A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 3

by François Guizot

We will not stop to examine whether these two accounts, though very different, are not fundamentally reconcilable, and whether Joan resumed man’s dress of her own desire or was constrained to do so by the soldiers on guard over her, and perhaps to escape from their insults. The important points in the incident are the burst of remorse which Joan felt for her weakness and her striking retractation of the abjuration which had been wrung from her. So soon as the news was noised abroad, her enemies cried, “She has relapsed!” This was exactly what they had hoped for when, on learning that she had been sentenced only to perpetual imprisonment, they had said, “Never you mind; we will have her up again.” “Farewell, farewell, my lord,” said the Bishop of Beauvais to the Earl of Warwick, whom he met shortly after Joan’s retractation; and in his words there was plainly an expression of satisfaction, and not a mere phrase of politeness. On the 29th of May the tribunal met again. Forty judges took part in the deliberation; Joan was unanimously declared a case of relapse, was found guilty, and cited to appear next day, the 30th, on the Vieux-Marche to hear sentence pronounced, and then undergo the punishment of the stake.

When, on the 30th of May, in the morning, the Dominican brother Martin Ladvenu was charged to announce her sentence to Joan, she gave way at first to grief and terror. “Alas!” she cried, “am I to be so horribly and cruelly treated that this my body, full pure and perfect and never defiled, must to-day be consumed and reduced to ashes! Ah! I would seven times rather be beheaded than burned!” The Bishop of Beauvais at this moment came up. “Bishop,” said Joan, “you are the cause of my death; if you had put me in the prisons of the Church and in the hands of fit and proper ecclesiastical warders, this had never happened; I appeal from you to the presence of God.” One of the doctors who had sat in judgment upon her, Peter Maurice, went to see her, and spoke to her with sympathy. “Master Peter,” said she to him, “where shall I be to-night?” “Have you not good hope in God?” asked the doctor. “O! yes,” she answered; “by the grace of God I shall be in paradise.” Being left alone with the Dominican, Martin Ladvenu, she confessed and asked to communicate. The monk applied to the Bishop of Beauvais to know what he was to do. “Tell brother Martin,” was the answer, “to give her the eucharist and all she asks for.” At nine o’clock, having resumed her woman’s dress, Joan was dragged from prison and driven to the Vieux- Marche. From seven to eight hundred soldiers escorted the car and prohibited all approach to it on the part of the crowd, which encumbered the road and the vicinities; but a man forced a passage and flung himself towards Joan. It was a canon of Rouen, Nicholas Loiseleur, whom the Bishop of Beauvais had placed near her, and who had abused the confidence she had shown him. Beside himself with despair, he wished to ask pardon of her; but the English soldiers drove him back with violence and with the epithet of traitor, and but for the intervention of the Earl of Warwick his life would have been in danger. Joan wept and prayed; and the crowd, afar off, wept and prayed with her. On arriving at the place, she listened in silence to a sermon by one of the doctors of the court, who ended by saying, “Joan, go in peace; the Church can no longer defend thee; she gives thee over to the secular arm.” The laic judges, Raoul Bouteillier, baillie of Rouen, and his lieutenant, Peter Daron, were alone qualified to pronounce sentence of death; but no time was given them. The priest Massieu was still continuing his exhortations to Joan, but “How now! priest,” was the cry from amidst the soldiery, “are you going to make us dine here?” “Away with her! Away with her!” said the baillie to the guards; and to the executioner, “Do thy duty.” When she came to the stake, Joan knelt down completely absorbed in prayer. She had begged Massieu to get her a cross; and an Englishman present made one out of a little stick, and handed it to the French heroine, who took it, kissed it, and laid it on her breast. She begged brother Isambard de la Pierre to go and fetch the cross from the church of St. Sauveur, the chief door of which opened on the Vieux-Marche, and to hold it “upright before her eyes till the coming of death, in order,” she said, “that the cross whereon God hung might, as long as she lived, be continually in her sight;” and her wishes were fulfilled. She wept over her country and the spectators as well as over herself. “Rouen, Rouen,” she cried, “is it here that I must die? Shalt thou be my last resting-place? I fear greatly thou wilt have to suffer for my death.” It is said that the aged Cardinal of Winchester and the Bishop of Beauvais himself could not stifle their emotion—and, peradventure, their tears. The executioner set fire to the fagots. When Joan perceived the flames rising, she urged her confessor, the Dominican brother, Martin Ladvenu, to go down, at the same time asking him to keep holding the cross up high in front of her, that she might never cease to see it. The same monk, when questioned four and twenty years later, at the rehabilitation trial, as to the last sentiments and the last words of Joan, said that to the very latest moment she had affirmed that her voices were heavenly, that they had not deluded her, and that the revelations she had received came from God. When she had ceased to live, two of her judges, John Alespie, canon of Rouen, and Peter Maurice, doctor of theology, cried out, “Would that my soul were where I believe the soul of that woman is!” And Tressart, secretary to King Henry VI., said sorrowfully, on returning from the place of execution, “We are all lost; we have burned a saint.”

