A Crown Without Conviction
In 1422 the disinherited son of Charles VI called himself King Charles VII. France was desperate and looked to him, but found little to hold on to. At about twenty he was listless, timid and unsure of his own claim. Like many of his countrymen, he probably doubted that he was truly his father's legitimate child. Jean Fouquet's portrait shows a sad, plain face with swollen eyes and a very long nose.
He was devout. He heard Mass three times a day and let no hour of prayer pass unobserved. The rest of his time went to a crowd of mistresses and concubines, although his dutiful wife bore him twelve children. He pawned his jewels and many garments inherited from his ancestors to fund the resistance against England. But he had no appetite for fighting and left the war to his ministers and generals. Apart from the spirited Jean de Dunois, the illegitimate son of Louis, Duke of Orléans, these men were neither energetic nor shrewd, and they quarrelled out of jealousy.
In 1428 the English marched south to besiege Orléans, and no organized defense met them. Orléans stands on the Loire. If it fell, the southern provinces that still leaned hesitantly toward Charles would likely join the north, and all France would become an English colony. North and south alike waited for the outcome and prayed for help from outside.
Domrémy and the Prophecy
Even Domrémy, a remote village on France's eastern frontier, followed the struggle with patriotic and religious fervor. Its peasants held thoroughly medieval beliefs. They lived from nature but felt themselves surrounded by a supernatural world. They were sure spirits lived around them, and many village women swore they had seen and spoken with them. Like country people elsewhere in France, they thought the English were devils who hid their tails in the backs of their coats.
A prophecy circulating in the village said that God would one day raise up a "Maiden" to cleanse France of these demons and end the war. The mayor's wife whispered these hopes to her goddaughter, Joan. Joan's father, Jacques d'Arc, was a prosperous peasant and probably paid such tales little attention.
The Voices
Among her devout neighbors, Joan was known for piety and fear of God. She loved going to church, confessed her sins to the priest regularly and earnestly, took part in local charitable work, and fed the birds and hens in her small garden. In 1424, aged thirteen, she was fasting when she thought she saw a strange light above her and heard a voice telling her to be obedient and to go to church always. The author suggests that the physiological changes of that impressionable age may have unsettled her and fed hallucinations.
Over the next five years she heard "voices" giving various counsel. Eventually it seemed to her that the archangel Michael commanded her to go to the aid of the king of France, restore his kingdom, and seek Captain Baudricourt at Vaucouleurs, who would take her to the king. Another time the voice told her to lead the dauphin to Reims to be anointed and crowned. This mattered because until the Church formally anointed Charles, France doubted that his kingship had divine sanction. Once the sacred oil was on his head, the French would unite behind him and the country could be saved.
From Domrémy to Chinon
After long and painful hesitation, Joan told her parents about her visions. Her father was horrified that an ordinary, innocent girl would take on such a fantastic mission. He said he would not allow it and would drown her with his own hands. To turn her aside, he put a village youth up to claiming her in marriage. Joan denied the claim. To keep her virginity, which she had pledged to the saints, and still obey the voices, she fled to her uncle and persuaded him to take her to Vaucouleurs (1429).
Baudricourt first advised the uncle to give his seventeen-year-old niece a good beating and send her home. But Joan forced her way into his presence and insisted that God had sent her to help the king save Orléans. Baudricourt softened. He still suspected she was possessed, but he sent word to Chinon to ask the king's pleasure. When a royal order arrived, he gave her a sword, the people of Vaucouleurs gave her a horse, and six soldiers agreed to escort her on the long, dangerous journey.
She put on men's military clothing: a leather jerkin, tight hose, long stockings, boots and spurs. This may have been to protect herself from the soldiers, to ride more easily, and to be accepted by the military. She also cut her hair like a boy's. She passed through towns that feared her as a witch and worshipped her as a saint, calm and dignified.
Before the King
She covered 735 kilometers in eleven days and came before the king and his council. Charles wore poor clothes that did not look royal, but Joan, as the story goes (and the author asks how legend can be kept out of her life), recognized him at once and greeted him politely. She told him that her name was Joan the Maid and that the King of Heaven had sent her to say he would be anointed and crowned at Reims and would become the lieutenant of the King of Heaven, who is the true King of France.
