Jeanne d'Arc; the story of her life and death

Book I

the peasant maid.

Chapter . Page

I. Childhood of Jeanne d'ARC . . 33

II. The Voices 41

III. Jeanne Enters Upon Her Mission . 49

IV. Jeanne Meets the King . . .56

V. Jeanne is Examined by the Doctors

AT Poitiers 63

VI. Preparations for War . . .71

VI

Book III. The Martyr

Chapter Page

I. Jeanne is Sold to the English . .181

II. Preparations FOR Jeanne's Trial . 190

III. The Trial 204

IV. Re-Examination 223

V. Martyrdom 243

Rehabilitation 259

To

THE MEMORY

of

MY FATHER.

Celebrated) Momem

JEANNE d'ARC.

WOMEN OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. (In

preparation.)

Introduction

In order to understand the condition of France in the fifteenth century, when Jeanne d' Arc, the noblest figure of profane history, appeared, and how it was that so powerful and wealthy a country had sunk to the need of miraculous interposition to free her from the yoke of the invader, we must go back to the fourteenth century. In the year 1314, Philip the Fair, King of France, died, leaving three sons. None of these had sons, so that they successively occupied the throne. In 1328, the youngest was laid to rest in St. Denis, and the house of Capet, for the first time, since, from the ruins of the House of Charlemagne, it had risen to the kingship, was without any direct heir. It is true, each of these three sons of Philip had left daughters, but these did not count, because there was a law, known as the Salic law, from the Salian Franks, the most powerful of the great confederacy of tribes which had followed Clovis to the conquest of Gaul, which prohibited women from reigning.

After due consideration, the twelve peers of France conferred the crown on Philip of Valois, the nephew of Philip the Fair, and his nearest kinsman in the male line. The granddaughters of Philip the Fair yielded to their cousin, in consideration of certain concessions made to them, and a critical time seems to have been happily passed through, when a new claimant for the French crown appeared.

This was no less a personage than the splendid young king of England, Edward the Third, who grounded his claim on his descent from his mother, Isabella of France, daughter of Philip the Fair. In vain it was represented to him that his mother could not transmit a right that she had never possessed ; he retorted that she had transmitted the royal blood which gave her son a right to the crown which her sex alone forbade her to assume. It was never very difficult to tempt an English king into war with France, and the end of the argument was that Edward assumed the title of King of France, quartered the royal lilies of that country on his shield, and declared war>^against Philip of Valois. During that king's reign, victory rested with Edward. The glory of Cr6cy (1346) added its lustre to English annals, while the capture of the strong city of Calais insured the invaders a permanent advantage by giving them a point of arrival, of departure, of occupancy, of provisioning, and of refuge, in the enemy's country.

Under King John, the son and successor of Philip of Valois, French arms fared still worse, for at their terrible defeat at the battle of Poitiers, (1356) John himself was taken prisoner. Humiliating as this was to France, however, it was really a blessing in disguise, for it brought to the governing of the Kingdom, the king's eldest son, the dauphin Charles. It is true his gifts were not for war ; he had been guilty of running away from the field of Poitiers, a fact

INTRODUCTION. II

sufficient to utterly disgrace him in a time when war was the passion and habitual condition of men. But he redeemed this fault by the sagacity and prudence which he displayed in circumstances which would have been found trying by the oldest and most experienced sovereign.