A saint indeed in faith and in destiny. Never was human creature more heroically confident in, and devoted to, inspiration coming from God, a commission received from God. Joan of Arc sought nothing of all that happened to her and of all she did, nor exploit, nor power, nor glory. “It was not her condition,” as she used to say, to be a warrior, to get her king crowned, and to deliver her country from the foreigner. Everything came to her from on high, and she accepted everything without hesitation, without discussion, without calculation, as we should say in our times. She believed in God, and obeyed Him. God was not to her an idea, a hope, a flash of human imagination, or a problem of human science; He was the Creator of the world, the Saviour of mankind through Jesus Christ, the Being of beings, ever present, ever in action, sole legitimate sovereign of man whom He has made intelligent and free, the real and true God whom we are painfully searching for in our own day, and whom we shall never find again until we cease pretending to do without Him and putting ourselves in His place. Meanwhile one fact may be mentioned which does honor to our epoch and gives us hope for our future. Four centuries have rolled by since Joan of Arc, that modest and heroic servant of God, made a sacrifice of herself for France. For four and twenty years after her death, France and the king appeared to think no more of her. However, in 1455, remorse came upon Charles VII. and upon France. Nearly all the provinces, all the towns, were freed from the foreigner, and shame was felt that nothing was said, nothing done, for the young girl who had saved everything. At Rouen, especially, where the sacrifice was completed, a cry for reparation arose. It was timidly demanded from the spiritual power which had sentenced and delivered over Joan as a heretic to the stake. Pope Calixtus III. entertained the request preferred, not by the King of France, but in the name of Isabel Romee, Joan’s mother, and her whole family. Regular proceedings were commenced and followed up for the rehabilitation of the martyr; and, on the 7th of July, 1456, a decree of the court assembled at Rouen quashed the sentence of 1431, together with all its consequences, and ordered “a general procession and solemn sermon at St. Ouen Place and the Vieux- Marche,” where the said maid had been cruelly and horribly burned; besides the planting of a cross of honor (crucis honestee) on the Vieux-Marche, the judges reserving the official notice to be given of their decision “throughout the cities and notable places of the realm.” The city of Orleans responded to this appeal by raising on the bridge over the Loire a group in bronze representing Joan of Arc on her knees before Our Lady between two angels. This monument, which was broken during the religious wars of the sixteenth century and repaired shortly afterwards, was removed in the eighteenth century, and, Joan of Arc then received a fresh insult; the poetry of a cynic was devoted to the task of diverting a licentious public at the expense of the saint whom, three centuries before, fanatical hatred had brought to the stake. In 1792 the council of the commune of Orleans, “considering that the monument in bronze did not represent the heroine’s services, and did not by any sign call to mind the struggle against the English,” ordered it to be melted down and cast into cannons, of which “one should bear the name of Joan of Arc.” It is in our time that the city of Orleans and its distinguished bishop, Mgr. Dupanloup, have at last paid Joan homage worthy of her, not only by erecting to her a new statue, but by recalling her again to the memory of France with her true features, and in her grand character. Neither French nor any other history offers a like example of a modest little soul, with a faith so pure and efficacious, resting on divine inspiration and patriotic hope.

