Round about this centre of eager intelligence, curiosity, and prejudice, the cathedral and council chamber teeming with Churchmen, was a dark and silent ring of laymen and soldiers. A number of the English leaders were in Rouen, but they appear very little. Winchester, who had very lately come from England with an army, which according to some of the historians would not budge from Calais, where it had landed, "for fear of the Maid"—was the chief person in the place, but did not make any appearance at the trial, curiously enough; the Duke of Bedford we are informed was visible on one shameful occasion, but no more. But Warwick, who was the Governor of the town, appears frequently and various other lords with him. We see them in the mirror held up to us by the French historians, pressing round in an ever narrowing circle, closing up upon the tribunal in the midst, pricking the priests with perpetual sword points if they seem to loiter. They would have had everything pushed on, no delay, no possibility of escape. It is very possible that this was the case, for it is evident that the Witch was deeply obnoxious to the English, and that they were eager to have her and her endless process out of the way; but the evidence for their terror and fierce desire to expedite matters is of the feeblest. A canon of Rouen declared at the trial that he had heard it said by Maître Pierre Morice, and Nicolas l'Oyseleur, judges assessors, and by other whose names he does not recollect, "that the said English were so afraid of her that they did not dare to begin the siege of Louviers until she was dead; and that it was necessary if one would please them, to hasten the trial as much as possible and to find the means of condemning her." Very likely this was quite true: but it cannot at all be taken for proved by such evidence. Another contemporary witness allows that though some of the English pushed on her trial for hate, some were well disposed to her; the manner of Jeanne's imprisonment is the only thing which inclines the reader to believe every evil thing that is said against them.
Such were the circumstances in which Jeanne was brought to trail. The population, moved to pity and to tears as any population would have been, before the end, would seem at the beginning to have been indifferent and not to have taken much interest one way or another: the court, a hundred men and more with all their hangers-on, the cleverest men in France, one more distinguished and impeccable than the others: the stern ring of the Englishmen outside keeping an eye upon the tedious suit and all its convolutions: these all appear before us, surrounding as with bands of iron the young lonely victim in the donjon, who submitting to every indignity, and deprived of every aid, feeling that all her friends had abandoned her, yet stood steadfast and strong in her absolute simplicity and honesty. It was but two years in that same spring weather since she had left Vaucouleurs to seek the fortune of France, to offer herself to the struggle which now was coming to an end. Not a soul had Jeanne to comfort or stand by her. She had her saints who—one wonders if such a thought ever entered into her young visionary head—had lured her to her doom, and who still comforted her with enigmatical words, promises which came true in so sadly different a sense from that in which they were understood.
(1) We are glad to add that the learned Quicherat has doubts
on the subject of the cage.
CHAPTER XII — BEFORE THE TRIAL. LENT, 1431.
We have not, however, sufficiently described the horror of the prison, and the treatment to which Jeanne was exposed, though the picture is already dark enough. It throws a horrible yet also a grotesque light upon the savage manners of the time to find that the chamber in which she was confined, had secret provision for an espionnage of the most base kind, openings made in the walls through which everything that took place in the room, every proceeding of the unfortunate prisoner, could be spied upon and every word heard. The idea of such a secret watch has always been attractive to the vulgar mind, and no doubt it has been believed to exist many times when there was little or no justification for such an infernal thought. From the "ear" of Dionysius, down to the Trou Judas, which early tourists on the Continent were taught to fear in every chamber door, the idea has descended to our own times. It would seem, however, to be beyond doubt that this odious means of acquiring information was in full operation during the trial of Jeanne, and various spies were permitted to peep at her, and to watch for any unadvised word she might say in her most private moments. We are told that the Duke of Bedford made use of the opportunity in a still more revolting way, and was present, a secret spectator, at the fantastic scene when Jeanne was visited by a committee of matrons who examined her person to prove or to disprove one of the hateful insinuations which were made about her. The imagination, however, refuses to conceive that a man of serious age and of high functions should have degraded himself to the level of a Peeping Tom in this way; all the French historians, nevertheless, repeat the story though on the merest hearsay evidence. And they also relate, with more apparent truth, how a double treachery was committed upon the unfortunate prisoner by stationing two secretaries at these openings, to take