In the spring of 1430, Joan of Arc rode forth near Compiègne at the head of a French company. Her defeat wrought the very opposite effect of her former victories: hitherto, her name had sustained a faltering army and struck disquiet into the hearts of the English; henceforth, her adversaries could display her as their captive. George Borrow opens his relation upon the sharp contrast between the jubilation of her foes and the consternation of the French. Taken by the Burgundians on May 23, she was held in ward for many months, and presently sold to the English, who conveyed her to Rouen. Her military capture thus became an issue of sovereign politics and religion.
The trial was framed to prove that she had dissembled in claiming to be guided by celestial voices, had practiced sorcery, worn the apparel of a man, and defied the Church. The prosecution clothed itself as an inquest of faith, yet the outcome was destined to serve the English cause: could the judges brand her an impostor or a heretic, they might strip all legitimacy from the coronation of Charles VII, which she had brought to pass. Borrow dwells with emphasis upon the bond between her symbolic power and the bitter hostility directed against her person.
Her captivity began well before the formal opening of the sessions. Joan was detained under English ward within a fortress, rather than in an ecclesiastical prison. She petitioned to be committed to the custody of the Church, but her plea went unheeded. Her jailers could see therein a mere measure of security; to her, it was a question of elementary justice, for the spiritual court that was to try her exercised no governance over the conditions under which she awaited her ordeal. Borrow’s account returns repeatedly to this disparity: the tribunal claimed jurisdiction over her soul, while her military adversaries regulated her access, her rest, and her every movement.
The first phase consisted of a protracted sequence of preparatory interrogations. The assessors demanded whether she had heard the voices of Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret, when they had first appeared unto her, and what commands they had laid upon her. Joan maintained that she had known them and that they had tendered her counsel. The interrogators pressed their inquiries under diverse guises: had she beheld them with bodily eyes, had she received a sign, had she obeyed a voice or her own will? She made no pretense of disclosing all that had been committed to her trust. When urged to reveal a secret sign, she at times refused, or declared that it concerned not her judges.
The judges inquired whether she would submit herself to the Church Militant—that is to say, to the living ecclesiastical authority before her. Joan answered that she was willing to submit to God and to the Church Triumphant, but that she would never recall what she held to be a divine mission. The phrase might have seemed a profession of faith; the examiners sought in it the proof of contumacy. The conflict turned not merely upon the possibility of her visions, but upon the hierarchy of allegiances: the court demanded that the young captive set the authority of her judges above her own interpretation of the heavenly command.
The interrogations unfolded in an exhausting atmosphere. Multiple clerks plied her with questions, while notaries set down her replies. The chapter recounts how she was required to swear an oath to answer all things, whereas she sought to limit her pledge solely to those matters she was at liberty to reveal. The examiners reverted incessantly to her male attire. She explained that it had accompanied her military service, and that she felt more secure in such dress in the midst of male guards. Borrow recounts the repeated efforts to compel her to cast it aside and the perils to which she remained exposed in her cell. Such are the circumstances preserved in Borrow’s compilation.
Witnesses were heard from Joan’s native country and concerning her early years. They spoke of her childhood, her conduct, and her repute. The authorities sought to assign a merely human origin to her voices and to show that her demeanour exceeded the bounds of accepted piety. Their depositions did not explain how her visions were to be interpreted; they supplied rather the reminiscences from which the judges might fashion a portrait either favourable or hostile. As the articles of accusation lengthened, the prisoner’s replies were pared down to isolated phrases, stripped often of their living context.
Yet a single visit altered the terms of the encounter. Isambart de la Pierre spoke to her of a general council, wherein she might find men of her own party. She inquired what a general council might be; the friar explained that it represented the universal Church. In the scene related by Borrow, Joan straightway consented to submit herself thereto. The Bishop of Beauvais broke in upon Isambart and commanded the notary not to record this answer. Joan protested: they wrote down that which accused her, but refused to set down that which made for her defense. The friar himself was met with threats. The right of appeal was no longer an abstract question of authority: it hung upon a reply that a man might yet choose to leave off the page.
On May 24, 1431, Joan was conducted to the cemetery of Saint-Ouen, where a form of abjuration was tendered to her. A milder sentence was promised should she renounce the articles the court deemed heretical. The young woman stood before a choice whose theological import was not fully within her grasp. She signed or marked a schedule of abjuration, and thereafter resumed woman’s attire. The tribunal treated this act as an unconditional submission; Joan understood it, according to Borrow’s version, as a means of escaping the stake without disavowing the mission of her voices. This gulf between the written formula and the sense she attached to it was to prove fatal.
She was taken back to prison. There, the question of male garments returned immediately to the fore. The narrative relates that she resumed that attire under circumstances that rendered it, in her view, necessary for her preservation. To her judges, this resumption signified that she had violated her abjuration and lapsed back into error: she could henceforth be pronounced a relapsed heretic. The prosecution was no longer required to prove her initial transgressions; it sufficed to show that her pledge had been abandoned. Joan affirmed that her voices had not deceived her, nor would she retract what she believed to be the truth.
Condemnation was pronounced without any fresh adversarial proceeding comparable to the earlier interrogations. On May 30, Joan was led to the Old Market place of Rouen. A mitre bearing words that proclaimed her a heretic and an idolater was set upon her head. The priests and civil magistrates publicly rehearsed the sentence. She asked to look upon a crucifix and to hear religious exhortations. In Borrow’s narrative, the Dominican Martin L’Advenu remained steadfast at her side. When the flames drew near, she warned him to step down lest he be burned, and besought him to hold the cross aloft before her eyes.
Borrow records that she called upon Jesus and the saints, protested her innocence once more, and reminded the Bishop of Beauvais that he was the author of her death. The chronicler recounts her agony and the order given to reduce her remains to ashes and cast them into the Seine. In court, Joan had pleaded that a favorable answer be preserved upon the parchment of the record. At the stake, she pleaded only that a man hold a crucifix high enough for her to behold it. The interrogations, the abjuration, and the final decree had fixed what her judges sought to make of her words. She died maintaining that they had not spoken the truth concerning her mission.