Had she answered (as a lawyer said at the time), “It seemed to me I saw a saint,” no man could have condemned her. Probably she did not know this, for she was not allowed to have an advocate of her own party, and she, a lonely girl, was opposed to the keenest and most learned lawyers of France. But she maintained that she certainly did see and hear her saints and that they came to her by the will of God. This was called blasphemy and witchcraft.
Most was made of her refusal to wear woman’s dress. For this she seems to have had two reasons: first, that to give up her old dress would have been to acknowledge that her mission was ended; next, for reasons of modesty, she being alone in prison among ruffianly men. She would wear woman’s dress if they would let her take the Holy Communion, but this they refused. To these points she was constant: she would not deny her visions; she would not say one word against her king, who had deserted her; she would not wear woman’s dress in prison.
We must remember that, as she was being tried by churchmen, she should have been in a prison of the church, attended by women. They set a spy on her, a despicable priest named L’Oyseleur, who pretended to be her friend and who betrayed her. The English soldiers were allowed to bully, threaten, and frighten away every one who gave her any advice. They took her to the torture chamber and threatened her with torture. Finally, they put her up in public opposite a pile of wood ready for burning and then set a priest to preach at her.
At last, in fear of the fire and the stake before her, and on promise of being taken to a kindlier prison among women and released from chains, she promised to renounce her visions and submit to the Church, that is to Cauchon and her other priestly enemies. A little note on paper she now signed with a cross and repeated a short form of words. By some trick this signature was changed for a long document in which she was made to confess all her visions false.
Cauchon had triumphed. The blame of heresy and witchcraft was cast on Joan and on her king as an accomplice. But the English were not satisfied. They made an uproar; they threatened Cauchon, for Joan’s life was to be spared. She was to be in prison all her days, on bread and water, but while she lived, they dared scarcely stir against the French. They were soon satisfied.
Joan’s prison was not changed. There soon came news that she had put on man’s dress again. The judges went to her. She told them that she put on this dress of her own free will. In confession, later, she told her priest that she had been refused any other dress and had been brutally treated both by the soldiers and by an English lord. In self-defense, she dressed in the only attire within her reach.
In any case, the promises made to her had been broken. The judge asked her if her Voices had been with her again.
“Yes.”
“What did they say?”
“God told me by the Voices of the great sorrow of my treason, when I abjured, to save my life.”
“Do you believe the Voices came from St. Margaret and St. Catherine?”
“Yes, and that they are from God.”
She added that she had never meant to deny this, had not understood that she had denied it. All was over now; she was a relapsed heretic.
Enough. They burned Joan the Maid. She did not suffer long. Her eyes were fixed on a cross which a priest, Martin l’Advenu, held up before her. She maintained, he says, to her dying moment, the truth of her Voices. With a great cry of “JESUS!” she gave up her life. Even the English wept; even a secretary of the English king said that they had burned a saint. This cowardly and cruel crime profited the English not at all.
“Though they ceased not to be brave,” says Patrick Abercromby, “yet they were almost on all occasions defeated, and within the short space of twenty-two years lost not only all the conquests made by them in little less than a hundred, but also the inheritances which they had enjoyed for above three centuries bypast.”
Twenty years after her death, Charles VII, in his own interest, induced the pope to try the case of Joan over again. It was as certain that the clergy would find her innocent now as that they would find her guilty before.
But, happily, they collected the evidence of most of the living people who had known her. Thus we have heard from the Domremy peasants how good she was as a child; from Dunois, d’Alencon, and d’Aulon how she was beautiful, courteous, and brave; from Isambart and L’Advenu how nobly she died and how she never made one complaint but forgave all her enemies freely. All these old Latin documents were collected, edited, and printed in 1849 by Monsieur Jules Quicherat, a long and noble labor.
The English long believed silly stories against her, as a bad woman, stories which were not even mentioned by her judges. The very French, at different times, have mocked at her memory in ignorance and disbelief. They said she was a tool of politicians who, on the other hand, never wanted her, or that she was crazy. In modern times, some have called the strongest and healthiest of women hysterical, which is their way of accounting for her Voices.
But now the world, if it chooses, may know Joan as she was: the stainless Maid, the bravest, gentlest, kindest, and wisest woman who ever lived. Her country people, in her lifetime, called her the greatest of saints after the Blessed Virgin, and she is, at least, the greatest concerning whose deeds and noble sufferings history preserves a record.
And her Voices we leave to Him who alone knows all truth.
The End