A priest who later served as her chaplain said that in private she reassured the king that he was his father's legitimate son. Some scholars think that from her first meeting with Charles, Joan found in the clergy the true interpreters of her inner voices and followed their guidance in her counsel to the king. Through her, bishops had some commanders removed and replaced.
Charles, still doubtful, sent her to Poitiers to be examined by scholars, who found no heresy or wickedness in her. Women were appointed to test her virginity, and that too gave satisfaction. The scholars, like Joan, saw virginity as a special mark of God's messengers.
The Relief of Orléans
In Orléans, Dunois had assured the garrison that God would soon send help. When he heard of Joan, half believing his own hopes, he asked the court to send her at once. She was dressed in white armor, given a white banner bearing the French royal emblem, mounted on a black horse, and sent toward Orléans with a large convoy of supplies. Getting into the city on April 29, 1429 was not hard. The English had not fully surrounded it. They had spread an army of two or three thousand, smaller than the garrison, among ten or twelve strategic towers around the city.
The people of Orléans saw her as the Virgin Mary made flesh. They followed her everywhere, even into danger, went with her to church, prayed when she prayed and wept when she wept. At her command the soldiers gave up their mistresses and tried to speak without foul language. One captain, La Hire, found this impossible, so Joan allowed him to swear by his baton of command. This same rough Gascon is credited with the famous prayer: "Lord, I ask that you do for La Hire what La Hire would do for you if he were God and you were La Hire."
Joan sent a letter to Talbot, the English commander, proposing that the two armies unite in brotherhood and march together to free the Holy Land from the Turks instead of fighting. Talbot thought this beyond his mission.
A few days later, part of the garrison crossed the river without telling Dunois or Joan and attacked an English bastion. The English fought bravely and drove the French back. When Dunois and Joan learned of it, they mounted, rallied the troops and attacked again. This time the French won and the English lost the position. The next day the French stormed two more bulwarks and took them. Joan was in the thick of every fight. In the second one an arrow wounded her shoulder, but once the wound was bandaged she returned to the battle.
Meanwhile the powerful artillery of Guillaume Duisy bombarded the English fort of Les Tourelles with 55-kilogram shot. After the fort fell, the victorious French massacred about five hundred English, a sight Joan did not take in. Talbot concluded his men were too few to maintain the siege and withdrew north on May 8.
Reims, and the Soldier Who Forgot She Was a Saint
All France rejoiced. The people saw the hand of God in the Maid of Orléans, while the English declared her a sorceress and swore to take her alive or dead.
The day after her triumph, Joan went to meet the king, who came out from Chinon. He greeted her with a kiss and accepted her plan to go to Reims, crossing the country from one end to the other through enemy territory. Her troops fought the English at Meung, Beaugency and Patay, won repeatedly, and distressed her with revenge massacres. When she saw a French soldier kill an English prisoner, she dismounted, took the dead man's head in her lap and sent for a confessor.
The king entered Reims on July 15 and was anointed and crowned in the great cathedral on the 17th in an impressive ceremony. Jacques d'Arc came from Domrémy and saw his daughter, still in men's clothes, ride in splendor through the streets of France's greatest religious city. He seized the chance and, through her intercession, got his village exempted from taxes for a year.
For a moment Joan thought her mission was complete. She said that if God willed, it was time for her to go home and tend sheep with her brother and sister. But the fever of war had entered her blood. Half of France considered her inspired and holy, and she herself almost forgot she was a saint and became a warrior. She was strict with her soldiers, punishing and scolding them with affection and denying them the things soldiers enjoy. Once she found them with two prostitutes and was so furious that she drew her sword and struck one woman with such force that the blade broke and the woman died on the spot.
Paris, Compiègne and Capture
When the king attacked Paris, still held by the English, Joan went with him. Leading the advance to clear the first moat and approaching the second, she took an arrow in the thigh but stayed on the field to keep up morale. The assault failed. The French lost 1,500 men and cursed her, thinking that prayer could quench cannon and gunfire. Some French women who envied her had been waiting for her first misfortune and blamed her for leading the troops to slaughter on the Virgin's birthday (September 8, 1429).
She withdrew with her army to Compiègne, where the Burgundians, allied with the English, surrounded her. Joan charged the besiegers bravely but was repulsed. She was the last to retreat, and before she reached the town its gates were shut against her. Enemies pulled her from her horse and took her captive to Jean of Luxembourg (May 24, 1430). He kept her honorably in the castles of Beaulieu and Beaurevoir.