France, in the fourteenth century, was far from being the compact state which we know by that name. It could hardly be called a nation at all. After the empire of Charlemagne, as fragile as it was extensive, had broken into pieces, five centuries before, the weakness of that branch of his family to whom France had fallen, and the confusion and want of union that prevailed in consequence, added to, the terrible and constant invasions of the Northmen, caused large numbers of the native chiefs and warriors to build strong fortresses in the forests, on the tops of mountains, and in the crags of rocks. The less wealthy proprietors, along with the free peasantry and the serfs, were glad to seek shelter with these, and in this way feudal society sprang into existence. The kingship waned in power and influence, while the great feudal lords, its nominal vassals, became really independent sovereigns. The sentiment of nationality became almost extinct. The mental horizon of the vassals of each feudal lord narrowed to his territory ; all beyond was vague and uncertain. In the tenth century, Hugh Capet, duke of Paris, revived the French kingship, founded the Capetian dynasty, and began a struggle with the feudal power, that was still in progress in the fourteenth century. It was the feudal system which caused the terrible French defeats of Crecy and Poitiers. The French army was not really an army at all, in the sense of being a compact, organized, disciplined body, fighting for a common country against an invader ; it was merely a collection of individuals, each of whom had followed his lord's banner to the field to fight in his quarrel.

In the eleventh century, the kingship had gained a new ally. During the period when royalty was but a name, and vassalage but a shadow, and the feudal lords, secure in their mountain eyries, or rockbound fortresses, seemed in their recklessness, and cruelty, to defy all laws, human and divine, in the towns at their feet, there had been growing painfully and slowly, but surely, a power that was to break theirs ; the aristocracy of commerce, destined to destroy that of birth.

Many of these towns, having become powerful and wealthy enough to resist the oppressions of their feudal lords, turned to the kingship as a counterbalancing power, and in return for charters guaranteeing their liberties, supported the king against the feudal power. The existence of these Communes was brief ; the state of society was too disturbed, they too small and weak to stand alone ; bargaining liberty for security, they requested the king to assume their administration. But though the Communes passed, the power of the great middle class, the burghers, or " the inhabitants of the good towns," as they were called, abided, and under the name of the Third Estate, became one of the most determining influences in French civilization.

But in the middle of the fourteenth century, this great middle class only added to the problems with which the dauphin had to deal. In France the throne rested on no other foundation than that of loyalty. It was an absolute monarchy. There were no institutions to control it or supply its place in its absence. When this absolute power was in the hands of a wise king, all went well, but when such a king as John reigned, the country suffered terribly. John was " a good and loyal knight," but much more concerned about acquitting himself well in the tournaments and jousts which were his delight, than about administering the affairs of his kingdom wisely. The result was that when he was carried off by the English, he left a distracted country, in which king, nobles, and middle class were all soon at strife. The burghers were seeking to obtain power and rights in order to guard their property ; the nobles were equally resolute in opposing any government or institutions that would deprive them of a share in the revenue and wealth derived exclusively from the middle and civic classes, and which they demanded from the king in payment for their military services; while Charles, though anxious as the representative of the kingship, to protect the middle classes, whom tradition taught him to regard as its defender, and obliged to try to satisfy the nobles, was resolved not to sanction any institutions that would be at all likely to curtail the royal power.

How radical were these dissensions was shown at the opening of the dauphin's career as " lieutenant of the king " when at the meeting of the States General convened by him " to deliberate on the state of the kingdom," the Third Estate made a series of demands, which, however great the abuses they were intended to correct, were excessive and violent, and would have impeded the regular course of government and justice. The dauphin was placed in a trying position, because his need of ready money was great, and the Third Estate, which supplied the royal revenues, made their subsidies dependent on the granting of their demands. Charles adopted a policy of delay, and in order to supply his financial needs, had recourse to a favorite expedient of French kings in such circumstances, and debased the coinage. This led to a terrible insurrection in Paris, headed by Stephen Marcel, the provost of the tradesmen, who assumed the government, stopped the issue of the debased coinage, and authorized the States General to meet when they pleased, (1356).

