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.
And perhaps there might have been at first a certain relief in Jeanne's
mind, such as often follows after a long threatened blow has fallen. She
had no longer the vague tortures of suspense, and probably believed that
she would be ransomed as was usual: and in this silence and seclusion
her "voices" which she had not obeyed as at first, but yet which had not
abandoned her, nor shown estrangement, were more near and audible than
amid the noise and tumult of war. They spoke to her often, sometimes
three times a day, as she afterwards said, in the unbroken quiet of
her prison. And though they no longer spoke of new enterprises and
victories, their words were full of consolation. But it was not long
that Jeanne's young and vigorous spirit could content itself with
inaction. She was no mystic; willingly giving herself over to dreams and
visions is more possible to the old than to the young. Her confidence
and hope for her good friends of Compiègne gave way before the continued
tale of their sufferings, and the inveterate siege which was driving
them to desperation. No doubt the worst news was told to Jeanne, and
twice over she made a desperate attempt to escape, in hope of being able
to succour them, but without any sanction, as she confesses, from her
spiritual instructors. At Beaulieu the attempt was simple enough: the
narrative seems to imply that the doorway, or some part of the wall of
her room, had been closed with laths or planks nailed across an opening:
and between these she succeeded in slipping, "as she was very slight,"
with the hope of locking the door to an adjoining guard-room upon the
men who had charge of her, and thus getting free. But alas! The porter
of the château, who had no business there, suddenly appeared in the
corridor, and she was discovered and taken back to her chamber. At
Beaurevoir, which was farther off, her attempt was a much more desperate
one, and indicates a despair and irritation of mind which had become
unbearable. At this place her own condition was much alleviated; the
castle was the residence of Jean de Luxembourg's wife and aunt, ladies
who visited Jeanne continually, and soon became interested and attached
to her; but as the master of the house was himself in the camp before
Compiègne, they had the advantage or disadvantage, as far as the
prisoner was concerned, of constant news, and Jeanne's trouble for her
friends grew daily.
She seems, indeed, after the assurance she had expressed at first,
to have fallen into great doubt and even carried on within herself a
despairing argument with her spiritual guides on this point, battling
with these saintly influences as in the depths of the troubled heart
many have done with the Creator Himself in similar circumstances. "How,"
she cried, "could God let them perish who had been so good and loyal to
their King?" St. Catherine replied gently that He would Himself care for
these _bons amis_, and even promised that "before the St. Martin"
relief would come. But Jeanne had probably by this time--in her great
disappointment and loneliness, and with the sense in her of so much
power to help were she only free--got beyond her own control. They bade
her to be patient. One of them, amid their exhortations to accept her
fate cheerfully, and not to be astonished at it, seems to have conveyed
to her mind the impression that she should not be delivered till she had
seen the King of England. "Truly I will not see him! I would rather die
than fall into the hands of the English," cried Jeanne in her petulance.
The King of England is spoken of always, it is curious to note, as if
he had been a great, severe ruler like his father, never as the child he
really was. But Jeanne in her helplessness and impotence was impatient
even with her saints. Day by day the news came in from Compiègne,
all that was favourable to the Burgundians received with joy and
thanksgiving by the ladies of Luxembourg, while the captive consumed her
heart with vain indignation. At last Jeanne would seem to have wrought
herself up to the most desperate of expedients. Whether her room was in
the donjon, or whether she was allowed sufficient freedom in the house
to mount to the battlements there, we are not informed--probably the
latter was the case: for it was from the top of the tower that the rash
girl at last flung herself down, carried away by what sudden frenzy
of alarm or sting of evil tidings can never be known. Probably she had
hoped that a miracle would be wrought on her behalf, and that faith
was all that was wanted, as on so many other occasions. Perhaps she had
heard of the negotiations to sell her to the English, which would give a
keener urgency to her determination to get free; all that appears in the
story, however, is her wild anxiety about Compiègne and her _bons amis_.
How she escaped destruction no one knows. She was rescued for a more
tremendous and harder fate.
The Maid was taken up as dead from the foot of the tower (the height is
estimated at sixty feet); but she was not dead, nor even seriously hurt.
Her frame, so slight that she had been able to slip between the bars put
up to secure her, had so little solidity that the shock would seem
to have been all that ailed her. She was stunned and unconscious and
remained so far some time; and for three days neither ate nor drank. But
though she was so humbled by the effects of the fall, "she was comforted
by St. Catherine, who bade her confess and implore the mercy of God" for
her rash disobedience--and repeated the promise that before Martinmas
Compiègne should be relieved. Jeanne did not perhaps in her rebellion
deserve this encouragement; but the heavenly ladies were kind and
pitiful and did not stand upon their dignity. The wonderful thing was
that Jeanne recovered perfectly from this tremendous leap.