During the trial of Joan of Arc the war between France and England, without being discontinued, had been somewhat slack: the curiosity and the passions of men were concentrated upon the scenes at Rouen. After the execution of Joan the war resumed its course, though without any great events. By way of a step towards solution, the Duke of Bedford, in November, 1431, escorted to Paris King Henry VI., scarcely ten years old, and had him crowned at Notre-Dame. The ceremony was distinguished for pomp, but not for warmth. The Duke of Burgundy was not present; it was an Englishman, the Cardinal-bishop of Winchester, who anointed the young Englander King of France; the Bishop of Paris complained of it as a violation of his rights; the parliament, the university, and the municipal body had not even seats reserved at the royal banquet; Paris was melancholy, and day by day more deserted by the native inhabitants; grass was growing in the court-yards of the great mansions; the students were leaving the great school of Paris, to which the Duke of Bedford at Caen, and Charles VII. himself at Poitiers, were attempting to raise up rivals; and silence reigned in the Latin quarter. The child-king was considered unintelligent, and ungraceful, and ungracious. When, on the day after Christmas, he started on his way back to Rouen, and from Rouen to England, he did not confer on Paris “any of the boons expected, either by releasing prisoners or by putting an end to black-mails, gabels, and wicked imposts.” The burgesses were astonished, and grumbled; and the old queen, Isabel of Bavaria, who was still living at the hostel of St. Paul, wept, it is said, for vexation, at seeing from one of her windows her grandson’s royal procession go by.

Though war was going on all the while, attempts were made to negotiate; and in March, 1433, a conference was opened at Seineport, near Corbeil. Everybody in France desired peace. Philip the Good himself began to feel the necessity of it. Burgundy was almost as discontented and troubled as Ile-de-France. There was grumbling at Dijon as there was conspiracy at Paris. The English gave fresh cause for national irritation. They showed an inclination to canton themselves in Normandy, and abandon the other French provinces to the hazards and sufferings of a desultory war. Anne of Burgundy, the Duke of Bedford’s wife and Philip the Good’s sister, died. The English duke speedily married again without even giving any notice to the French prince. Every family tie between the two persons was broken; and the negotiations as well as the war remained without result.

An incident at court caused a change in the situation, and gave the government of Charles a different character. His favorite, George de la Tremoille, had become almost as unpopular amongst the royal family as in the country in general. He could not manage a war, and he frustrated attempts at peace. The Queen of Sicily, Yolande d’Aragon, her daughter, Mary d’Anjou, Queen of France, and her son, Louis, Count of Maine, who all three desired peace, set themselves to work to overthrow the favorite. In June, 1433, four young lords, one of whom, Sire de Beuil, was La Tremoille’s own nephew, introduced themselves unexpectedly into his room at the castle of Coudray, near Chinon, where Charles VII. was. La Tremoille showed an intention of resisting, and received a sword-thrust. He was made to resign all his offices, and was sent under strict guard to the castle of Alontresor, the property of his nephew, Sire de Beuil. The conspirators had concerted measures with La Tremoille’s rival, the constable De Richemont, Arthur of Brittany, a man distinguished in war, who had lately gone to help Joan of Arc, and who was known to be a friend of peace at the same time that he was firmly devoted to the national cause. He was called away from his castle of Parthenay, and set at the head of the government as well as of the army. Charles VII. at first showed anger at his favorite’s downfall. He asked if Richemont was present, and was told no: where-upon he seemed to grow calmer. Before long he did more; he became resigned, and, continuing all the while to give La Tremoille occasional proofs of his former favor, he fully accepted De Richemont’s influence and the new direction which the constable imposed upon his government.

War was continued nearly everywhere, with alternations of success and reverse which deprived none of the parties of hope without giving victory to any. Peace, however, was more and more the general desire. Scarcely had one attempt at pacification failed when another was begun. The constable De Richemont’s return to power led to fresh overtures. He was a states-man as well as a warrior; and his inclinations were known at Dijon and London, as well as at Chinon. The advisers of King Henry VI. proposed to open a conference, on the 15th of October, 1433, at Calais. They had, they said, a prisoner in England, confined there ever since the battle of Agincourt, Duke Charles of Orleans, who was sincerely desirous of peace, in spite of his family enmity towards the Duke of Burgundy. He was considered a very proper person to promote the negotiations, although he sought in poetry, which was destined to bring lustre to his name, a refuge from politics which made his life a burden. He, one day meeting the Duke of Burgundy’s two ambassadors at the Earl of Suffolk’s, Henry VI.‘s prime minister, went up to them, affectionately took their hands, and, when they inquired after his health, said, “My body is well, my soul is sick; I am dying with vexation at passing my best days a prisoner, without any one to think of me.” The ambassadors said that people would be indebted to him for the benefit of peace, for he was known to be laboring for it. “My Lord of Suffolk,” said he, “can tell you that I never cease to urge it upon the king and his council; but I am as useless here as the sword never drawn from the scabbard. I must see my relatives and friends in France; they will not treat, surely, without having consulted with me. If peace depended upon me, though I were doomed to die seven days after swearing it, that would cause me no regret. however, what matters it what I say? I am not master in anything at all; next to the two kings, it is the Duke of Burgundy and the Duke of Brittany who have most power. Will you not come and call upon me?” he added, pressing the hand of one of the ambassadors. “They will see you before they go,” said the Earl of Suffolk, in a tone which made it plain that no private conversation would be permitted between them. And, indeed, the Earl of Suffolk’s barber went alone to wait upon the ambassadors in order to tell them that, if the Duke of Burgundy desired it, the Duke of Orleans would write to him. “I will undertake,” he added, “to bring you his letter.” There was evident mistrust; and it was explained to the Burgundian ambassadors by the Earl of Warwick’s remark, “Your duke never once came to see our king during his stay in France. The Duke of Bedford used similar language to them. Why,” said he, “does my brother the Duke of Burgundy give way to evil imaginings against me? There is not a prince in the world, after my king, whom I esteem so much. The ill-will which seems to exist between us spoils the king’s affairs and his own too. But tell him that I am not the less disposed to serve him.”

