THE TRIAL After four months spent as a prisoner in the chateau
of Beaurevoir, Joan was transferred to the English in exchange for
10,000 livres, an arrangement similar to the standard practice in other cases of prisoner transfers between
members of the same side, such as when Henry V had paid his nobles for transferring their
prisoners to him after the battle of Agincourt.
Pierre Cauchon, a longtime supporter of
the Anglo-Burgundian faction, was given the job of procuring her
and setting up a trial. He had been given many such tasks in the past:
a letter from Duke John-the-Fearless of Burgundy, dated
26 July 1415, authorized Cauchon to bribe Church officials at the Council of
Constance in order to influence the Council's ruling concerning a murder
which the Duke had ordered. They now needed someone
who was willing to engineer a murder under the guise of an Inquisitorial
trial, and Cauchon again got the job. English government documents record in great detail the
payments made to cover the costs of obtaining Joan and rewarding the
various judges and assessors who took part in her trial, and we know that the clergy
who served at the trial were drawn from their supporters.
Some of these men later admitted that the English conducted the
proceedings for the purposes of revenge rather
than out of any genuine belief that she was a heretic. Joan was held at the fortress of Crotoy before being brought
to Rouen, the seat of the English occupation government. Although
Inquisitorial procedure required suspects to be held in a Church-run prison, and female prisoners to be
guarded by nuns rather than male guards (for obvious reasons), Joan was held in
a secular military prison with
English soldiers as guards. According to several eyewitness accounts,
it was for this reason that she clung to her soldiers' outfit and
kept the pants and tunic "firmly laced and tied together" as a defense against rape: the trial transcript says that she wore two layers of such pants, both attached to the tunic with a total of over two dozen cords, and many eyewitnesses
said that this was now her only means of defending herself
against rape since a dress didn't offer any such protection. The tribunal
eventually decided to use this against her by charging that it violated
the prohibition against cross-dressing, a charge which intentionally ignored the
exemption allowed in such cases of necessity by medieval doctrinal sources such as the "Summa Theologica" and "Scivias". The eyewitnesses said that Joan
pleaded with Cauchon to transfer her to a Church prison with women to
guard her, in which case
she could safely wear a dress; but this was never allowed. The trial included a series of hearings from February 21st
through the end of March 1431. Normally, Inquisitorial tribunals were supposed to
hear witness testimony against the accused and base any verdict upon such testimony, but in this case
the only witness called was the accused herself. The trial assessors, as a number of them later admitted,
therefore resorted to trying to manipulate her into saying something
that might be used against her. There were other profound deviations from lawful procedure. As many historians have pointed out, the
theological arguments put forward by Cauchon and his associates are
mostly a set of subtle half-truths,
not only on the "cross-dressing" charge but also concerning
issues such as the authority of the tribunal: standard Inquisitorial
procedure required such tribunals to be overseen by non-partisan
judges, otherwise the trial could be automatically rendered null and void. Similarly, the accused was allowed to appeal to the Pope. The
eyewitnesses said Joan repeatedly asked for both of these rules to be honored, but this was never
granted. They stated that she had submitted to the
authority of both the Papacy and the Council of Basel, but the latter was
left out of the transcript on Cauchon's orders and the former was entered in a form which distorted her statements on the matter.
The dispute between Joan and her judges
therefore largely revolved around the legitimacy of the tribunal
as an impartial jury of the Church Universal, and medieval
ecclesiastic law is on her side. Early
in the trial an attempt was made to link her to witchcraft by claiming her banner
had been endowed with "magical" powers, that she allegedly poured
wax on the heads of small children, and other accusations of this sort, but these charges were
dropped before the final articles of accusation were drawn
up on April 5th. In one of the more curious bids to
discredit her, Cauchon objected to her use of the "Jesus-Mary" slogan
which, somewhat paradoxically, was used by the Dominicans who
largely ran the Inquisitorial courts. Her saints were dismissed as "demons", despite the transcript's own description that they had counseled her to "go regularly to Church" and maintain her virginity. In the end, Cauchon would convict her on the cross-dressing
charge, which he utilized in a manner which gives an indication of
his character. According to several eyewitnesses - the trial bailiff
Jean Massieu, the chief notary Guillaume Manchon, the assessors
Friar Martin Ladvenu and Friar Isambart de la Pierre, and the
Rouen citizen Pierre Cusquel - after Joan had
finally consented to wear a dress, her guards immediately increased their
attempts to rape her, joined by "a great English lord" who
tried to do the same. Her guards finally took away her dress entirely
and threw her the old male clothing which she was forbidden to wear,
sparking a bitter argument between she and the guards that "went on
until noon", according to the bailiff. She had no choice but to
put on the clothing left to her, after which Cauchon
promptly pronounced her a "relapsed heretic" and condemned her to death.
Several eyewitnesses remembered that Cauchon came out of the prison
and exclaimed to the Earl of Warwick and other English
commanders waiting outside: "Farewell,
be of good cheer, it is done!", implying that
he had orchestrated the trap that the guards had set for her. It would not be until the
English were finally driven from Rouen in November of 1449, near the
end of the war, that the slow process of appealing the case would
be initiated. This process resulted in a posthumous acquittal by an Inquisitor
named Jean Bréhal, who had paradoxically been a member of an English-run
institution during the war. Bréhal
nevertheless ruled that she had been convicted illegally and without
basis by a corrupt court operating in a spirit of "...manifest malice against the Roman Catholic Church, and indeed heresy". The Inquisitor and other theologians consulted for the
appeal therefore denounced Cauchon and the other
judges and described Joan as a martyr,
thereby paving the way for her eventual beatification in 1909 and
canonization as a saint in 1920, by which time even
English writers and clergy no longer showed the opposition that their
predecessors had. Williamson, Allen Read the Trial Transcripts HERE provided by the Saint Joan of Arc Center.
by Allen Williamson
Joan of Arc : A Brief Biography : The Trial