Jeanne D'Arc: Her Life And Death

by Mrs. Oliphant

CHAPTER X — THE CAPTIVE. MAY, 1430-JAN., 1431.

We have here to remark a complete suspension of all the ordinary laws at once of chivalry and of honest warfare. Jeanne had been captured as a general at the head of her forces. She was a prisoner of war. Such a prisoner ordinarily, even in the most cruel ages, is in no bodily danger. He is worth more alive than dead—a great ransom perhaps—perhaps the very end of the warfare, and the accomplishment of everything it was intended to gain: at least he is most valuable to exchange for other important prisoners on the opposite side. It was like taking away so much personal property to kill a prisoner, an outrage deeply resented by his captor and unjustified by any law. It was true that Jeanne herself had transgressed this universal custom but a little while before, by giving up Franquet d'Arras to his prosecutors. But Franquet was beyond the courtesies of war, a noted criminal, robber, and destroyer: yet she ought not perhaps to have departed from the military laws of right and wrong while everything in the country was under the hasty arbitration of war. No one, however, so far as we know, produces this matter of Franquet as a precedent in her own case. From the first moment of her seizure there was no question of the custom and privilege of warfare. She was taken as a wild animal might have been taken, the only doubt being how to make the most signal example of her. Vengeance in the gloomy form of the Inquisition claimed her the first day. No such word as ransom was breathed from her own side, none was demanded, none was offered. Her case is at once separated from every other.

Yet the reign of chivalry was at its height, and women were supposed to be the objects of a kind of worship, every knight being sworn to succour and help them in need and trouble. There was perhaps something of the subtle jealousy of sex so constantly denied on the stronger side, but yet always existing, in the abrogation of every law of chivalry as well as of warfare, in respect to the Maid. That man is indeed of the highest strain of generosity who can bear to be beaten by a woman. And all the seething, agitated world of France had been beaten by this girl. The English and Burgundians, in the ordinary sense of the word, had been overcome in fair field, forced to fly before her; the French, her own side, had experienced an even more penetrating downfall by having the honours of victory taken from them, she alone winning the day where they had all failed. This is bitterer, perhaps, than merely to be compelled to raise a siege or to fail in a fight. The Frenchmen fought like lions, but the praise was to Jeanne who never struck a blow. Such great hearts as Dunois, such a courteous prince as Alençon, were too magnanimous to feel, or at least to resent, the grievance; they seconded her and fought under her with a nobility of mind and disinterestedness beyond praise; but it was not to be supposed that the common mass of the French captains were like these; she had wronged and shamed them by taking the glory from them, as much as she had shamed the English by making those universal victors fly before her. The burghers whom she had rescued, the poor people who were her brethren and whom she sought everywhere, might weep and cry out to Heaven, but they were powerless at such a moment. And every law that might have helped her was pushed aside.

On the 25th the news was known in Paris, and immediately there appears in the record a new adversary to Jeanne, the most bitter and implacable of all; the next day, May 26, 1430, without the loss of an hour, a letter was addressed to the Burgundian camp from the capital. Quicherat speaks of it as a letter from the Inquisitor or vicar-general of the Inquisition, written by the officials of the University; others tell us that an independent letter was sent from the University to second that of the Inquisitor. The University we may add was not a university like one of ours, or like any existing at the present day. It was an ecclesiastical corporation of the highest authority in every cause connected with the Church, while gathering law, philosophy, and literature under its wing. The first theologians, the most eminent jurists were collected there, not by any means always in alliance with the narrower tendencies and methods of the Inquisition. It is notable, however, that this great institution lost no time in claiming the prisoner, whose chief offence in its eyes was less her career as a warrior than her position as a sorceress. The actual facts of her life were of secondary importance to them. Orleans, Rheims, even her attack upon Paris were nothing in comparison with the black art which they believed to be her inspiration. The guidance of Heaven which was not the guidance of the Church was to them a claim which meant only rebellion of the direst kind. They had longed to seize her and strip her of her presumptuous pretensions from the first moment of her appearance. They could not allow a day of her overthrow to pass by without snatching at this much-desired victim.

No one perhaps will ever be able to say what it is that makes a trial for heresy and sorcery, especially in the days when fire and flame, the rack and the stake, stood at the end, so exciting and horribly attractive to the mind. Whether it is the revelations that are hoped for, of these strange commerces between earth and the unknown, into which we would all fain pry if we could, in pursuit of some better understanding than has ever yet fallen to the lot of man; whether it is the strange and dreadful pleasure of seeing a soul driven to extremity and fighting for its life through all the subtleties of thought and fierce attacks of interrogation—or the mere love of inflicting torture, misery, and death, which the Church was prevented from doing in the common way, it is impossible to tell; but there is no doubt that a thrill like the wings of vultures crowding to the prey, a sense of horrible claws and beaks and greedy eyes is in the air, whenever such a tribunal is thought of. The thrill, the stir, the eagerness among those black birds of doom is more evident than usual in the headlong haste of that demand. Sous l'influence de l'Angleterre, say the historians; the more shame for them if it was so; but they were clearly under influence wider and more infallible, the influence of that instinct, whatever it may be, which makes a trial for heresy ten thousand times more cruel, less restrained by any humanities of nature, than any other kind of trial which history records.

