We can thoroughly explain her conduct by supposing that she was afflicted by hysteria and nymphomania. There are plenty of accounts of unhappy women whose cases are parallel to Anne’s in the works of Havelock-Ellis and Kisch. There is plenty of indubitable evidence that she was hysterical and unbalanced, and that she passionately longed for a son; and it is simpler to believe her the victim of a well-known and common disease than that we should suppose the leading statesmen of England and nearly the whole of its peerage suddenly to be affected with blood-lust. It has been suggested that Anne, passionately longing for a son and terrified of her husband’s tyrannical wrath, acted like one of Thomas Hardy’s heroines centuries later and tried another lover in the hope that she would gratify her own and Henry’s wishes. This course of procedure is probably not so uncommon as some husbands imagine and would satisfy the questions of our problem but for Anne’s promiscuity and vehemence in solicitation. If her sole object in soliciting Norreys was to provide a son, why should she have gone from man to man till the whole Court seems to have been ringing with her ill fame?
Her spasms of violent temper after her marriage, her fits of jealousy, her foolish arrogance and insolence to her friends, are all mental signs which go with nymphomania, and the fact that her post-nuptial incontinence seems to have begun while she was still in the puerperal state after the birth of her only living child seems highly significant. It is not uncommon for sexual desire to become intolerable in nervous and puerperal women. The proper place for Anne Boleyn was a mental hospital.
Henry VIII’s case, along with those of his children, deserve a paper to themselves. Henry himself died of neglected arterio-sclerosis just in the nick of time to save the lives of better men from the executioner; Catherine Parr, who married him probably in order to nurse him—it is possible that she was really fond of him and that there was even then something attractive about him—succeeded in outliving him by a remarkable effort of diplomatic skill and courage, though had Henry awakened from his uræmic stupor probably her head would have been added to his collection. On the whole, one cannot avoid the conclusion that his conduct to his wives was not all his fault. They seem to have done no credit to his power of selection. The first and the last appear to have been the best, considered as women.
Inexorable Nemesis had avenged Catherine. The worry of the divorce left her husband with an arterial tension which, added to the royal temper, caused great misery to England and ultimately death to himself; and her mean little rival lay huddled in the most frightful dishonour that ever befell a woman. Decidedly there is something Greek in the complete horror of the tragedy.
The Problem of Jeanne d’Arc
IN 1410-12 France was in the most dreadful condition that has ever affected any nation. For nearly eighty years England had been at her throat in a quarrel which to our minds simply exemplifies the difference between law and justice; for it seems that the King of England had mediæval law on his side, though to our minds no justice; the Black Death had returned more than once to harass those whom war had spared; no man reaped where he had sown, for his crops fell into the hands of freebooters. Misery, destitution, and superstition were man’s bedfellows; and the French mind seemed open to receive any marvel that promised relief from its intolerable agony. Into this land of terror was born a little maid whose mission it was to right the wrongs of France; a maiden who has remained, through all the vicissitudes of history, extraordinarily fascinating, yet an almost insoluble problem. It is undeniable that she has exercised a vast influence upon mankind, less by her actual deeds than by the ideal which she set up; an ideal of courage, simple faith, and unquenchable loyalty which has inspired both her own nation and the nation which burnt her. When the English girls cut their hair short in the worst time of the war;[3] when the French soldiers retook Fort Douaumont when all seemed lost: these things were done in the name of Joan of Arc.
The actual contemporary sources from which we draw our ideas are extraordinarily few. There is of course the report of the trial for lapse and relapse, which is official and is said not to be garbled. It is useful, not only for the Maid’s answers, which throw a good deal of light on her mentality, but for the questions asked, which appear to give an idea of reports that seem to have been floating about France at the time. The only thing which interested her judges was whether she had imperilled her immortal soul by heresy or witchcraft, and from that trial we shall get few or no indications of her military career or physical condition, which are the things that most interest modern men. About twenty years after her execution it occurred to her king, who had repaid her amazing love and self-sacrifice with neglect, that since she had been burnt as a witch it followed that he must owe his crown to a witch; moreover, her mother and brother had been appealing to him to clear her memory, for they could not bear that their child and sister should still remain under a cloud of sorcery. King Charles VII, who was now a great man, and very successful as kings go, therefore ordered the case to be reopened, in which course he ultimately secured the assistance of the reigning Pope. Charles could not restore the Maid to life, but he could make things unpleasant for the friends of those who had burned her; and so we have the so-called Rehabilitation Trial, consisting of reports and opinions, given under oath, from many people who had known her when alive. As King Charles was now a great man, some of the clerics who had helped to condemn her crowded to give evidence in the poor child’s favour, attributing the miscarriage of justice in her case to people who were now dead or hopelessly unpopular; some friends of her childhood came forward and people who had known her at the time of her glory; and, perhaps most important, some of her old comrades in arms rallied round her memory. We thus have a fairly complete account of her battles, friendships, trials, character, and death; if we read this evidence with due care, remembering that more than twenty years had elapsed and the mentality of mediæval man, we may take some of the statements at their face value. Otherwise there is absolutely no contemporary evidence of the Maid; Anatole France has pricked the bubble of the chroniclers and of the Journal of the siege of Orleans. But there is so much of pathological interest to be found in the reports of the trials that I need no excuse for a brief study of them in that respect.
The record of the life of Jeanne d’Arc is all too short, and the main facts are not in dispute. It is the interpretation of these facts that is in dispute. She was born on January 6th, 1412; the year is uncertain. Probably she did not know herself. In the summer of 1424 she saw a great light on her right hand and heard a voice telling her to be a good girl. This voice she knew to be the voice of God. Later on she heard the voices of St. Michael the Archangel, of St. Catherine, and of St. Margaret. St. Michael appeared first, and warned her to expect the arrival of the others, who came in due course. All three were to be her constant companions for the rest of her life. At first their appearances were irregular, but later on they came frequently, especially at quiet moments. Sometimes, when there was a good deal of noise going on, they appeared and tried to tell her something, but she could not hear what they said. These she called her Council, or her Voices. Occasionally the Lord God spoke to her himself; Him she called “Messire.”
As Jeanne grew more accustomed to her heavenly visitors they came in great numbers, and she used to see vast crowds of angels descending from heaven to her little garden. She said nothing to anybody about these unusual events, but grew up a brooding and intensely religious girl, going to church at every possible opportunity, and apparently neglecting her ordinary duties of looking after her father’s sheep and cattle. She learned to sew and knit, to say her Credo, Paternoster, and Ave Maria; otherwise she was absolutely ignorant, and very simple in mind and honest. She was dreamy and shy; nor did she ever learn to read or write.
Later on the voices told her to go into France, and God would help her to drive out the English. She continually appealed to her father that he should send her to Vaucouleurs, where the Sieur Robert de Baudricourt would espouse her cause. Ultimately he did so; and at first Robert laughed at her. He was no saint; in his day he had ravaged villages with the best noble in the land; and he was not convinced that Jeanne was really the sent of God that she claimed. When she returned home she found herself the butt of Domremy; nine months later she ran away to Vaucouleurs again, and found Robert more helpful. He had for some time felt sympathy with the dauphin Charles, and had grown to detest the English and Burgundians; and he now welcomed the supernatural aid which Jeanne promised; she repeated vehemently that God had sent her to deliver France, and that she had no doubt whatever that she would be able to raise the siege of Orleans, which was then being idly invested by the English.