About the same time, the peasants in many of the northern provinces of France, maddened by the outrages and oppressions resulting from the long war with England, rose in a terrible revolt, known as the Jacquerie, from the -name Jacques Bonhomme, *' Jack Goodfellow," which had been given the peasant in the pleasant belief that he would bear anything. Whether or not the peasant insurrection had been instigated by Marcel it is hard to say, but it is certain that he encouraged it. It required but a short time, however, to prove the failure of the Parisian burgher's attempt to govern the country by the country itself. He and his partisans had grasped a power which they wanted the prudence to moderate, or the skill to control, and which the absence of political ideas, hereditary rights, or old institutions gave nothing by which to hold. Seeing his power waning, Marcel attempted to give up Paris to the King of Navarre who might be called the evil genius of the dauphin's life, but was killed by some loyal citizens in the act of doing so. Paris returned to its allegiance, and threw open its gates to the dauphin who bore himself very wisely at this juncture of affairs. Only the ringleaders in Marcel's insurrection were punished ; and a general amnesty was granted to all, noble or ignoble, who had been concerned in the Jacquerie. Taught by experience, Charles made no more mistakes, and soon began to bring order out of chaos. In 1360 he succeeded in concluding with Edward III. the Treaty of Bretigny, known as " the great peace." Its terms were sufificiently humiliating to France, involving as they did, the absolute cession of a large portion of her territory, and the payment of an enormous ransom for her sovereign ; but it procured her a breathing-space. John returned to France. He stayed, however, only two years and a half ; then learning that his son, the Duke of Anjou, one of the hostages given to England as security for the carrying out of the treaty, had broken his parole, the pleasure-loving king, disguising under the noble sentiment " that if honor had no other asylum on earth, it should have one in the heart of kings," his preference for the gala life, filled with jousts and tournaments, which he had led in England, departed for that country, where he died the following year, leaving France to the effective government of Charles, who had already obtained the surname of the Wise, by which he is distinguished in history (1364.)

John's stay in France, however, had been long enough for him to commit the greatest fault of his wretched reign. When, on the field of Poitiers, he had been fighting desperately against overwhelming odds, his young son Philip, only fourteen years of age, had clung obstinately to him, shouting, "Father, 'ware right; Father, 'ware left," as the danger proved greater in either direction ; had been taken prisoner with him and shared his captivity. In 1362, the extinction of the first House of Burgundy caused that great and wealthy fief to revert to King John, and he, welcoming it as an opportunity to reward the devotion of his favorite child, bestowed it on Philip, thus founding the second House of Burgundy which was destined to play for more than a century, so great, often so fatal a part in the fortunes of France.

Charles now sought to repair the ravages of the long war. When the truce of Bretigny was over, with the aid of the great Breton warrior, Bertrand du Guesclin, he renewed the war with Edward. Realizing that the lack of organization had caused the French defeats of Crecy and Poitiers, he adopted the plan of avoiding any general engagement, and depending on the result of small expeditions and skirmishes. This policy of wasting and scattering the English forces was approved by Du Guesclin who carried it out so well, that at his death in 1380, the English possessed little of importance in France beyond Calais. In gratitude for the Breton warrior's services, Charles caused him to be interred in a tomb close by the one built for himself in St. Denis. Two months after Du Guesclin's death, Charles himself passed away, at the age of forty-three, leaving, as he himself said, " the affairs of the kingdom in good case."

Then began a reign which has been called, " the grave of good morals and good laws in France." This is no exaggeration, for the sixteenth century with its religious wars ; the eighteenth, with its reign of terror ; or the nineteenth, with its Commune of Paris, show scarcely any events so sinister as those of which France, from 1380 to 1422, was the theatre and the victfm.

As has been said, France had come to put her trust in the absolute power and will of the monarch, as the sole principle of security. But the weak point of absolute monarchy, the crevice in its armor, is the nonage or incapacity of the reigning sovereign. This evil now fell on France, for the son of Charles the Wise, who ascended the throne as Charles the Sixth, was but a boy, and a boy in whom all the reckless and chivalric qualities of the Valois were strongly marked. In his hands the royal authority became a nullity, while the princes of the blood, his unpopular and rapacious uncles, the Dukes of Burgundy, Anjou, Berry and Bourbon, seized France as their prey. Each of these strove to get the young king under his influence in order to further his own projects. In order to maintain his ascendency, the Duke of Burgundy effected Charles' marriage with Isabella of Bavaria, with whose portrait the young king is said to have fallen in love. The wedding was celebrated with great splendor in the Cathedral of Amiens, in the year 1385. Then Isabella was but a frivolous girl of the exuberant type of Flemish beauty; in later years most French historians describe her as a reincarnation of Poppaea or Theodora ; what is certain is that she gave an impetus to France in her course towards the abyss of ruin,