In March, 1435, the Duke of Burgundy went to Paris, taking with him his third wife, Isabel of Portugal, and a magnificent following. There were seen, moreover, in his train, a hundred wagons laden with artillery, armor, salted provisions, cheeses, and wines of Burgundy. There was once more joy in Paris, and the duke received the most affectionate welcome. The university was represented before him, and made him a great speech on the necessity of peace. Two days afterwards a deputation from the city dames of Paris waited upon the Duchess of Burgundy, and implored her to use her influence for the re-establishment of peace. She answered, “My good friends, it is the thing I desire most of all in the world; I pray for it night and day to the Lord our God, for I believe that we all have great need of it, and I know for certain that my lord and husband has the greatest willingness to give up to that purpose his person and his substance.” At the bottom of his soul Duke Philip’s decision was already taken. He had but lately discussed the condition of France with the constable, De Richemont, and Duke Charles of Bourbon, his brother-in-law, whom he had summoned to Nevers with that design. Being convinced of the necessity for peace, he spoke of it to the King of England’s advisers whom he found in Paris, and who dared not show absolute opposition to it. It was agreed that in the month of July a general, and, more properly speaking, a European conference should meet at Arras, that the legates of Pope Eugenius IV. should be invited to it, and that consultation should be held thereat as to the means of putting an end to the sufferings of the two kingdoms.

Towards the end of July, accordingly, whilst the war was being prosecuted with redoubled ardor on both sides at the very gates of Paris, there arrived at Arras the pope’s legates and the ambassadors of the Emperor Sigismund, of the Kings of Castile, Aragon, Portugal, Naples, Sicily, Cyprus, Poland, and Denmark, and of the Dukes of Brittany and Milan. The university of Paris and many of the good towns of France, Flanders, and even Holland, had sent their deputies thither. Many bishops were there in person. The Bishop of Liege came thither with a magnificent train, mounted, says the chroniclers, on two hundred white horses. The Duke of Burgundy made his entrance on the 30th of July, escorted by three hundred archers wearing his livery. All the lords who happened to be in the city went to meet him at a league’s distance, except the cardinal-legates of the pope, who confined themselves to sending their people. Two days afterwards arrived the ambassadors of the King of France, having at their head the Duke of Bourbon and the constable De Richemont, together with several of the greatest French lords, and a retinue of four or five hundred persons. Duke Philip, forewarned of their coming, issued from the city with all the princes and lords who happened to be there. The English alone refused to accompany him, wondering at his showing such great honor to the ambassadors of their common enemy. Philip went forward a mile to meet his two brothers-in-law, the Duke of Bourbon and the Count de Richemont, embraced them affectionately, and turned back with them into Arras, amidst the joy and acclamations of the populace. Last of all arrived the Duchess of Burgundy, magnificently dressed, and bringing with her her young son, the Count of Charolais, who was hereafter to be Charles the Rash. The Duke of Bourbon, the constable De Richemont, and all the lords were on horseback around her litter; but the English, who had gone, like the others, to meet her, were unwilling, on turning back to Arras, to form a part of her retinue with the French.

Grand as was the sight, it was not superior in grandeur to the event on the eve of accomplishment. The question was whether France should remain a great nation, in full possession of itself and of its independence under a French king, or whether the King of England should, in London and with the title of King of France, have France in his possession and under his government. Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, was called upon to solve this problem of the future, that is to say, to decide upon the fate of his lineage and his country.