seemed, after an interval of a quarter of a century, to raise its voice in honour of the memory of its martyr Maid, and to attest to the spotless and noble life of her country's saviour.
At Domremy, at Vaucouleurs, and at Toul, thirty-four witnesses were heard on the 28th of January and on the 11th of February, 1456. At Orleans, during the months of February and of March, forty-one depositions were collected by the Archbishop of Rheims.
In Paris, in April and May, the same prelate, assisted by the Bishop of Paris, heard the evidence of twenty witnesses. At Rouen, the same commission heard nineteen others. Finally, at Lyons, the deposition of Joan of Arc's esquire, d'Aulon, who had attended her throughout her campaigns, was made before the Vice-Inquisitor of that province, John Desprès.
All these depositions are recorded in Latin, the only exception being that of d'Aulon, which was taken down in French. All those written in Latin have been translated into French by M. Fabre, and published in his Procès de Réhabilitation de Jeanne d'Arc.
Among the witnesses first appear the friends and neighbours of Joan of Arc in her childhood and early years. From her birthplace came her greatest friends, Henriette, Mengette, and Isabellette. The first of these, in the year 1456, was aged forty-five, the second was a year older, and the third was in her fiftieth year. All three were the wives of labourers. Henriette was married to Gerard, Mengette to John Joyart, and Isabellette to Gerardin d'Epinal. To the child of the last Joan had stood god-mother. Next came from the same village three older women, all three being god-mothers to Joan. In those days the French peasantry seem to have had an almost unlimited number of god-fathers and god-mothers. These were named Jeannette, widow of Thépelin de Viteau, aged sixty; Jeannette Théverien, aged sixty-six; and Beatrix, widow of d'Estelin, a labourer of Domremy, then in her eightieth year.
After these three god-mothers, came to give their evidence her god-fathers. Four of these appear—John Rainguesson, John Barrey, John de Langart, and John Morel de Greux. Of these four god-fathers, only the last one seems to have been called to give evidence; he was in his seventieth year. Gerardin d'Epinal, husband of one of the god-mothers, also gave his evidence; it was his son Nicolas for whom Joan of Arc had stood sponsor. In those days it was held that the god-mother of a child stood to it in the relation of a second mother: hence originated the term of 'commère' and 'compère,' which Joan gave the d'Epinals.
Six labourers, who had been playmates with Joan in childhood, then came forward. These men, named respectively Le Cuin, Guillemeth, Waterin, Colin, Masnier, and Jacquard, were between the ages of forty-four and fifty. All these humbly born witnesses agreed in their answers to the twelve questions asked them in the following order:—