Charles Sixth was as fond of war as his grandfather had been. He gathered the materials for a great expedition to invade England, but at the last moment was frustrated in this plan by his uncles. This made him anxious to become his own master, and in a great council, which he called at Rheims, he took the government on himself, and recalled all of his father's old ministers. These being mostly men of humble birth, were called " marmousets " by the princes of the blood and their followers.

With the king's greedy uncles removed from power, and Charles anxious to repair the injustice they had caused, it seemed as if happier days were dawning for France. But at this juncture the crowning blow fell upon her in the insanity of her king (1392). This restored to the king's uncles the power which they had believed lost to them forever. The most powerful of them was Philip, Duke of Burgundy who, to the great domain of Burgundy in the heart of France which his father. King John, had given him, had joined Flanders to the North

Sea, which had come to him through his wife in 1384. Thus this nominal vassal of France was in reality one of the most powerful and opulent princes in Christendom.

On their return to power, the royal dukes gradually got rid of Charles' ministers, and appointed tliose of their own choosing. The war with England was disposed of by the marriage of her king, Richard Second, and Isabella the little daughter of Charles' Sixth, (1394), and for ten years the affairs of the kingdom were conducted without any great troubles, the Duke of Burgundy remaining in the ascendant, save during those brief intervals when a return of reason enabled Charles to assume the government himself.

Such was the state of affairs when a rival to Burgundy appeared in the youngest brother of the king, the Duke of Orleans, the first to bear the title since so prominent in the annals of French history. His youth had hitherto kept him in the shade of his ambitious uncles, but as he grew to manhood, his handsome person, gallant nature, and cultivated tastes, rendered him more agreeable than they to the king and court. He had obtained from the king grants of territory which made him almost the equal of Burgundy in this respect, and even sought to encroach on that duke's territory, a proceeding which excited the latter's wrath to a terrible degree. Whatever reprisal he might have meditated, however, was prevented by his death. This was a sad event for the French people, for Philip's age and the attachment to France which leavened his selfishness, had always kept him from proceeding to extremities against his nephew. His son, John the Fearless, who succeeded him, was deterred by no such reasons, but on the contrary, stimulated by a personal jealousy of his kinsman, carried the inherited feud to a terrible ending. One dark night, after the curfew had emptied the streets of Paris, the Duke of Orleans was set upon by armed rufifians as he passed through a lonely street, and murdered (1407).

This terrible deed changed partisan strife into civil war which arrayed the north and the south of France against each other. The young Duke of Orleans was married to Bonne d'Armagnac, the little daughter of Count Bernard d'Armagnac, one of the most powerful nobles in the south of France, and a man of iron will and ruthless nature. Henceforth the adherents of Orleans were known as Armagnacs, and distinguished by the white scarf, which they wore as their badge of party. The Burgundians assumed the green hat or chaperon of the Flemings, and the St. Andrew's cross, with a fleur-de-lis in the midst, the emblem of Burgundy.

It is almost impossible to portray the misery into which France, and especially Paris, was plunged by this war. All shadow of stable government disappeared ; to-day one faction, to-morrow, another, ruled. The queen cast in her lot, now with the Armagnacs, now with the Burgundians, whilst the poor mad king and his children were utterly neglected. There was no such thing as justice, for the magistrates were appointed through bribery and corruption. The revenue of the royal domains was squandered, while the people were pillaged by the royal officers acting in the name of whichever faction happened to be in the ascendant. The peasants were at the mercy of brigands who took what the tax-gatherers left.