That is what the Inquisitor demanded after a long description of Jeanne, "called the Maid," as having "dogmatised, sown, published, and caused to be published, many and diverse errors from which have ensued great scandals against the divine honour and our holy faith." "Using the rights of our office and the authority committed to us by the Holy See of Rome we instantly command, and enjoin you in the name of the Catholic faith, and under penalty of the law: and all other Catholic persons of whatsoever condition, pre-eminence, authority, or estate, to send or to bring as prisoner before us with all speed and surety the said Jeanne, vehemently suspected of various crimes springing from heresy, that proceedings may be taken against her before us in the name of the Holy Inquisition, and with the favour and aid of the doctors and masters of the University of Paris, and other notable counsellors present there."

It was the English who put it into the heads of the Inquisitor and the University to do this, all the anxious Frenchmen cry. We can only reply again, the more shame for the French doctors and priests! But there was very little time to bring that influence to bear; and there is an eagerness and precipitation in the demand which is far more like the headlong natural rush for a much desired prize than any course of action suggested by a third party. Nor is there anything to lead us to believe that the movement was not spontaneous. It is little likely, indeed, that the Sorbonne nowadays would concern itself about any inspired maid, any more than the enlightened Oxford would do so. But the ideas of the fifteenth century were widely different, and witchcraft and heresy were the most enthralling and exciting of subjects, as they are still to whosoever believes in them, learned or unlearned, great or small.

It must be added that the entire mind of France, even of those who loved Jeanne and believed in her, must have been shaken to its depths by this catastrophe. We have no sympathy with those who compare the career of any mortal martyr with the far more mysterious agony and passion of our Lord. Yet we cannot but remember what a tremendous element the disappointment of their hopes must have been in the misery of the first disciples, the Apostles, the mother, all the spectators who had watched with wonder and faith the mission of the Messiah. Had it failed? had all the signs come to nothing, all those divine words and ways, to our minds so much more wonderful than any miracles? Was there no meaning in them? Were they mere unaccountable delusions, deceptions of the senses, inspirations perhaps of mere genius—not from God at all except in a secondary way? In the three terrible days that followed the Crucifixion the burden of a world must have lain on the minds of those who had seen every hope fail: no legions of angels appearing, no overwhelming revelation from heaven, no change in a moment out of misery into the universal kingship, the triumphant march. That was but the self-delusion of the earth which continually travesties the schemes of Heaven; yet the most terrible of all despairs is such a pause and horror of doubt lest nothing should be true.

But in the case of this little Maiden, this handmaid of the Lord, the deception might have been all natural and perhaps shared by herself. Were her first triumphs accidents merely, were her "voices" delusions, had she been given up by Heaven, of which she had called herself the servant? It was a stupor which quenched every voice—a great silence through the country, only broken by the penitential psalms at Tours. The Compiègne people, writing to Charles two days after May 23d, do not mention Jeanne at all. We need not immediately take into account the baser souls always plentiful, the envious captains and the rest who might be secretly rejoicing. The entire country, both friends and foes, had come to a dreadful pause and did not know what to think. The last circumstance of which we must remind the reader, and which was of the greatest importance, is, that it was only a small part of France that knew anything personally of Jeanne. From Tours it is a far cry to Picardy. All her triumphs had taken place in the south. The captive of Beaulieu and Beaurevoir spent the sad months of her captivity among a population which could have heard of her only by flying rumours coming from hostile quarters. From the midland of France to the sea, near to which her prison was situated, is a long way, and those northern districts were as unlike the Orleannais as if they had been in two different countries. Rouen in Normandy no more resembled Rheims, than Edinburgh resembled London: and in the fifteenth century that was saying a great deal. Nothing can be more deceptive than to think of these separate and often hostile duchies as if they bore any resemblance to the France of to-day.

The captor of Jeanne was a vassal of Jean de Luxembourg and took her as we have seen to the quarters of his master at Margny, into whose hands she thenceforward passed. She was kept in the camp three or four days and then transferred to the castle of Beaulieu, which belonged to him; and afterwards to the more important stronghold of Beaurevoir, which seems to have been his principal residence. We know very few details of her captivity. According to one chronicler, d'Aulon, her faithful friend and intendant, was with her at least in the former of those prisons, where at first she would appear to have been hopeful and in good spirits, if we may trust to the brief conversation between her and d'Aulon, which is one of the few details which reach us of that period. While he lamented over the probable fate of Compiègne she was confident. "That poor town of Compiègne that you loved so much," he said, "by this time it will be in the hands of the enemies of France." "No," said the Maid, "the places which the king of Heaven brought back to the allegiance of the gentle King Charles by me, will not be retaken by his enemies." In this case at least the prophecy came true.