The earthly ladies, though so completely on the other side, were
scarcely less kind to the Maid. They visited her daily, carried their
news to her, were very friendly and sweet: and no doubt other visitors
came to make the acquaintance of a prisoner so wonderful. There was one
point on which they were very urgent, and this was about her dress. It
shamed and troubled them to see her in the costume of a man. Jeanne had
her good reasons for that, which perhaps she did not care to tell
them, fearing to shock the ears of a demoiselle of Luxembourg with the
suggestion of dangers of which she knew nothing. No doubt it was true
that while doing the serious work of war, as she said afterwards, it was
best that she should be dressed as a man; but Jeanne had reason to know
besides, that it was safer, among the rough comrades and gaolers who now
surrounded her, to wear the tight-fitting and firmly fastened dress of
a soldier. She answered the ladies and their remonstrances with all
the grace of a courtier. Could she have done it she would rather have
yielded the point to them, she said, than to any one else in France,
except the Queen. The women wherever she went were always faithful
to this young creature, so pure-womanly in her young angel-hood and
man-hood. The poor followed to kiss her hands or her armour, the rich
wooed her with tender flatteries and persuasions. There is not record in
all her career of any woman who was not her friend.
For the last dreary month of that winter she was sent to the fortress
of Crotoy on the Somme, for what reason we are not told, probably to
be more near the English into whose hands she was about to be given
up: again another shameful bargain in which the guilt lies with the
Burgundians and not with the English. If Charles I. was sold as we Scots
all indignantly deny, the shame of the sale was on our nation, not on
England, whom nobody has ever blamed for the transaction. The sale of
Jeanne was brutally frank. It was indeed a ransom which was paid to
Jean of Luxembourg with a share to the first captor, the archer who had
secured her; but it was simple blood-money as everybody knew. At Crotoy
she had once more the solace of female society, again with much
pressing upon her of their own heavy skirts and hanging sleeves. A
fellow-prisoner in the dungeon of Crotoy, a priest, said mass every day
and gave her the holy communion. And her mind seems to have been soothed
and calmed. Compiègne was relieved; the saints had kept their word: she
had that burden the less upon her soul: and over the country there were
against stirrings of French valour and success. The day of the Maid was
over, but it began to bear the fruit of a national quickening of vigour
and life.
It was at Crotoy, in December, that she was transferred to English
hands. The eager offer of the University of Paris to see her speedy
condemnation had not been accepted, and perhaps the Burgundians had
been willing to wait, to see if any ransom was forthcoming from
France. Perhaps too, Paris, which sang the _Te Deum_ when she was taken
prisoner, began to be a little startled by its own enthusiasm and to ask
itself the question what there was to be so thankful about?--a result
which has happened before in the history of that impulsive city:--and
Paris was too near the centre of France, where the balance seemed to
be turning again in favour of the national party, to have its thoughts
distracted by such a trial as was impending. It seemed better to the
English leaders to conduct their prisoner to a safer place, to the
depths of Normandy where they were most strong. They seem to have
carried her away in the end of the year, travelling slowly along the
coast, and reaching Rouen by way of Eu and Dieppe, as far away as
possible from any risk of rescue. She arrived in Rouen in the beginning
of the year 1431, having thus been already for nearly eight months in
close custody. But there were no further ministrations of kind women for
Jeanne. She was now distinctly in the hands of her enemies, those who
had no sympathy or natural softening of feeling towards her.
The severities inflicted upon her in her new prison at Rouen were
terrible, almost incredible. We are told that she was kept in an iron
cage (like the Countess of Buchan in earlier days by Edward I.), bound
hands, and feet, and throat, to a pillar, and watched incessantly by
English soldiers--the latter being an abominable and hideous method
of torture which was never departed from during the rest of her life.
Afterwards, at the beginning of her trial she was relieved from the
cage, but never from the presence and scrutiny of this fierce and
hateful bodyguard. Such detestable cruelties were in the manner of
the time, which does not make us the less sicken at them with burning
indignation and the rage of shame. For this aggravation of her
sufferings England alone was responsible. The Burgundians at their worst
had not used her so. It is true that she was to them a piece of
valuable property worth so much good money; which is a powerful argument
everywhere. But to the English she meant no money: no one offered to
ransom Jeanne on the side of her own party, for whom she had done
so much. Even at Tours and Orleans, so far as appears, there was no
subscription--to speak in modern terms,--no cry among the burghers to
gather their crowns for her redemption--not a word, not an effort, only
a barefooted procession, a mass, a Miserere, which had no issue. France
stood silent to see what would come of it; and her scholars and divines
swarmed towards Rouen to make sure that nothing but harm should come
of it to the ignorant country lass, who had set up such pretences of
knowing better than others. The King congratulated himself that he
had another prophetess as good as she, and a Heaven-sent boy from the
mountains who would do as well and better than Jeanne. Where was Dunois?
Where was La Hire,(1) a soldier bound by no conventions, a captain whose
troop went like the wind where it listed, and whose valour was known?
Where was young Guy de Laval, so ready to sell his lands that his men
might be fit for service? All silent; no man drawing a sword or saying
a word. It is evident that in this frightful pause of fate, Jeanne had
become to France as to England, the Witch whom it was perhaps a danger
to have had anything to do with, whose spells had turned the world
upside down for a moment: but these spells had become ineffectual or
worn out as is the nature of sorcery. No explanation, not even the
well-worn and so often valid one of human baseness, could explain the
terrible situation, if not this.
(1) La Hire was at Louvain, which we hear a little later the
new English levies would not march to besiege till the Maid
was dead, and where Dunois joined him in March of this fatal
year. These two at Louvain within a few leagues of Rouen and
not a sword drawn for Jeanne!--the wonder grows.