The murdered Duke of Orleans had made the Parisians pay such heavy taxes in order to supply his pleasures, that he had become extremely unpopular, in that city, so that from the beginning of his quarrel with Burgundy, it had espoused the cause of the latter. The better class of the inhabitants, however, shocked by the murder of Orleans which Burgundy not only boldly avowed, but justified as the removal of a tyrant, and seeing that there was little to choose between Armagnacs and Burgundians, began to assume a neutral attitude, so that both parties were compelled to turn to the lower classes for support. The Burgundians gained the alliance of the butchers, one of the most powerful and wealthiest corporations in Paris. Caboche, a skinner and tanner, was a kindred spirit of the butchers, and from him this band took its name of Cabochiens (hob-nails). They were the prototypes of the sans-terres, and sans-culottes of the French Revolution.

So engrossed was the nation in this fraternal strife, that it paid but little heed to the new danger that menaced it. Richard Second of England, the friend of France, had been deposed by the Duke of Lancaster, who ascended the throne as Henry Fourth.

Conspiracies against him were so numerous that he had no time for foreign wars. But when the frohcsome Prince Hal had become the serious and majestic Henry Fifth, he demanded from France the absolute cession of Normandy, Anjou, and Maine, and the hand of the princess Katharine, Charles Sixth's daughter, in marriage, with a dowry of two million crowns (1414).

The refusal of this monstrous demand caused Henry to invade France. Charles Sixth, who happened to be having a lucid interval at the time, hastily collected an army, in which the nobles, roused at last to a sense of their country's danger, hastened to enroll themselves. The armies met at the little village of Agincourt. The result of the battle was a splendid victory for the English ; for the French a crushing defeat in which the flower of her chivalry was slain or taken prisoner (141 5). Among those who shared the latter fate was the Duke of Orleans, the son-in-law of the fierce d'Armagnac. He was a graceful poet, a gift that must have proved a great solace during the long years that he was doomed to pass in captivity.

Henry Fifth maintained that France had been delivered into his hands because of the iniquities of her princes and her people. His war against her was conducted in a religious spirit, none of the excesses to which a mediaeval army was prone, being permitted. Shakespeare, in his play of Henry Fifth, indicates this by representing Bardolph as hanged for stealing a pax. After the battle of Agincourt, Henry returned to England, where he was received with the greatest enthusiasm which took the very substantial form of large subsidies to enable him to carry on the war.

Meanwhile the Burgundians and Armagnacs continued their war, heedless of France's peril, and Henry landed again in France without the slightest effort being made to prevent him, besieged, and captured, several towns in Normandy. But it was in these walled towns, filled with the descendants of men so impatient of slavery that they had made the touch of their city's soil give freedom to the serf, that the spirit dwelt which was to inspire the real resistance to the foreign conquest of France. We can picture these old high-roofed, gabled and walled cities of Northern France ; now mellowed and crumbling with age, but then with many of their beautiful wooden buildings quite new ; standing amid meadows and orchards, and vineyards, or upon sunny slopes, by winding rivers ; inside the city, narrow winding streets with rough stone pavements, and gutters down their midst ; lofty gabled houses, many of them with the solid arris, the great horizontal beams, the coping and turret, that spoke of a troubled time, and the need of a man being able to defend his house in case of an outbreak ; beyond, by the river, the wharves and halles ; the whole girt about by massive walls with numerous batteries, and strong fortifications. Such was Rouen, the capital of Normandy, and after Paris, the wealthiest and most populous town in France. Henry laid siege to it. It resisted long and bravely, though its appeals to the Burgundians, then in possession of the government were unheeded, but famine at length compelled it to yield (141 8). Henry spared the lives of its inhabitants on condition of their paying him 315,000 gold crowns, and leaving the city to be filled by English families.