down her conversation with a spy who had been sent to her in the guise of a countryman of her own; and that not only Cauchon but Warwick also was present on this occasion, listening, while their plot was carried out by the vile traitor inside. The clerks, we are glad to say, are credited with a refusal to act: but Warwick did not shrink from the ignominy. The Englishmen indeed shrank from no ignominy; nor did the great French savants assembled under the presidency of the Bishop. It is necessary to grant to begin with that they were neither ignorant nor base men, yet from the beginning of the trial almost every step taken by them appears base, as well as marked, in the midst of all their subtlety and diabolical cunning, by the profoundest ignorance of human nature. The spy of whom we have spoken, L'Oyseleur (bird-snarer, a significant name), was sent, and consented to be sent, to Jeanne in her prison, as a fellow prisoner, a pays, like herself from Lorraine, to invite her confidence: but his long conversations with the Maid, which were heard behind their backs by the secretaries, elicited nothing from her that she did not say in the public examination. She had no secret devices to betray to a traitor. She would not seem, indeed, to have suspected the man at all, not even when she saw him among her judges taking part against her. Jeanne herself suspected no falsehood, but made her confession to him, when she found that he was a priest, and trusted him fully. The bewildering and confusing fact, turning all the contrivances of her judges into foolishness, was, that she had nothing to confess that she was not ready to tell in the eye of day.
The adoption of this abominable method of eliciting secrets from the candid soul which had none, was justified, it appears, by the manner of her trial, which was after the rules of the Inquisition—by which even more than by those which regulate an ordinary French trial the guilt of the accused is a foregone conclusion for which proof is sought, not a fair investigation of facts for abstract purposes of justice. The first thing to be determined by the tribunal was the counts of the indictment against Jeanne; was she to be tried for magical arts, for sorcery and witchcraft? It is very probable that the mission of L'Oyseleur was to obtain evidence that would clear up this question by means of recalling to her the stories of her childhood, of the enchanted tree, and the Fairies' Well; from which sources, her accusers anxiously hoped to prove that she derived her inspiration. But it is very clear that no such evidence was forthcoming, and that it seemed to them hopeless to attribute sorcery to her; therefore the accusation was changed to that of heresy alone. The following mandate from the University authorising her prosecution will show what the charge was; and the reader will note that one of its darkest items is the costume, which for so many good and sufficient reasons she wore. Here is the official description of the accused:
"A woman, calling herself the Maid, leaving the dress and habit of her sex against the divine law, a thing abominable to God, clothed and armed in the habit and condition of a man, has done cruel deeds of homicide, and as is said has made the simple people believe, in order to abuse and lead them astray, that she was sent by God, and had knowledge of His divine secrets; along with several other doctrines (dogmatisations), very dangerous, prejudicial, and scandalous to our holy Catholic faith, in pursuing which abuses, and exercising hostility against us and our people, she has been taken in arms, before Compiègne, and brought as a prisoner before us."
According to French law the indictment ought to have been founded upon a preliminary examination into the previous life of the accused, which, as it does not appear in the formal accusations, it was supposed had never been made. Recent researches, however, have proved that it was made, but was not of a nature to strengthen or justify any accusation. All that the examiners could discover was that Jeanne d'Arc was a good and honest maid who left a spotless reputation behind her in her native village, and that not a suspicion of dogmatisations, nor worship of fairies, nor any other unseemly thing was associated with her name. Other things less favourable, we are told, were reported of her: the statement, for instance, made in apparent good faith by Monstrelet the Burgundian chronicler, that she had been for some time a servant in an auberge, and there had learned to ride, and to consort with men—a statement totally without foundation, which was scarcely referred to in the trial.
The skill of M. Quicherat discovered the substance of those inquiries among the many secondary papers, but they were not made use of in the formal proceedings. This also we are told, though contrary to the habit of French law, was justified by the methods of the Inquisition, which were followed throughout the trial. One breach of law and justice, however, is permitted by no code. It is expressly forbidden by French, and even by inquisitorial law, that a prisoner should be tried by his enemies—that is by judges avowedly hostile to him: an initial difficulty which it would have been impossible to get over and which had therefore to be ignored. One brave and honest man, Nicolas de Houppeville, had the courage to make this observation in one of the earliest sittings of the assembly: