Joan of Arc by Timothy Wilson-Smith

Author:Timothy Wilson-Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Joan of Arc: Maid, Myth and History
ISBN: 9780752472263
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

Witnesses to the Trial

The many witnesses who had come forward to share their memories of Joan twenty-five years or so after they had known her regarded her with a mixture of awe and admiration, not just because of her piety and purity, but also because of her competence, courage and kindness. Indirectly, the often long depositions by acquaintances, colleagues and friends revealed how shocking had been the bias of the judges who had condemned her. Her questioners had seen her as a deceiver, yet she was transparent; as a witch, yet she remained a virgin; as heretical, yet she was scrupulously Catholic; as a sorceress, yet she claimed no special powers. They had seen her decision to revert to male costume as the conclusive sign of her wickedness, yet those who had lived with her thought her merely sensible in her choice – they had not been shocked. Some of them knew she heard ‘voices’, but none of those who did found her experiences unusually preposterous or even interesting – they were plain matter-of-fact about them.

But Joan’s new judges dealt in legal niceties rather than character assessment. As Macy realised, the key evidence concerned the trial; and what mattered most in the royal inquest and in the ecclesiastical inquests was the evidence of theologians and Church lawyers, for Joan, who could have been tried as a traitor to Henry VI and II, was tried for sorcery and heresy. Charles VII’s royal lawyers did not restore Joan’s good name because they could not: only a Church court could do that. Indeed, one royal official produced a witness who could have hindered Joan’s case, for in 1450 the king’s commissioner, Maître Guillaume Bouillé, secured the testimony of an unrepentant critic of Joan, who disappeared from history before he could speak to papal officials.

Maître Jean Beaupère, one of Joan’s most implacable interrogators twenty years earlier and who had by now retired to Besançon, just happened to come to Rouen to collect dues from his canonry in Rouen Cathedral. He felt free to express a view of Joan not unlike that he had maintained in 1431. For a royal inquest of the mid-fifteenth century, Bouille’s inquest proved to be remarkably fair. Beaupère himself still had no doubt that in many details his snide view of Joan had been sound. He believed Joan’s ‘apparitions’ had natural and human rather than supernatural and divine causes, and he referred back to the evidence of the trial.1

Before she was taken to St-Ouen to be admonished on the following morning, Beaupère went alone, with permission, into Joan’s prison, and warned her that she would soon be led to the scaffold to be preached to, telling her that, if she were a good Christian, she would say on the scaffold that she referred all her actions and words to the care of Holy Mother Church, and especially of the Church’s judges. And this she said on the scaffold, having been asked to do so by Maître Nicolas Midi. On due

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