Nothing could be cruder than this last condition of the conqueror. It would be terrible to-day, but it was much more so in the Middle Ages, when, save perhaps to make a pilgrimage, generations lived and died without passing beyond the suburbs of the city where they were born ; when every man built his house, not for himself alone, but to be handed down to his descendants, for which reason it was built with individuality, for a family with its own style of life, its own traditions, and desiring a dwellingplace in accordance with its tastes. Thus in its construction and ornamentation, it received a stamp of its own, and as time went on, and generation after generation of the same family lived and died within its walls, and it became hallowed to its possessor by the consciousness that its rooms had witnessed birth and death, had echoed the passion of great causes, and the enthusiasm of popular movements, for which perhaps his forefathers had shed their blood, the vows of love and words of tenderness, the anger, and the merry jest, the laughter, and the sobs of anguish ; all the joys and the sorrows in a word, that went to make up that family life to which strong religious faith gave dignity and earnestness ; he asked nothing better of God than to die where his father had died, and to leave the old roof-tree to his children.

A short time before Henry had laid siege to Rouen, the strife between the Burgundians and Armagnacshad culminated in the massacre of Count Armagnac and an immense number of his adherents in Paris (141 8). A few days later, Queen Isabella, accompanied by the Duke of Burgundy, entered the blood-stained city, took possession of the king's person, and claimed the royal authority. Those of the Armagnacs who escaped, repaired to Poitiers, where they proclaimed the dauphin Charles, the third of the insane king's sons who had borne that title, regent, and set up a rival government.

The Burgundian faction now sought to treat with Henry Fifth. The queen, representing the king, who was still insane, accompanied by her daughter the Princess Katharine, and the Duke of Burgundy, had an interview with the English king. The negotiations thus opened progressed favorably for Henry, as far as the unscrupulous Isabella was concerned, for she cared little about the fate of her adopted country, provided her own future'was secure. It was different with the Duke of Burgundy. Ruthless, sanguinary, stained with murder as he was, he was still guiltless of treason. The patriotism, which was not strong enough to keep him from rending France with civil war, proved sufficient to vanquish the temptation to betray her, and the English king, expecting his adherence, received instead the news that he had opened negotiations with the dauphin.

But it was not decreed that Burgundy the murderer should live in history with the light of the patriot on his brow. The foul crime which had caused rivers of blood to flow in France and brought suffering on untold thousands, was to be requited by one still fouler. The duke, bidden to a friendly interview with the dauphin at the bridge of Montereau, was slain during it, by some of the dauphin's followers.

This mad act was the crown of France's misery. The new Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, hastened to ally himself with the English, and with Queen Isabella, concluded, in the name of the insane Charles, the Treaty of Troyes with Henry, by which the dauphin was set aside, and the English king received the hand of the Princess Katharine, and was adopted as Charles' son, given the regency of France during her king's life, and the crown at his death.

On Trinity Sunday, the twenty-first of May, 1420, Henry and Katharine were married at Troyes. Even his bride did not keep the royal warrior more than a single day from his work of conquest. But he found that the dauphin did not mean to yield easily. Outcast as his mother's solemn renunciation of him had made him ; crippled in resources, and with the sympathy of France alienated by the crime which, rightly or wrongfully, he was held accountable for, he still struggled to hold his own. Victory, however, continued to favor Henry, and when, in the spring of 1422, he went with his queen to keep the festival of Whitsuntide in Paris, he was the master of almost the whole of northern France.

He entered the capital with great pomp, but failed to arouse any enthusiasm. The Parisians loved their afflicted king ; and they remained angry and silent at seeing him only a cipher in the sum of the conqueror's grandeur.

The end was drawing near, however, for two of the actors in the tragic drama. The English king was in the stern, secret grasp of a foe that knows not defeat, and two months later he died at Vincennes. A few weeks later, death ended the long and unhappy reign of Charles Sixth. The dauphin at once assumed the title of Charles Seventh, and as Rheims, the city in which every French king had been crowned since the foundation of the monarchy, was in the hands of the English, he was anointed and crowned at Poitiers.