The Sale
This capture put Jean of Luxembourg in a dangerous bind. His overlord, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, demanded a huge price, and the English pressed him to hand her over, hoping that executing her would break the spell that had given the French such courage.
They sent Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, who had been expelled from his diocese for backing the English, to Philip. They gave him money and authority to buy the Maid by any means and bring her to the British authorities, and in return promised him the archbishopric of Rouen. The Duke of Bedford, who oversaw the University of Paris, had its scholars urge Philip to hand Joan over as a witch and heretic to Cauchon, since she had been taken in his ecclesiastical district.
When these talks stalled, Cauchon offered Jean and Philip a bribe of 1,000 gold crowns (250,000 dollars in the book's conversion). When that was not enough, the English government banned exports to the whole Burgundian lowland region. This threatened Flanders, the richest source of the duke's income, with bankruptcy. In the end Jean, at his wife's insistence, and Philip, despite his title "the Good," took the money and handed the Maid to Cauchon, who took her to Rouen.
Although she was nominally a prisoner of the Inquisition, she was held under English protection in a castle tower controlled by the Earl of Warwick, governor of Rouen. Her feet were shackled and a chain across her chest tied her to a heavy beam.
The Trial
Her trial ran from February 21 to the end of May 1431. Cauchon presided, one of his subordinate clerics acted as prosecutor, a Dominican friar represented the Inquisition, and forty theologians and jurists served as assessors. The charge was heresy and unbelief. To block the sorcerers and witches then troubling Europe, the Church had declared any claim of divine inspiration heresy, punishable by death.
Witches were burned for claiming supernatural powers, and popular opinion, clerical and lay, held that anyone making such claims drew their extraordinary power from the devil. Some judges seem to have thought this of Joan. In their eyes her refusal to accept the Church as Christ's stand-in on earth was worse than her claim to hear "voices" that marked her as a sorceress and fraud. Most of the court held this view. Even so, the plain honesty of her answers and her obvious piety shook them. They were men, and many probably felt pity for this nineteen-year-old girl, the prey of English fear. Warwick said bluntly, as soldiers do: "The King of England has paid a great price to get her, and he will by no means let her die a natural death, guilty or innocent."
Some judges wanted to refer her case to the pope, freeing her and the court from English control. Joan said she was willing. But her distinction between powers ruined her. She admitted the pope's supremacy in religious matters, but for what she had done at the command of her voices she would accept no judge except God. The judges all agreed this was heresy.
Worn out by months of interrogation, she was pushed into a recantation and made to sign a statement. Then she learned it meant she would spend the rest of her life in prison under English jurisdiction, and she took it back. English soldiers surrounded the court and threatened to kill the judges if they did not condemn the Maid to death. A few judges met and sentenced the poor girl to death.
The Stake
That morning a great pile of wood was heaped in the market square of Rouen. Two platforms were built nearby for Cardinal Winchester and his English prelates, and for Cauchon and the judges. Eight hundred English soldiers stood guard. Joan was brought to the square in a cart, accompanied by an Augustinian friar, Isambart, who had helped her to the last at the cost of his own safety. She asked for a cross, and an English soldier made one from two sticks and gave it to her.
She accepted it but asked for a cross blessed by the Church too. Isambart made the officials fetch one from the church of Saint-Sauveur. It was noon and the soldiers were growling at the delay. Their commander asked whether the priests meant to have lunch there, and his men seized the girl from the clergy and bound her to the stake. Isambart held the Church's blessed cross before her face, and a Dominican friar climbed the woodpile with her. The wood was lit. When flames reached her feet and she saw the friar still beside her, she begged him to climb down and save himself. Then she called on her voices, the saints, the archangel Michael and Christ, and burned in extreme agony.
One of the English king's secretaries foresaw history's verdict and cried: "We are lost. We have burned a saint."
Vindication
In 1455 Pope Callixtus III, at Charles VII's request, ordered a new review of the evidence on which Joan had been condemned. In 1456, with France now victorious, the appeals court declared the 1431 verdict null and unjust. In 1920 Pope Benedict XV declared the Maid of Orléans a saint.